Round The Ball: Lent – 2009

A US friend recently lamented that it’s hitting him in a new way that I’m not coming back from this trip away.  As he and I are both very used to one or the other of us being gone and coming back, I have a new appreciation for what he’s going through.  I’ve indeed left on a “trip” from which I will not be returning anytime soon.

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Hearing him express that helped me put words to things I’m feeling on this side of the water.  And I thought I’d share it because it might hit you where you’re at in your grieving process as well.

When you move to a new country, you have to learn to cook what you know how to cook using the ingredients you’re able to find. I’m convinced this is how some of our best cuisines out there got invented, as necessity (or is it scarcity?) is the mother of all invention. (I’ve heard the tomato wasn’t grown in Italy for many centuries – so pasta and pizza sauce are actually the product of cultural fusion.)

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I’m inspired to write this after eating what essentially ended up being a bleu-cheese chapatti-quesadilla. We’ve raised our kids on Mission-district Mexican food from their births . . . but here in London, the closest thing to tortillas we’re able to find are some whole-grain chapattis, which are essentially Indian-Bangladeshi flat-bred (picture a healthier, flatter version of naan). I came home with some pungent bleu-cheese after a particularly strong “California cuisine” craving; so when the strong-chedder ran out, I ended up melting some French bleu-cheese onto my pan-seared chapatti, garnished with fresh spinach and tomato slices. So there you go: Californian (via France), Mexican, Bangladeshi.

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The same thing happened when Pam decided to make what used to be a staple for us back in San Francisco: a big pot of black-beans and rice. Unable to find any black beans in our local Indian/Bengali “Cash & Carry” stores, we settled on some kind of cross between beans, lentils and peas. But, hey, they were black. Sort of.

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I’ll say it again: when you relocate, you end up cooking what you already know how to cook, using whatever ingredients you’re able to find. Fancy restaurants rightly call this “fusion” cuisine . . . but perhaps it’s short for (con)fusion?

The kids and I are making an effort to meet kids in our housing block by getting out to the little (and I mean little) playground area in our courtyard during the “peak” kid-times.  So Sunday afternoon Jesse, Lulu and I headed over and encountered a number of younger kids (mostly girls) and their parents (mostly dads).

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Two sisters, older than Jesse, had a jump-rope that Jesse was immediately jealous of.  Seeing an opportunity when they laid it down and moved on to something else, he thought he’d give it a try.  He was too shy to ask them if he could borrow it, but didn’t mind using back-channels, a.k.a. having me do it instead.  I asked, but insisted he say thank-you when they handed it to him.  Being too young to actually jump-rope, in spite of my laughably-poor attempt to demonstrate, Jesse quickly moved on to doing what he does best with strings and ropes: tying it up to various parts of the playground equipment and swinging down, climbing up, tossing around, etc.  A jump-rope is not a jump-rope in Jesse’s world.  A snake, a Tarzan-jungle-vine, a fireman’s ladder maybe – but never just a boring old jump-rope!

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He must have only set it down for a minute when the girls snatched it up again and started walking away.  Jesse immediately broke into a whimper, bordering on a cry, progressing towards an all out international crisis.  The girls, sensitively noticing Jesse’s five-alarm panic, turned and returned to the playground to offer the rope again.

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It was a tender moment; these kind Bengali girls doing their best to keep the pouting American boy happy.  They asked my kids their names and offered their own.  I ended up doing most of the conversation on my kids’ behalf, but it was our first moment of real connection.

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If found myself realizing, in that moment there with the jump-rope, that by posturing ourselves in the neighborhood alongside our kids, we’ve given up some of the countrol we have over how we chose to interact with our neighbors.  In the end, our kids haven’t had any of the cross-cultural sensitivity training, or even the basic people skills, that Pam and I are steeped in.  So, try as we might to be the worlds’ best cross-cultural workers, our kids will still be kids . . . ungrateful, loud, stubborn, pink-in-the-face with brewing rage . . . all of the above.

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Will the dads and moms who observe us with our kids think more or less of how we interact with them?  Is our image or reputation in the housing estate here tied to our kids sweet, or sometimes unsavory behavior?  Suddenly I’m swamped with a swath of cross-cultural questions they never taught us in college.  And I discover a new layer of sympathy for my dad, who grew up as a spit-shined and squeaky-clean Pastor’s Kid in the rural hills of Kentucky.

We’ve had some fun outings in the past week here. Besides the moving in and discovering our neighbors and neighborhood, we’ve made sure to get out and be active! On Saturday the 14th we went for our routine Saturday walk over to Mile End Park and a picnic along Regents Canal. (If you’re adventurous, go to google maps and you can retrace our steps!)

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I snuck a new bike for Pam onto our shipping container and gave it to her as an early birthday present yesterday. That was just in time for us to both ride in the London Freewheel bike ride — where 40,000 bike riders took over the roads of London in a large, organized ride past major monuments like the London Bridge, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Buckingham Palace. We had a blast! Now Pam’s feeling more comfortable cycling on the road here (a great chance to see the sites with roads closed off to cars) Here’s some great photos below!

CLICK HERE FOR PICS

I’ve been wondering how long we’ll be living here before we break in with some of our Bengali neighbors.  At present, they don’t make a lot of eye contact, and almost never say hello when passing by on the sidewalk, or even out in front of our house.  I find myself not wanting to be “Mr. Chipper-American-Christian Guy” (‘heidi-ho, neighbor!’) – but also not wanting to play into the typical urban stand-off-ishness that’s so common here.  Especially in a melting-pot of languages and cultures like London, it’s often easier to simply pretend the people around you aren’t there, than to try and make contact and engage.  (You should see people crammed together during rush hour on the Subway, acting as though they are alone in the doctor’s waiting room.)

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So when my bike had a flat tire Sunday night, I locked it up in front of our house and prayed that it would actually be a way to connect with some of the people living around us.  See, I’ve noticed that there’s a small posse of 20-something Bengali guys who ride around our housing estate on their bikes in the afternoons.  A couple of times I’ve exchanged hello’s with them, and talked some small-talk about their bikes and mine.  So when my tire was flat, I had to see it as a way to go deeper.  Even though my rugged-individualist instincts are to fix my own problem by myself, I realize that one of the ways I’m going to connect with some of my neighbors involves allowing them to help me with something that I need.  (Pam feels threatened slightly when I suggest we need some kind of crisis or calamity to befall us so our neighbors can come to our rescue, thus ensuring our neighborly bonding for the next couple of years.)

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So Monday morning I step out to my bike, whisper a prayer about God letting me engage one of the neighborhood bicycle-boys as a result of this flat tire.  And no sooner have I finished the prayer but I look up and the bicycle-gang’s ring leader, a young Bengali man of no more than 18 or 19, is looking out over his balcony at me with a wry smile.

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“Do you have a bicycle pump?” I ask, arms gesturing and pointing to my bike in case he doesn’t understand my complicated use of the English language.

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“Um, no,” he replies after some thought, “but wait until the afternoon and I can get you one.”  Ahh . . . there’s the connection I’ve been praying for.  We are now neighborly companions on a quest to procure a bicycle pump and get my tire fixed!

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“Is there anywhere nearby where I can go and get it filled maybe?”

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“Yes, you can go to the petrol station across from the Mosque.”

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“Okay, maybe I’ll try that and see if it works.  Thanks!”

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It’s a small interaction, but the perspective and the posture really matter.  As people on mission, if we are the answers to our own problems, we probably miss out on bonding opportunities with our neighbors.  Why should we be the only people with resources – available to help “them” with their stuff but not need them in our own moments of crisis?  In this instance, I had to fight back my own instinct to get the problem fixed in a hurry, and simply rely on a prayer and a glance up at the balcony for something bigger.  Another reminder that even our flat tires in life might be a way God wants to do something else in us, or through us.