hope

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that everyone you ask will tell you it is impossible to condense all events and experiences from one year into a 20 minute presentation. Over these last few weeks, I’ve given two presentations summarizing my experiences with MCC in Chad and Burkina Faso. Neither was an accurate summary. How could I have included enough detail in 20 minutes? So I chose to tell the following story. I’m the first to admit that these are patchwork reflections, but I hope they’ll offer some perspective on my time.

Disclaimer: the following stories are my one. I do not pretend to speak to experiences across Africa or in Chad or Burkina Faso, or even in the communities in which I lived. I’ll be representing my experiences in these places the very best way that I can.

Full disclosure: it gets a little more intangible although I’ll come back around to some more tangible stuff at the end.

I start my story back in spring of 2017 when I had the very hard job of studying abroad in the south of France for a semester (this is sarcasm). I spend five months living in a cute little apartment, attending lectures, going on wine tours, and frequenting the 24 hour bakery down the street from my front door.

I remember learning on one of the aforementioned wine tours that it takes approximately 30 years for a grapevine to reach its wine-making peak. The guide mentioned how because of this, families tended to hold onto vineyards for many generations, and winemakers would plant new vines, not for themselves, but for their children to harvest. That blew my mind.

A few weeks later I was in a tourist shop somewhere and found a little notebook – which I still own by the way – that had the following quote printed on the front:

“To plant a garden, is to believe in tomorrow.” – Audrey Hepburn

It reminded me of the dedication and hope of the parents at the vineyards and I bought it as a souvenir. But, I never really believed in that kind of hope in tomorrow for myself. What would that feel like?

I think there is a certain kind of hopelessness among my generation. We’re saddled with lots of student debt, sometimes medical bills and there are few well-paying jobs out there. We are hearing news about climate change and natural disasters on an almost daily basis, while global political movements actively try to sow division and hatred. Could it be possible to feel hopeful in tomorrow?

This is a photo I’ve shared before, but I like it because it shows my first host family’s courtyard along with some of the lovely fruit trees. In the center (closest to my door) is the family’s guava tree. On the left side is a tree that produces “pomme cannelle” or sugar apples in English. Shading the motorcycle in the lower right corner is a mango tree. All throughout my time there, we were eating one or another fruit produced by these trees.

I found these flowers and peppers in the nun’s garden. They also had a very full basil patch which we benefited from often. One of my favorite parts of driving around the dusty city during the dry season was spotting the green oases that at first I took for parks. I soon realized they were, in fact, nurseries of trees, both big and small, planted in woven bags for sale.

After I had lived in Burkina Faso for some months, my host mom took me to visit her daughter who had just moved into a new house. Patricia – the daughter – graciously showed us around her yard in which she had recently planted several trees. She reached out to gently squeeze a small, orange-pink pomegranate on the branches of one of the trees and said, “Oh, these aren’t ready today, but I think they’ll be ready tomorrow.”

It took me the full year and then a few weeks to realize what I had been passively observing the whole time: all around me, people were planting gardens for tomorrow. For their children. For their grandchildren. They were planting hope all over the place.

So here is a picture of my small mint and basil plants in my backyard in Goshen. I’m trying to keep them alive, but already the mint plant is turning brown. Maybe her season is over this year, but I’m going to keep on planting because for me, hope is a discipline.