by Nafisa Haji
When I was done with the new list, I turned over the pages to look at the old ones—collections of words in Tagalog, Mandarin, Swahili, and Spanish. These were gifts from my grandmother—not the paper or the notebook I had written them in, but the words themselves.
Grandma Faith, whose husband left her when my mother was little, began traveling the world when her son—my uncle Ron—was away at college, and when her daughter—my mother—started high school. She left Mom behind in Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Peltons’ care.
Mom said that Grandma Faith was a gypsy at heart. “I suppose it’s in her blood.” She sighed. “She was born out there,” Mom said, waving her hand around vaguely, lumping all places beyond our borders together—all of them a little scary. Borders were something we were acutely aware of, living in the suburbs of San Diego. But only as something that should be sealed tighter than they were. We’d never been across to Mexico. Never gone out of the country at all, until the big trip Chris and I took that summer, before I started college.
Grandma Faith was an oddball in our family, exuding an exotic air that she must have absorbed from years of traveling. She didn’t like to be called Grandma. At least not in English. She gave herself a new title every year, teaching me and Chris the word for “grandmother” in whatever language she’d spent time learning on her most recent travels.
One year, she was Abuela Faith. She’d been in Central America that year. The next year, the year she spent some months in East Africa, she was Bibi Faith, which is how you say “grandmother” in Swahili. Another year, coming back from the Philippines, she was Lola Faith.
Every time Grandma Faith came home, she taught us the new word we were supposed to call her and listened to us repeat it, wincing a little at the way Chris mangled the words, nodding her approval at the sounds I made.
“You’ve got an ear for languages, Jo,” she’d tell me. “It’s a gift. Some people have got it and some don’t.” Then she’d quiz us on the words she’d taught before. The different words for “grandmother.” Numbers, one to ten. Colors. Hello and good-bye. I always remembered the words, making lists in my notebook from when I was ten, studying them before Abuela/Bibi/Lola Faith was due home for a visit. Chris never did. It was a game to him, the novelty wearing off quickly so that he’d forget and slip back into calling her Grandma after a day or two. Not me. I’d keep it up until she’d leave on another trip.
Last year, just home from Taiwan, she was Wàipó Faith.
“That’s maternal grandmother, mind you,” Grandma Faith had said. “There’s another word for your grandma on your dad’s side. A lot of languages are like that—you can tell exactly how someone’s related to you, on your mother’s side or your father’s, by blood or by marriage—by what you call them, all the relationships very specifically defined, the words themselves like a family tree. I guess that says something about the importance of family in some cultures. Something we could all stand to emulate. Instead of just talking, all the time, about family values—only thing I ever saw being valued when I’ve heard those two words getting thrown around is the act of not minding your own business.”
That comment, like a lot of what Grandma Faith said, set Mom’s eyes rolling in her brother’s direction. Once, I heard Uncle Ron say to my mother, “Mom just has a talent for going native, Angie. I suppose that’s a good thing, in her line of work. But I know how you feel. I worry sometimes. Just like you do. That she goes too far—approaching her work like some kind of evangelical version of Margaret Meade.” That was a reference that went over my head, until I looked it up later. Margaret Meade, the woman who made anthropology as much about learning from other cultures as learning about them, making all values relative, leaving no room for the absolute. “It also makes her a bit of a stranger to us, I suppose. I love her. But I don’t always understand where she’s coming from.” He chuckled. Mom just shook her head.
Grandma Faith was the reason I’d transferred from Christ Academy, where the foreign language program wasn’t that great, to the public high school, where it was. I’d taken four years of Spanish and French there and counted myself as pretty fluent in both. Grandma Faith was also the reason I had decided to go to college in Chicago, to a university famous for the wide choice of foreign languages it offered—ready to venture out of Europe, linguistically speaking, and into more exotic, less Romantic languages involving whole new sets of letters and sounds that I’d have to memorize and master.
I ran an eye down the list of words I’d collected in Swahili, one of the classes I was enrolled in, which was starting the next day, a long list because of a trip Chris and I had taken earlier in the summer.
Right after high school graduation, before I’d asked Mom the truth about the color of my eyes, Chris and I had gone to Africa with a bunch of kids from church and camp, Uncle Ron in charge, to meet up with Grandma Faith and the missionary organization she’d been working with for the last few years. Grandma Faith coordinated the trip on the African end, to a slum town on the outskirts of Nairobi in Kenya. They spoke Swahili there, so, of course, Grandma Faith made us call her Bibi Faith. The mission had been simple. To give shoes to kids.
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with going barefoot,” Grandma Faith had said. “I think there’s something true and honest about having your bare feet grounded on the earth. Huck Finn had it right when he resisted getting ‘civilized’ by the widow, kicking off his shoes every chance he got. Except, for some of these kids, here in this town, it’s a matter of life and death. This isn’t the banks of the Mississippi. Right near here, there’s a huge garbage pit, where a lot of trash from the city gets dumped. Some of the kids have to go through those garbage pits, looking for food and stuff to salvage and sell. And in those pits, there are needles—infected needles. These kids get stuck by one of those and they can get AIDS or all kinds of other diseases. So shoes are important for them. I know that foot-washing has become a fashionable thing to do on missions. But here, it’s not just about humbling yourself, or reenacting a scene from the Bible—though that’s definitely part of the experience. Here, you’re providing a necessary service, a real-life mission, not just something symbolic.”
Before we handed out the shoes, we washed and disinfected the feet of those little kids, the way Jesus washed the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper. It was humbling. Beautiful. Like something right out of the Bible. Some of the kids would laugh and laugh, because our hands on their feet tickled. And, at the end, the way those kids’ eyes lit up when we showed them how to tie their shoelaces!
I helped Bibi Faith—all the kids here called her that—with her work in the mobile clinic on wheels, parked in the slum. She saw patients and vaccinated kids, making even the most frightened ones, the little babies, laugh at the voices that she put into the mouths of the silly puppets she used to distract them. I knew this was what I wanted to do—not the nursing, because needles made me queasy. Just the interaction. The communication across languages. I understood why Grandma Faith had such a hard time staying home.
I didn’t want to go home, either, deciding not to leave with Chris and Uncle Ron and the other kids from church, as we’d planned to do at the end of two weeks in Kenya.
During the second week of our stay, I told Chris, “Bibi Faith is going up north, to Ethiopia. To some villages out in the Omo River Valley.”
“I know,” said Chris—red-faced, nose peeling from sunburn, the same way mine was. He was thinner, too, because he’d had a hard time with the food.
“I want to go with her.”
“What? PPSYC’s starting right after we get back. You’ve got to come home.”
“I’ll skip camp this year.”
“But— Mom and Dad need us at camp.”
Mom and Dad hadn’t come with us to Africa. Not that Mom had seemed interested anyway. She’d used camp as an excuse—all the preparations that needed to be done before it started, all the activities she was planning for the Progress Course this year.
“They’ll do fine without us.”
“Us?”
“Stay back with me, Chris. I already talked to Bibi Faith and Uncle Ron. They’re okay with it.”
“But— I want to go home. I mean— it’s been a great experience. But I want to go home now.”
Chris had been more homesick than me. But he’d enjoyed himself with the kids—able to communicate with them without words. By the time I’d find the words in my phrase book to ask them their names, he’d already be cracking them up with his funny faces, kicking a ball around with them in the dirt.
“Come on, Chris. It’ll be awesome to stay back. They speak different languages out in the villages. We’ll get to learn new words.”
“You mean you’ll get to learn new words. I’m not the nerd with the notebook. No way, Jo. I’m going home. Just like we planned. Two weeks. That’s enough for me.”
In the end, I wasn’t the only one to stay back. Uncle Ron stayed, too—along with the team he’d unexpectedly brought with him. His camera crew, his makeup man, his production team—a whole media entourage that I hadn’t realized his television show had grown into. They were the reason the trip ended on a bit of a sour note.
Everything was fine at first. I saw Bibi Faith crinkle her nose only a few times when she watched some of the interviews that Uncle Ron’s team was engaged in filming and collecting for broadcast later. Once, while we were still in Nairobi, on the shoe mission, we found her in the clinic, muttering to herself, and then to me and Chris when she saw we were there. “Complaining! Actually complaining, because the kids are smiling too much! Get me some kids that look sad, he says! Did you hear him? That idiot who calls himself a producer? They shouldn’t look so happy, he says!”
Chris shifted his feet around and said, “Uncle Ron said they’re going to show some of this stuff on TV to get people to donate money to your mission. Guess people give more if the kids look sad.”
Grandma/Bibi Faith nodded, furiously, raising her voice out of mutter mode and into pure indignation. “Pity! That’s what they want people to feel!”
“Well—if it works, why not? If it gets people to give more?” I asked.
“But it’s not the truth! Do you know I actually heard that man ask one of the children to make a sad face? One of the most amazing things about these children—and others like them all over the world—is their capacity to smile and laugh. They live in garbage pits for God’s sake! That’s what they should do a story about. To get people to think about how these children, who have none of the things that people back home think are absolute necessities, how they can smile and laugh and look so damned happy.” She trailed off, falling back into a mutter.
Later, in one of the villages on the Ethiopian side of the border with Kenya—an amazing place, with people right out of National Geographic, half-naked, bodies painted in all kinds of colors, and those women with plates in their lips—Bibi Faith really blew up. This time, at Uncle Ron and one of the reporters, who was doing an interview with her. He kept asking Bibi Faith about how many children had been saved. Three times, she answered, telling him how many vaccinations she’d given and from what diseases they’d now be protected.
Frowning and shaking his head, the man said, “No, Mrs. Rogers. I’m asking about how many kids were Saved. In the Christian sense.” It wasn’t the first time he’d asked. It’s what he’d been asking every day, keeping a tally that seemed to be the focus of all the filming.
Right there, on camera, Grandma/Bibi Faith started yelling, “I’ve had it up to here with this obsession with numbers—with all you mighty ‘Christian soldiers’ and your body counts! I told you to lay off of that here, in this village. They don’t take kindly to it. We promised the elders here that we wouldn’t proselytize. They’ll kick us out and nobody else from our group will be allowed back and if these kids die from lack of vaccinations, it’ll be all your pushy, pushy, fault!”
“Take it easy, Mom,” said Uncle Ron, stepping in with a forced smile and a hand on her shoulder meant to soothe, but which only made her more mad.
The reporter said, “I think you’ve forgotten the reason for this mission, Mrs. Rogers. It’s not about the shots or the shoes. It’s about Jesus.”
Grandma—Bibi—Faith stomped off in a tizzy. I found her muttering to herself again, way up one of the dirt paths in the village.
“Nothing worse than the smug smell of certainty—they’re all reeking with it.” She waved her hands wildly, in a way that indicated not just the reporter but her own son as well.
I was quiet for a moment. “But— isn’t certainty a good thing? It’s the opposite of doubt,” I said, thinking of the wall at camp that had been so hard to climb. “It’s what faith is all about.”
“Not when it makes you willfully blind to the truth. That’s not faith. That’s belief. A decision. A line in the sand. It’s telling yourself, this is what I believe in. And anything—or anybody—that doesn’t fit is the enemy.”
“If faith isn’t belief, then what is it?”
“To me? Faith is revelation. And in order to receive revelation you have to be open. Belief is about closing yourself off—a lie you tell yourself to make the world fit in with how you’ve decided it should be. Real faith is an action—a verb. It’s truth unfolding. You have to let yourself be vulnerable to let that happen. You can’t hide from it. You can’t run away from it. You can’t drown it out, covering your ears while you shout out declarations of belief. That’s not faith. That’s cowardice—a fear of truth, which is only scary when you’re fighting to keep yourself from knowing it. Do you know what the first phrase I learn is when I go to a new place where they speak a language I don’t understand?”
I shook my head, still digesting what she’d already said.
“I don’t understand. I don’t know,” Bibi Faith said. “It’s the most liberating bunch of words you can learn in any language. When you admit your own ignorance, to yourself and to others, you open the door to the kind of revelation—real faith—that I was talking about. The strangers I meet in foreign places slow down when I say those words. They start paying attention to my face, to see if I get what they’re saying. It brings out the kindness in folks. I’ve had people—all kinds—men, women, children—literally take my hand and guide me to the place I’m asking directions for. Miles out of their way. Waiters in restaurants have chosen my meal for me—and it’s always the best stuff on the menu. People will help you shop. They’ll take care of you. If you let them know the truth. That you don’t understand. That you’re ignorant. That you’re lost. It’s the best part of going to a new place. Because you’ve admitted something that’s true for all of us—whether we admit it to ourselves and to each other or not—that we’re all vulnerable. It’s like—it’s like going back and getting to be a kid. You’re not afraid of breathing through your mouth, of letting your eyes drink everything in, wide-open—that cynical slit of the eyelids that we all have to practice and perfect in front of the bathroom mirror disappears and all those muscles in your face that you have to flex to look smart get to relax. And it’s wonderful. All the pretense of adulthood melts away. It’s all crystal-clear—that I don’t know a damn thing about anything and that’s okay. Good, in fact. Kind of like what Jesus said in Matthew: ‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’ Diving into a new place, a new language—that’s the closest I’ve ever come to understanding what that verse means,” Bibi Faith said.
After that trip to Africa, Grandma Faith decided not to work with religious organizations anymore, taking up a position with a secular medical aid group instead.
She said it was something she’d been thinking about for a long time. “With these guys, at least, I’ll be able to just do the work that needs to be done,” she said, “without constant interference from ignorant fools who’re too much in love with the sound of their own preachy voices to really understand what Christ is about. They think evangelism is about spreading the Word by
talking about it, while I think it’s about doing it, as best I can.”
I suppose that talk with Bibi Faith, back in Ethiopia, was the reason I finally asked Mom the questions that took me to Sadiq’s door.
When Sadiq called that last time, I picked up. I was relieved to hear him say he was leaving. I pretended to write down the number he gave me, in Pakistan, so that I could reach him if I ever needed to. As if I ever would. I felt bad, but I think he got it. That I didn’t really want to have anything to do with him. I already had a father. And even though I couldn’t pretend, anymore, not to know what I knew, I didn’t have to let it affect the rest of my life.
Except that it did, of course. I didn’t tell him. That I dropped out of the Swahili class I’d enrolled in during the first week of school. That I signed up for an Arabic class and an Urdu one instead. I only dropped in to audit the classes at first. But I fell in love with the letters—mostly the same alphabet for both languages. The curves and the dots. The unfamiliar sounds.
The Arabic department had an assortment of professors that I got to know over the next few years. The first class I took was taught by a British man, Professor Crawley—a large man with an intimidating, snooty attitude dripping from the lines of his jowls and the sacks under his eyes, topped off with thick, black-out-of-a-bottle hair—who was old-fashioned enough to never address his students by their first name. In my first semester of Arabic, I went to his office one day to ask a question about an assignment. After he’d answered me, he leaned forward at his desk, put his chin on his hands, and asked me, in that lazy, British drawl of his, “Are you a convert?”
“Excuse me?”
“I am asking, Ms. March, if you are a convert? To Islam?”
“Oh. No. I’m Christian.”
“I—see,” he said, as if he’d just tasted something sour. “Then you have an Arab boyfriend?”