It was a sweltering evening in Abidjan in 1997, and I was dazed, disoriented, and helpless. About 24 hours earlier, I had hugged my family goodbye in the Chicago airport and set forth towards Côte d'Ivoire, a West African nation, for a six-month internship. Although I was a seasoned international traveler, I had almost always traveled with my family, and I was unprepared for the chaos that would greet me upon my arrival in Abidjan. A "porter" grabbed my luggage and passport, whisked me through lines and checkpoints I didn't understand, then demanded money before returning my passport. I finally made it out of the airport, my luggage intact but my purse lighter, with the uncomfortable feeling that I had been in the country only two hours, but had already contributed to its corruption by paying a bribe.
I drew a deep breath and moved on to my next task: locating Minata, the woman I knew should be there to meet me. Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire's capital city, is located on its southern coast. The public health team I was going to work with lived near the northern border, a day's drive away. The American missionary overseeing the project wasn't able to come meet me, so she had sent Minata, a young Ivorian nurse, in her place. Minata had traveled all day on a bus to greet me at the airport, and had directions to take me to a missionary guest house in the city, spend a couple nights there with me, then catch a small Air Ivoire plane to Korhogo, the northern city nearest to our final destination (it would be Minata's first flight ever). To my utmost gratitude, we connected without a problem. Then things got hard and confusing again.
Minata spoke French (the official language of Côte d'Ivoire) as well as her native Senoufo language, and I spoke English and had studied French in high school and college. In theory, we should have been able to converse. Unfortunately, the French Minata spoke was so different from what I had learned that at first, I didn't even recognize it as the same language. I understood almost nothing she said, and in my jet-legged, overwhelmed state, I wasn't very good at formulating coherent French sentences, phrases, or even words. I had no way to figure out what was going on.
One thing did become clear to me - Minata was almost as out of place and confused in this busy city as I was. Her puzzled face and worried conversations with our taxi driver did not inspire confidence. We drove around Abidjan for over an hour, heat pressing in the windows, jarred by the nonstop sound of honking (apparently an accepted form of auto-to-auto conversation, even at midnight). It felt like we were driving in circles, and perhaps we were. My head was beginning to feel light from travel and disorientation.
Finally, we stopped at a dark compound containing a house with a semi-constructed wing. Minata paid the taxi driver, and another man whose French I didn't understand took us to one of the rooms opening out of the new wing. Inside was unfinished cement floor and walls and two cots. It didn't look like any missionary guesthouse I had ever stayed in before, and I was convinced that Minata hadn't found the right place, and the taxi driver had instead dropped us off at some sketchy hotel. I made a fool of myself trying to communicate this, and poor Minata looked just as confused as I felt.
Finally, I asked if there was a telephone. I had a calling card with me, and I wanted nothing more at that moment than to call my family back in Chicago, tell them I had arrived safely (mostly), and hear their voices speaking to me in a language I could understand. To my delight, I was taken to a phone. It didn't work.
That was the last straw. We returned to our room and Minata left for the bathroom. I sat down on the bed and began crying and laughing at the same time - crying from sheer exhaustion and helplessness, and laughing at the absurdity of it all. I was not the calm, competent international traveler I envisioned. I was not in my ordinary and proper place at all, and I was overwhelmed.
 |
| Minata and I in the real Abidjan guesthouse (we got admitted in the morning, to my great relief) |
Fortunately, the faculty and staff overseeing my internship had foreseen the kind of displacement I was feeling now, and had worked to equip and prepare me. I was enrolled in HNGR, an academic program that culminated in six months of living, working, worshipping, and serving with local communities around the world. My fellow interns and I were placed with organizations whose work matched our vocational interests, and we were expected to live with a national family whose income level was very typical for their area. The goal of HNGR was that we would cultivate a "life-orienting commitment to justice, intercultural humility, compassion, hospitality, environmental health, and peacemaking." Displacement was a big part of that. It was to be expected, and I quickly learned that even I, a seasoned missionary kid, was not exempt.
One of the books in my luggage was Compassion, by Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison. One of our first internship assignments was to read it and reflect, in the context of our experiences, on what it means to move away from the competitive life and cultivate a compassionate love that reaches out to the suffering world and moves us to action. According to Compassion, displacement - moving from our ordinary and proper lives - is central to helping us become compassionate people. When we are displaced, we "cast off the illusion of 'having it together' and thus begin to experience our true condition, which is that we, like everyone else, are pilgrims on the way, sinners in need of grace." Displacement helps us recognize our inner brokeness and connect with other people in their brokeness.
It was easy for me to identify the many ways I was displaced over the next six months. I lost a good deal of my competence, control, and communication abilities. I was continually in the position of being served and loved by those considered the "poor" of the world, and I had so little I could give them in return. These displacements became a transforming grace in my life, however, when I let myself rest in and receive them, when I reflected and wrote about them, and when I listened to God's voice in the midst of them. I returned from my internship deeply changed and healed; more fully myself and also more fully alive to community and compassion.
In fact, I returned from my internship confident that I had finally figured things out - that I had learned who I was, how to live in the world, how to hear and respond to God. I knew that everything would be different from here on out, and I was eager to live the rest of my life from my newfound place of freedom and love.
What was true was that my internship experience changed me in fundamental, solid ways. What wasn't true was that I had learned all I needed for the rest of my life. There was still plenty of displacement left to experience in life, much of it less clear-cut and more painful that what I experienced in Côte d'Ivoire. There was still plenty of compassion left to develop.
It's been 20 years now since that night in Abidjan. I recently reread Compassion, and was drawn once again to the chapter on displacement. What struck me this time was the authors' emphasis that we don't need to seek out displacement (like a HNGR internship, a missions trip, or a grand gesture) in order to form compassionate hearts. Instead, compassion grows in us when we "identify in our own lives where displacement is already occuring," then "allow these actual displacements to become places where we can hear God's call."
Here are some major ways I've experienced displacement in the past 15 years:
- Becoming a (literal) dependent of my husband
- Failing in my ideals
- Letting two degrees gather dust while I pursued mothering instead of changing the world
- Recognizing I suffered from mental illness
- Crying alone, often, because I had no friends and no community in the place I lived
- Raising a boy with ADHD
Those are some hard things, and some of them are difficult to write about. But I realize that reflecting and writing on them is exactly what I need to do if I want them to shape and transform me in a good way. I want to let these displacements become places where I can see God working, where I hear his call to discipleship and compassion.
And so I'm beginning a series on displacement, and how it shapes us. I'm planning to write both about the more dramatic displacements of my HNGR internship, as well as the unspectacular displacements of stay-at-home motherhood. My hope is that it will help me to lean into the ways God is continuing to shape and grow me, as well as to help you, my reader, ponder your own displacements and hear God's loving voice in the midst of them. Maybe the journey can help us become better at reaching out to others in compassionate love.
