Palm Sunday

 I’m often reminded of how developmental work is a conglomerate of cultures. Take Doug and Bahera Smith, two other volunteers at the college. His people came to America on the Mayflower, and he grew up in Boston. Her people came from Russia to Iran, where she grew up. They met, married, and raised their two children all over West Africa. Uziel, another volunteer at the college, is a Filipino who met her Indian fiancé in Ethiopia. They are getting married in Hong Kong before she moves to Sudan for a teaching job.

My work is a constant mixture of culture. Often this is difficult. There are literal differences and implicit differences between Western and Ethiopian time. Meetings can start thirty minutes late or can be canceled because of a holiday I didn’t know about or can end up taking an hour longer than I anticipated. And there are differences in communication. Simple subjects somehow balloon into immense problems of labyrinthine complexity. I ask, “Can we install sockets in the classrooms so teachers can use electricity?” and suddenly I’m Dante, wondering in a dark wood.

I’ve come to associate the problems of this cultural conglomeration with our church’s music, which normally consists of a Columbian monk on a dated Yamaha keyboard leading the congregation of, mostly, Italian and Ethiopian nuns in American songs. We can manage melody. The timing, though, incorrigibly oscillates between a synthesized polka and dirge.

Thankfully, my multicultural life is peppered with moments of exhilarating harmony: a student in his class’s adaptation of Jack and the Beanstalk pretending to play a traditional Ethiopian harp while singing Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” or Meron pretending to sound out Ethiopian fidel in an American children’s book.

Or our church’s Palm Sunday service, which began with an Italian priest reading the story of Christ’s triumphal entry in English before I followed a Korean nun in a procession into the chapel that was backed by the Columbian monk strumming a distinctively Latin-American rhythm on his guitar while the Ethiopian nuns harmonized in Amharic with “Hossana, Hossana in the heavens; Hossana, Hossana on the earth” and a wind swept by us from over the mountains and I thought, This might be what heaven is like.