This I Believe

I believe in stumbling. The kind of stumbling that happens when we find ourselves in uncomfortable situations, like stopping at an intersection where a weather-beaten, shabbily dressed person holds up a sign that says: “Hungry. Please Help. God Bless.” It is easy to keep the window rolled up, tell ourselves that the person just wants a handout for booze, then drive away, forgetting about it within a block.

There are some places, however, where you can’t drive away from uncomfortable situations. I learned that when my family and I moved to Bangladesh in the early 1990s for my husband’s work on a flood management project.

I was confident, smiling, and curious the first few weeks. While my husband worked, my young sons and I explored and got acquainted with other foreign families. But within six weeks, I felt the curiosity and novelty give way to growing anxiety. Something was wrong. I was no longer smiling and confident; instead I was confused, hot, sticky, afraid. An outing to the local market exhausted me, staring crowds suffocated me, household staff hired to clean and cook stripped me of a critical definition I didn’t even know I had. Those ragged street children and skeletal, bent old men and women always begged; large families crammed into 10-foot by 10-foot tin and cardboard hovels chattered and lived their lives just outside the concrete walls surrounding our house. As years went by, I struggled. I was supposed to have gone among the people with compassion and generosity. Instead I struggled with why I was there and why I was incapable. Why was I blessed with an incredibly generous life, while those around me were born into a harsh struggle for existence? What do you do with the heaviness that is Bangladesh?

It can be overwhelming and even frightening living in a completely alien culture. But it also is undeservedly, richly rewarding—for us individually and for us collectively. It is my experience that the more familiar we become with other cultures, the more tolerant and accepting we can become of differences. Even when we struggle and stumble through a foreign culture, we gain insight, we broaden our views, we start to accept. That is a stumble in the right direction. That is stepping toward understanding, stepping toward compassion, stepping toward co-creation of a more peaceful world. I stumbled and fell all over Bangladesh for six years and dirtied myself from guilt. Now that I’ve had the time to sweep away some of the dirt, I can see how generous the experience was to me. It forced me to look into the eyes of people who competed with dogs, rats, and crows as they picked through garbage dumps to survive. I learned to smile at the resiliency of paraplegic men rolling themselves down the streets, singing for coins. I gained perspective as I watched street children, clutching donated stubby pencils and tattered notebooks, sit in a courtyard’s dust to listen to an undereducated teacher. My understanding of want, need, and success ballooned and I was shaken. When destitution lives all around you, you begin to stumble.