I love stories.
Last night, I sat next to the swimming pool in Holland’s Holiday Inn Express and talked with a man from Kentucky. Last week I sat at a table with my great aunts and uncles who graduated whole decades before I was born. Last month I sat in a plastic chair under a tree in Africa with three street boys from Lira.
I didn’t really do much. I just sat there and listened. They told me their stories.
And their stories fascinate me.
“My aunt did some research and figured out we’re directly related to Pocahontas.” (That’s from Kentucky.)
“We left the football game and drove to Kentucky to get married, cause in Ohio you had to be 18 to elope. My mom said later she was wondering why I’d showed up to the game in my suit.” (That’s my grandpa telling about how he and Grandma got married.)
“My step-dad didn’t want me in the house, so I left my mom and went to live with my dad. But his new wife beat me and yelled at me all the time, so I left again. I tried to go back to my mom, but it didn’t work. That’s why I live on the street.”
This is Ronald’s story.
Ronald (left side) is one of the street boys I talked to in Lira. He and Solomon (black shirt) and Daniel (red shirt) sat with me for more than an hour and told me why they were on the streets. They were very polite and very patient with all the translating. None of them would look me in the eye while they told me their stories.
These boys have lived a life that I can only imagine.
They know what it feels like to pull a garbage sack up to your chin as a blanket. What’s it’s like to get woken up by an angry mob, wielding machetes. What it’s like to spend a night in jail with no one caring whether or not you come out in the morning. How much arm space it takes to hold a kilo of plastic. (They collect plastic on the street and take it in to recycle. They get paid 12 cents per kilo.) The message in the eyes of the adults who pass you every day on the street. How your heart feels when you see other kids your age in their starched, ironed uniforms, marching off to school.
Listening to their stories, I didn’t laugh as much or smile as much as I do when I’m listening to stories here in the States. The stories in Africa are often more somber, more complicated. They don’t have happy endings. They’re different.
It makes me wonder what it would take to bring the laughter and smiles back into the stories in Africa. What does that look like? How does it sound? What does it do to your heart? I want to know. Will Solomon, Daniel, and Ronald look me in the eye when they tell me their stories then?
