Day 45 ❦ And...give again...

Day 45 ❦ And...give again...

The gift: An African necklace

I am certainly getting a lot of giving mileage with the African jewelry I brought back from Ghana, Togo and Benin and today I am going to continue that trend...

The other night I gave Sevy a beautiful African beaded bracelet for helping with book group and it just looks striking on her. She is from Bulgaria and has that same dark olive skin that I have that lends itself well to wearing certain colors and jewelry. Sevy comes from a family that has very little and did not grow up with an expectation of having material items. Living in Bulgaria post Russia she shared a communal bathroom with the other tenants of her apartment building and her family ate out of one bowl at meal time.

There are always cultural transition stories that we have to tell about the first time this happened or when that happened with students - such as our student from Paraguay who took cold showers for weeks because she didn’t know how to turn the hot water on and had only had cold showers in her native home, or our student from Denmark who cried when we told her she would have to make her bed...realizing later that she actually thought she would have to use wood, hammer and nails to “make her bed”, as opposed to dressing her bed in the morning. Sevy presented some of those stories too, for example in Bulgaria shaking your head up and down means no and shaking your head from side to side means yes...but her first cultural issue happened at her first meal with her first host family.

As dinner was served, Sevy picked up the serving bowl and began eating out of it. Fortunately her host family was very experienced and realized that this was something they were going to have to get to the bottom of carefully...and quickly...and as they were working this out with her, they learned that her family had no plates or bowls for individual servings and that they all ate out of one communal bowl because that is all they had.

Now I am telling you this story because it is not often that we in the United States have children in our lives who have so little that they are sharing a bathroom with hundreds, or share one serving bowl with their entire family. This is the life that Sevy came from. Receiving a bracelet was a huge gift and the pride with which she wore it was so moving that I decided to gift her with the matching necklace. Her delight in being gifted was fun to witness.

 ❦ And...give again...