Brent and Gabby's African Adventures!: Advent and Watermelon Seeds

We are officially off for 5 weeks' holiday- much like "summer vacation" in Canada, the kids are off until January 9th, and we are relaxing around home. We spent part of last week on the beach in Pangani, which was delicious... a constant routine of reading, sleeping, swimming and eating. Now we have a few weeks at home before we head off on our Christmas safari.

It's advent now. I've always been drawn to advent... it's a time of waiting and anticipation. I know that biblically it is meant to be a time when we anticipate the birth of Christ. But I find it a bit too abstract to anticipate something that has already happened. Instead, in Canada most years, I find myself in the cold and dark winter, exhausted out of my mind from the first 3 months of teaching. I anticipate the solstice- when the days will start to grow lighter bit-by-bit. I anticipate the Christmas holidays, when I will rest and recover from the exhaustion. And I anticipate the holiday of Christmas- the time with family, the food, the celebration of Christ with singing and candlelight scripture readings.

So I find myself caught in a totally different advent here. I'm not that exhausted, as my job is actually a manageable work load and I don't take work home in the evenings. The amount of daylight stays virtually the same all year, with the sun rising dutifully at 6:15 am and painting the sky pink around 6:30 pm. So no deficit of vitamin D here. And I find myself not missing the Christmas "trappings" at all... the other day some friends drove us into Arusha and we went shopping at Shoprite- which is a rather grotesque imitation of a Superstore kind of environment and, despite the availability of things like ketchup, it usually leaves me feeling a bit nauseous as I leave. Anyways, the whole time we shopped there were Dolly Parton Christmas carols playing over the tinny speakers, and little tufts of tinsel were haphazardly taped to random ends of aisles. Then at the end of the store was a sad-looking artificial Christmas tree with some plastic balls dangling from its ends. It was the first I have seen of any Christmas consumerism, and I couldn't finish my shopping fast enough.

But despite my not missing Christmas "stuff" at all, I am finding it a beautiful thing to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas in a relaxed state, with plenty of time to ponder the meaning of advent and Christmas. At the same time, I have been spending lots of time in the garden. Helen, a long term volunteer here, has built the most beautiful garden. There's too many beautiful things to name in this garden, but my favourites are the herbs (almost every one you can imagine), peppers, lettuce and chard. She has also started nursing several trees into existence- most of which she will never see the fruit of, but we have avocado, passionfruit, papaya, and lemon trees growing in our yard. Helen has gone home to Australia for the holidays and asked me to care for her garden, so I have been dutifully watering, weeding, and doting over her babies. I have also been throwing any seeds I can into empty spaces of dirt to see if they will grow. A few weeks ago I had watermelon for lunch and stood over a hole in the dirt, spitting them in as I ate. Then I made pumpkin pie (out of butternut squash) for Thanksgiving, and threw the hole goopey mess of seeds into a hole. Now, as they are beginning to pop out of the ground, I excitedly run out to see them in the morning, to see what progress they have made.

I am discovering how much a garden, like advent, is all about anticipation. I come from the city where, if I want a tomato right now, I just drive down to the store and it sits ripe and tasty on a pile waiting for me. I sometimes feel frustrated watching the garden... everything is happening so slowly, and I want my butternut squash NOW. And sometimes, when a pepper or zucchini is looking so promising, it falls off the stem or gets eaten by bugs. My hopes are dashed. But I keep waiting, anticipating the fruits of my labour. But at the same time, a garden is about celebration of the little milestones. Every day I see a change... the first leaves popping out of the ground; the leaves changing shape an colour as they mature; the first flowers; the first fruits. Each one of them causes my heart to jump a little, even though the finished product is so far from arriving. This is a side of advent that I have missed out on. In the exhaustion, busy-ness and stress of most Decembers, I
am unable to see the little celebrations along the way.

I think about the Tanzanian friends I have made here. I think their lives are a bit of a constant state of advent. They are trying to survive; working hard as a cleaner, taxi driver or teacher; trying to feed their kids, send them to school, and care for sick family members. The small amount of money that comes in each month is nearly never enough to cover what they need. Like the Israelites were waiting for a saviour, they live in anticipation and total faith that God will help them, even if they're not at all sure how. They take evening classes in French and zoology, in the hopes of becoming a safari guide. They send their children to an English-medium school, in the hopes that that child will one day be a doctor or lawyer. They befriend a mzungu (white person) like me, with the unspoken hope that I might one day pay for their university tuition as so many other mzungus have done. There are so many sad things that happen to people here; I can understand how they would look to the future to lift them out of the present. And YET... my Tanzanian friends are also the most joyful, in-the-moment people I know. They celebrate an uneventful day as a miracle... grateful to God that they have enjoyed another day on this earth without tragedy. They celebrate that God is here, now, and loves them unconditionally. We saw our friend James the taxi driver (who is also a school teacher) the other evening and asked him how his classes were that day. He said: "Oh, my classes went very well today, praise the Lord!". The irony is never lost on me that we mzungus, the ones who have all of our basic (and not-so-basic) needs and wants provided for, are the ones who forgo this wonder and celebration, in order to complain about the heat or office politics.

This advent, I want to learn to think more like my Tanzanian friends. I want to live each day in hope that something beautiful and life-changing is around the corner. But I also want to live each day in awareness that something and beautiful and life-changing is right here. In the midst of our African adventure, in the midst of my watermelon seedlings... God is here and he loves me unconditionally.