Beer with Strangers

She waved me down with a small crab in her hand. I thought she was trying to sell me something so I smiled and waved know. She waved harder, insistent, this time she offered beer. I smiled and shook my head again. Finally she reached fort the watermelon sitting in over-sized pieces on a plate.

The watermelon I took, the sweetness bursting in my mouth.

The only photo I got (after I left)

She smiled and handed me the crab – the size of the palm of my hand, pink shell and white underbelly. I stared at it, unsure of what she expected me to do. She pantomimed cracking it in half. A little flustered, my phone in one hand and a small crab in the other, I looked around the table. There were six people assembled around the table with another two women sitting on separate seats but clearly a part of the group.

Everyone smiled as the crab woman gestured to her seat and then scooted over to make room for me.

I sat. my phone and backpack settled in my lap. And then I cracked the crab in two.

I looked for the meat, dug my fingers into crannies and pulled out bits of soft white flesh. She handed me a small bowl with a chili sauce and I dipped what meat I could find into the bowl.

Then came the beer.

Drunk people cannot be reasoned with, no matter the country- no matter their beverage of choice.

I watched her pour a beer from a bottle in to an ice-filled mug. She thrust it cheerfully in my hands and gestured for me to drink.

I demurred, as much as one can demure when I don’t speak Vietnamese and the group assembled doesn’t speak English.

Desperation to avoid drinking the beer encouraged me to use Google Translate- to no avail. Whatever I said was met with raucous laughter and inspired a side conversation in the group that I had now way to participate in.

so there was beer.

I drank a little and tried to put the mug down. She insisted I drink some more. I tried again. More drinking. The mug finally drained she smiled and gestured for another round...just for me.

The enthusiastic peer pressure reminded me of marula beer season in my village in South Africa. A small green fruit that ferments and notoriously gets elephants drunk, is also fermented on purpose in rural areas. The go-gos (grandmothers) would sit outside next to a frothy bucket of marula beer and insist I have some. “O nwa, Lerato, O nwa!”( Drink Lerato, Drink). Rather than face the wrath of a village go-go, I'd drink up and exaggerate how good it was.

Outside on the sidewalk next to the ocean in Vietnam, I reenacted my South Africa days.

As we continued to battle over the beer she began to hand me other things on the table. Squid (overcooked but still squid so I happily ate it). Everyone seemed surprised that I ate and presumably liked it. Next was a mystery...something pickled maybe. It tasted a little like cabbage but much thicker. Then more watermelon.

By now she was insistent that I have more beer and I was insistent that I not. The older woman sitting on my right, on a small stool next to me gestured for me to go. She pointed at the woman while she was supervising the beer and shook her head in the universal language of “my friend is drunk”, so I took her advice and departed.

I left him stranded there...

He looked lost and a little afraid. His eyes darted back and forth and he was pushing an airport cart heavy with luggage that telegraphed a long journey. I remember thinking how awful it was to land in America, not even able to access American currency, and being charged for the cart to haul your luggage.

He was small. 

Standing outside of DFW, cars and buses flitting to a curb and then away in ever thinning clusters.

I recognized his expression. I’ve worn that look a couple dozen time at an airport, any airport, in a new country. Knowing I stand out, knowing I don’t know what I don’t know. It is always the most exposed and vulnerable I feel in a new country. In Sri Lanka that look led to a $40 taxi fare instead of a $2 one. In Peru it led to an hour walking through town with my luggage until finally agreeing to pay for a taxi. In Ethiopia it felt dangerous, a late flight and a poorly lit parking lot and me with no convincing language skills to speak of.

This man was of my nomadic tribe. I recognized myself in him. 

I also recognized fatigue. In me. I’d been traveling. I don’t know where I’d been or how long. I think my flight had been delayed or maybe I’d had to check luggage and they’d misplaced it. I don’t remember the particulars, only that I was tired. I averted my gaze and searched through the glaring orange lights and receding darkness for my shuttle bus.

I stood on the curb too, a little bit away from this man. This man with all of his belongings in a cart by his side. I watched him look at the same signs repeatedly hoping, I imagine, that they might make more sense each time he looked. Disheartened that they didn’t. 

He scanned the few faces on the curb looking…looking for me I imagine. Not the actual me but the me that recognized myself in him, the me that understood his trepidation and could help. Our eyes finally met and I stopped searching the bus lane for my bus. At least for a moment he had my attention.

The details are fuzzy now, only my guilt is crisp and clear.

He was confused about where he should go. I remember pointing to the sign, repeating the information, having him repeat the information. I think I made a phone call on the airport information phone. I nodded encouragingly as I gave him information, hoping he’d nod comprehension back, and he nodded. I’m certain his nodding mirrored my nodding, wasn’t an indication of clarity. But he nodded, I told myself.

Part of the helpful crew from Bahir Dar

My bus finally arrived. After standing on the curb for what seemed like forever, I was tired and ready to go home. I boarded the bus, watched the small man from the window, assured myself he’d be fine.

But it was late and he was far from home. 

Its been late and I’ve been far from home. In those moments I am forever grateful for the people who recognize my carefully concealed terror. The old woman on a bus in Durban who fussed at the driver and demanded he take me directly to my hostel, the two young men in Bahir Dar who drove me to a less sketchy hotel, the nun in Flores who helped me figure out where I was going. I didn’t even have to ask, didn’t have to stand on a curb clutching my bags. 

I have basked in traveler’s grace.

I should have stayed. I should have walked that man on the curb to where he needed to be. I should have been his English translator; I didn’t know what language he spoke but I could have cared enough to figure out a way to translate his needs. People have done that for me. I should have paid it forward.

I think about that man often. I send good travel vibes into the ether and hope that they found him another one of our tribe who was not so selfish as to choose 20 extra minutes of sleep over helping someone lost in the transition that is travel. 

That man and he has become, for me, a reprimand, a reminder, a mantra for who I should be at all times, not simply when I’m well rested or flush with time.

Blog prompt courtesy of Daily Post: Sorry, I’m Busy.

Sparklebright

She had the brightest smile. Bright like whites in the summer sun. Bright like kittens purring against your hand. Bright like nothing bad had ever happened. 

It has been so many years I can’t tell you how we started talking, or what mental or physical state I was in when we did. It was after my accident. My head was bandaged but I don’t know how far into the AZT I was. I don’t remember how sick I might have been. Only that when I remember it now, through the gauzy haze of nostalgia and toppled into the memory pit of a time, I can see her smiling as bright as anything, laughing as lightly as dandelion fluff. 

My trauma was obvious. Written all over my face with bandages, spiky stitches, and the constant nausea for my post exposure prophylaxis (a precaution against the unknown origin of the hospital needles). And if it were later, and the stitches were already gone, then my trauma was still obvious, with a raw jagged line running through a patch of shaved scalp. 

Her ailment was her secret to tell. 

We sat on a bench I think, waiting for appointments? Lingering after appointments? Sharing the same bed and breakfast? I can’t recall details; only that we talked and shared and laughed.

I have a memory of her joyful description of her house in Malawi. Her washing clothes in the doorway. Even talking about the mundane chores of rural Peace Corps life seemed pleasant with her, not in the obnoxious way where you want to shove a sponge in someone’s face, but in the…hmmm, I should try it her way, kind of way.

We talked about her travels. About making friends and keeping in touch. We talked about the difficulties of having no shared language. This was before google translate or babblefish. This was us sitting in a country whose internet, I was sure, was run by a lone hamster dying of thirst on a rusted out wheel.

I don’t remember exchanging addresses. How could I remember that when I can’t remember where she fits between the first time I threw up (from the smell of dinner -it didn’t matter that I was starving -my body heaved in revolt and I remained famished) and lying on the floor of my assistant Peace Corps Director’s office, under the air conditioning for 8 hours at a stretch for the sake of cooling my nausea. She is in there somewhere- a shining beacon, a moment when maybe I wasn’t fixated on sickness or pain.

I returned to my village a moth after my accident. Thinner. Weaker. Skittish of loud noises and sudden stops. I made my rounds in my village. Reacquainted people with me, attempted to find my place in the now strangely foreign place that until weeks before, had been my home. 

Sometime later – in my head it is February but that isn’t right because I’d been home barely a week by that point- I got a package in the mail. Inside were bath salts “for my bucket bath” …sweet smelling reminders of home. Beneath those envelopes wrapped in plastic bags, was a bag of marshmallows. 

Sitting in the Peace Corps doctor’s office, comparing Malawi to South Africa, sharing the yearnings of youngish people so far from home tangled in with adventures and lamentations…she remembered. She remembered what I said I longed for so far away from familiarity and the comforts of home. 

Through the mail, across the miles, her so removed from the sub-Saharan life we had discussed and shared…she remembered me. She remembered me and mailed me a piece of home.

Fifteen years later, the thought of her still makes me attempt a smile as bright as hers.