twende

I went to a Mennonite service the other week. How I ended up there is a longer story, but I was lured mostly by the promise of singing hymns. We sang several, none of which I knew, but one did make me tear up – surely mercy has a cadence! – and listened to a sermon reflecting on Matthew 23, 1 Kings 17, and a book that offers a sociological analysis of American infrastructure and our collective need to care and be cared for, a radical compassion and generosity both offered and received. People were kind. There were lots of adorable children. The harmonies in the songs were rich and lived in. I felt, somehow, like a voyeur of a life of a community. There was an electric spark between all of these people, known and loved and cared for. A woman had recently recovered from an illness and announced to the room, “I’ve left all the Tupperware and casserole dishes you all brought me on the table in the foyer. I’ve forgotten whose was whose. If it’s yours, just take it home!”

They have a children’s time, not uncommon for churches this vibrant. A family dressed in their Sunday best has snuck in late into the row behind me with four kids just as the rest of the children have gathered around the pastor up front. The kids behind me move to go, their mom stops them, an elderly woman in the row smiles and says, “they can go, it’s okay.”

Hearing this, the oldest kid, maybe eight, says to his siblings, “twende!”

It means “let’s go.” I know this immediately without thinking. And I freeze. Here, in a Mennonite church in Wisconsin, this family is speaking Swahili.

It is a language from one of my homes.

I can never escape the way I grew up, can’t really ever take off the lens that absolutely colors the way I see and process everything. Being from not-here is a defining feature of my self-concept for better or worse. I can speak wistfully about all these other places and how they feel like home but also don’t, how familiar the cultures are to me in a half-outsider way. I am rarely actually confronted with these places or their elements. And here is Swahili.

During the sermon, I listen to the husband translate for his wife, whispering a few second behind. I don’t understand it, I wouldn’t have understood them when my Swahili was at its best, when we lived in Kenya. But I know the rhythms and the sounds. I am reminded of sentence structures and my fourth-grade Swahili class. The teacher had a mustache, but I can’t remember his name. The Mennonites there had hymn sings. We used to go sometimes. They had a potluck after. Some of the people in this church remind me of those missionaries in Kenya, whose names I can’t remember and whose faces are blurry in my memory. Maybe it is just the earnest, genuine kindness of people who love Jesus and have quiet lives.

With one ear on the preacher and one on the Swahili behind me, I realize how much I’ve grown. I recognize words, the ones my family has integrated into our own little dialect, words like God and where and what and now and the verb to know. I don’t feel bad that I don’t understand more, don’t feel the need to try and speak to this family, to prove something to myself. It was comforting to hear, to remind myself of this place that means a lot to me and formed me, all tied up with my childhood and key moments of my life. 

But I am not homesick in this moment. It doesn’t make me feel small. I don’t feel like the eight-year-old who moved to Kenya or the ten-year–old who left. I feel like myself. I feel like I’m in my twenties, working a job I love in a field I love, several years into a career I’m proud of. I have friends who love me well and robust hobbies. I feel like everywhere is home and nowhere is home but I’m so grateful for the community I am building and the places I’m finding I belong. Because I do belong places. I wonder if I would have believed that if you told me back then.

Kenya feels so far away most of the time. The sense memories are there – rain, mostly, and termites, and a handful of smells, seed pods and a particular shade of green. I remember people, and school, and my favorite foods and a handful of conversations that have stuck with me. I think it’s the way most people remember elementary school. It just happened in Kenya, underscored by this language that is suddenly being spoken behind me, in a church I do not go to in the Midwest, in this city I think I’m falling in love with. 

I think it would have scared a past version of me how quietly that sense of missing has slipped away. The pull to go back is always there, I think, but even a language so ingrained in my heart didn’t make it unbearable. In fact, it was kind of nice. Something pinging in the back of my brain, here is a thing that you love. Remember who you are. That is a gift. I’m comfortable here. I’m comfortable now. In this present moment. This is, I clock, as we sing another hymn acapella, a new development for me. I rarely am where my feet are. And yet, here I am.

Some part of me wants to resist this, to kick and scream and say I miss it all, all the time, as if to do otherwise is denying myself somehow. But that is not true, nor should it be. I miss it, sometimes, when it rains or when the sky is the right shade of blue or I smell red clay or eat rum raisin anything. It matters to me. Of course it does. But I am not constantly yearning for it the way I think sometimes that I should.

I don’t know why I think that. I am very good at holding tension, at understanding multiple sides, comfortable in murky grays and walking the line without feeling transgressive. This is, I remind myself, part of that too. Perhaps that’s why I’m so good at that. Because that is how I feel about home, about all the places I’ve lived.

And so, in this Mennonite service held at the Church of Christ building in Madison, Wisconsin, I listen to this family speak a language I used to know but don’t anymore, from a place that I will always call home but don’t miss all that much, in a place that I don’t call home yet but imagine I could some day, in the context of a faith practice that is not mine but I find beautiful. 

I have to laugh a little. That’s my life in a nutshell, isn’t it? Everything is familiar and warm but not quite comfortable. Except I am comfortable in it. Deeply so. And I love it. 

I didn’t speak to the Swahili-speaking family, didn’t stay for fellowship time at church. I left, got lunch with a friend, talked about dreams and transience. I went home. I meal prepped and did laundry and cleaned the bathroom. I read a book about an Iranian poet. I also googled some Swahili vocab words, listened to the music I loved when I lived in Kenya, and watched the rain fall outside. A tiny meditation on who I was and who I am.