My Three Worlds

While I am here, I live in three worlds at once. One world is this place, this land with its people. At night I see stars here as Abraham and the ancients saw them, sparkling like jewels in heaven’s crown. You can almost see the lines of your hands in the starlight, you could almost guess your future from them, or dream it at least. Last night’s rain was new snow on the mountains and the white of it is unbelievable under the moon, and even whiter under the sun. The clouds that brought the rain were blown in violently by an all-of-a-sudden wind in the afternoon, which raised the dust of three rainless months and twisted it into billows and whirlwinds everywhere. People walked through the streets with scarves over their faces, women tried to hold their veils in place, and young men giggled to each other as the female form finally appeared to them in outline, drawn on burqas by the wind. After the rain there came the mud, slurping and splashing all over the streets now, spraying everywhere when the jeeps drive by. Children pick their way through it to drier places and carve out little pits to play marbles. They wear shoes but no socks, and their shirts are too thin for the sudden winter cold.

The work goes on. All week I have been interviewing for staff. It’s a strange procedure. Strange because here my world lines up in a collision course with this one and it’s like the equestrian society and the grade 8 chess club trying to have a game of rugby; everyone’s playing by different rules and no one knows what game it is. I don’t know what impression the interviewees have of the purpose of an interview, but it is different than mine, I think. I am interviewing for drivers. I expect that for the most part men who know how to drive will come. I will ask them questions to determine roughly to what extent they know basic things about driving safety and local procedure, such as it is – or isn’t. Up to this point, they oblige, telling me what I want to hear, which is that they know all about driving. Then we go out to the jeep and they try to fit the key into the air vent, or steer with the gearshift, or drive through the wall. People leap out of the way and everyone escapes death narrowly. I breathe deeply, thank politely, and move on to the next candidate, wondering what on earth I’m missing here.

Or the neighbour comes over to our newly rented office, and it is obvious (to me) that we are up to our necks in busyness. In fact, I am in the middle of a very busy conversation at that very moment. He comes over and does something like pulling rank. I wasn’t even aware that he had a rank to pull. Do neighbours have rank? Anyway, he pulls rank, and along with it he pulls my very new interpreter from our discussion with the mason (who is asking for even more money) to ask rapid-fire questions about why I haven’t hired his, the neighbour’s, son as a guard. Was it because I knew he was the neighbour’s son, and so was prejudiced? It seems that I should prefer the neighbour’s son, regardless of his ability, and be prejudiced against all people who aren’t the neighbour’s son, but if I don’t hire the neighbour’s son, then my prejudice has been misused, and a neighbourly visit is warranted. All of this assumes, wrongly, that I actually know the neighbour’s son from a mud puddle. We conclude our little interpreted chat with nothing actually resolved and the neighbour putting himself at my service. I have no idea what has just happened but I have a feeling that around here this is as normal as a pillowcase. If that seems like a weird simile, you haven’t spent all morning at the tailor’s trying to explain to both your translator and the tailor and anyone else who might possibly get it what a pillowcase is. I don’t even blink at something as silly as a cover for a pillow, and here they don’t blink at neighbours coming at silly times with silly things to discuss. But switch us around and put us in different worlds and we’re stumped for the rest of the day.

We go through the days together, trying to make something happen between the two worlds, between the absurdities of pillowcases and unknown neighbour’s sons. Slowly an office takes shape. Slowly the translator learns about bedding, and bills, and how to calculate quantity and unit costs and totals, how to do things and care about things that are silly, really, but must be done. Life was simple here before I came, if you knew what the neighbour actually wanted, and the polite things to say so that he got nothing and thought he’d won. The poor translator is doing his best. He just finished playing marbles a few years ago. Maybe he doesn’t even know what the neighbour really wants, let alone why I’m asking him to get a receipt for the pillowcases once he figures out what they are. But we get through it, and the neighbour is happy and the tailor might understand and I get my receipt and hopefully something resembling a pillowcase and we all shake hands, the neighbour, the tailor, the translator, and I. The day has been won for the moment and we can leave this half-baked world return to our own sensible ones.

My sensible world is my room, rented at the moment while we renovate our building. I have all the things that I’ve brought with me: too many clothes, vitamins, books, a laptop, good soap, Beethoven symphonies and Simon & Garfunkel albums. Here I can lie on my bed made comfy by an air mattress which cost more than some of my neighbours make in a month, and listen to Radiohead ask me “are you such a dreamer, to set the world to rights?” instead of the call to prayer. Sometimes while Horowitz is playing Chopin on the portable speakers and I’m deep into my umpteenth Graham Greene novel, I almost forget that I’m not at home. But here, when I am alone, I wake up like this in the middle of the night, confronted by the last of the three worlds, as real and invisible as spirit, asking what my purpose here is, asking the same haunting question as Radiohead: “are you such a dreamer…? I believe in invisible kingdoms more real than this place where I breathe air every day, so I am. I am such a dreamer.

The question is how to set the world to rights. I don’t even believe I can, and I don’t believe it especially here. The interpreter told me that the salary wasn’t important; he just wanted to help his country. It’s the right thing to say, but what does it mean? Did he know that helping his country means learning about nitpicking over receipts, and once I’ve taught him to nitpick properly, will we really have helped his country? It’s questionable. There’s more than just what we do here, there’s something invisible behind it all that makes it matter – and keeps me from total cynicism. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in dreams and fairytales. God is like the wizard disguised as an old beggar waiting for the kind-hearted son of the woodcutter to come along and share his lunch. Mother Teresa believed it too, although she didn’t put it like that. She said when she washed beggars, she was washing the body of Christ. Maybe in this world, teaching someone to read receipts will accomplish little, but if I am kind to him, patient, if I can manage to act in love, it matters in the invisible kingdom. And when the things are done that matter in heaven, the earth gets a little better, too. I hope so, anyway. I stake my life on it.