Farnham, England – We’ve just celebrated Easter. It’s the highpoint of the Christian calendar, celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s a time of fresh starts, holding the mysteries of death and life in harness, restoration, healing, transformation… it’s a time for reflection.
One of my favourite quotes of recent years comes from Richard Rohr: “Jesus was asked 183 questions in the gospels, he only answered 3 of them”. Many of you will know that frequently Jesus’ response was a tell a story, a parable… the purpose was to allow the listener to wrestle with it, and try to explore and extract the meaning applicable. This might sometimes be generic, but often, it was specific, personal…
We returned to the UK after our IndoChina adventure just over a week ago. A fantastic voyage that will definitely hold many memories… not surprisingly, everyone is asking us about “our favourites”. It’s a tough assignment, but we’re trying to order our thoughts a bit more coherently and will shortly publish our “Awards” ceremony.
However, there is one vignette that’s stuck in my mind during the last week. It’s been poking at me, pricking, irritating, wanting to be explored. It’s a “story” that happened in Sapa, right at the end of our trip. You may remember we walked through the tiered rice fields, and I waxed lyrical about their beauty. It wasn’t quite the perfect day I portrayed. I missed out something. So enter Exhibit A, a photo.
One of the joys of walking for me is experiencing the landscape, observing the beauty, and in a remote area such as this, drinking in the silence, the solitude. So I was less than enamoured when we started the trek that all-of-a-sudden “the tourists” were the centre of attention; about ten local women strapped their baskets on their backs (carrying their craft wares) and prepared to accompany us, uninvited. It was unhelpful in the extreme to start with… there had been a biblically heavy thunderstorm several hours earlier, and the packed red clay was a mud bath, intensely slippery. As I took each step gingerly, various people crowded around me and often I was unable to put my foot down as the space was taken away. The “crowd” dwindled down to two stalwarts who accompanied us on the entire trek. Occasionally they would try to open conversation in broken English. Their rationale was simple – “We are following you so that you will buy from us”. It was the act of service, the fact they had accompanied us that somehow made this their “emotional contract”, despite several clear statements to the contrary on our part. We didn’t buy anything, mainly on principle, not wanting to reward unhelpful behaviour; they had walked with us for several hours.
So… further conversation with May confirmed that we’d experienced a very common occurrence. When I wondered whether it would not be better to build a craft stall at the EcoLodge (where the walk started), May confirmed that the owners of the Lodge had offered to do exactly that, not happy with their guests being harried in this way. Despite numerous efforts over the months and years to explain that Westerners may not like this type of behaviour, the Red Tzao women continued: “If we don’t follow, someone else will, and they’ll get the sale”.
The vignette has been pressing me in the last 10 days – it’s asking me a question. “Where might your thinking, your approach, your actions be COMPLETELY wrong or in-appropriate? How could you remove the blindness to hear and explore a new, different & ultimately better way?”
