Wanderers in a Strange Land

 A personal essay by Jessica Brousseau

"All of us should remember that marginality is the purpose of God's plan of salvation. We are all aliens, exiles, sojourners far from our spiritual home." -Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye

Gold. Pure karat gold pushed its way under the airplane’s plastic window covers. My eyes were smarting at the brilliance of the sun. I was exhausted from the long night. I'd shifted constantly between laying, awkward and cramped, on the sticky tray table, to leaning back against the hard plane backrest while simultaneously avoiding contact with the lady on my right. “Now descending into Montevideo” the flight attendant sounded over the crackly audio system in a heavy Spanish accent. Outside, watery clouds cloaked the earth below like someone had been running a giant fog machine all night long. I had no idea how close we were to the earth. Suddenly, we split through the clouds to see the emerald grass only a few feet below us. The plane touched down, and passengers broke into polite applause. We'd actually arrived in our tiny country of Uruguay. There was no turning back now.

Two assistants and a few Uruguayos stood waiting for us when we exited the small terminal. A Uruguay flag, striped celeste y blanco waved excitedly in their hands. There were hugs for my dad and brothers and firm handshakes for everyone else. The sweet hermana gave us a comforting embrace and an enthusiastic beso on the cheek. Besos were another thing that we’d soon recognize not only as normal but as tender and endearing. They helped us gather the significant amount of checked luggage that we’d brought along and load it into a trailer hooked behind the mission van. We posed for a picture in front of it, all too aware that our luggage carried every bit of home that we’d have for a long time.
 
As we drove away from the airport, I couldn’t have felt more out of place. I was so used to traveling through airports, nestled tightly in the middle of looming cement jungles. This airport was a tiny, ugly white smudge on a beautiful landscape quilt. The luscious fields were patterned with cows and the ochre dirt roads sewed the beautiful seams that held it all together. One narrow cement highway created the stark, harsh border. We’d never seen such a quilt. We drove through narrow, one-way streets, passing entire families packed on tiny motorcycles. Small houses were squished together, looking like they were made of terracotta legos, their clay bricks exposed to the humid air and topped off with a precarious piece of shiny chapa. Strange, pokey pines dotted the street when they fell from the towering trees above.

 

"Home"

Slowly, our surroundings transformed as we neared the center of the city. The rich, earthy roads were now narrow asphalt streets lined with clay-tiled sidewalks. The orange brick houses were now sleek, modern-looking homes with second stories, stylish stucco, and giant electronically controlled gates. The street gente no longer drove a horse and cart combo but drove expensive imported cars. (We, for one, knew how truly expensive those cars were. The import tax was close to 50% on products from Europe and America. This was a price that we’d have to pay since Uruguay car manufacturers didn’t make cars that would fit our family of 8.)

Finally, we came to the first (and only) familiar view that we’d encounter in Uruguay. The temple. It was one of the small ones, with a tiny baptistery and a few small sealing rooms, but it looked like home. The gleaming white walls and towering steeple soothed our hearts, telling us that we would be safe here. The mission van stopped at an old, gated home next to the temple that sported wood-paneled garages that were probably stylish in the 1950s. We’d made it. The place that would become our refuge of familiar culture, food, language, and love for the next three years. The mission home.
 

How could a place so foreign ever feel comfortable or familiar? How could we really feel at home away from our family, friends, and all of the normal parts of our anterior life? Even going to the grocery store was a huge ordeal - It just reminded us how out of place we were, stuck in a place without familiar food or ingredients, surrounded by Spanish labels and Latino culinary vocab on all sides, it quickly became one of the more difficult parts of each week. How could we call this the mission “home,” with its hard cement walls and cold tile floors and tightly barred windows and mold-stained showers? How could this ever be our home when it felt so empty, so stiff, so lonely?

I wondered, was this how Edmond Dantés felt in The Count of Monte Cristo, unexpectedly torn from the side of his loved ones and shipped to a foreign prison, where he sat in devastating isolation, great waters separating him from any notion of familial aid or comfort? I finally understood why he’d worked so hard to escape. The dull ache of loneliness stabbing through the numbness of culture shock was already too much for me to carry alone. I later came to realize that this was the feeling of being a missionary. I guess that’s why they talked so much about trusting in the Lord, because if they didn’t have a bit of faith and hope, surely the loneliness would break them.

 

An Impossible Adjustment

The first weeks simultaneously blurred together and stretched out to span an eternity. The transition to mission life was not getting any easier. I drowned myself in books, their language familiar and their culture even more so. Dad was already working at breakneck speed to fuel the fires of faith among the missionaries. He was constantly on the road, tracing and retracing the thin highways of Uruguay. We hardly saw him, mostly on Sunday evenings when he paused for a pit stop of Mom’s best American-food-made-of-Uruguayan-ingredients-and-a-healthy-dose-of-salt. (Did I mention that they don’t believe in salt in Uruguay? As they say, “Menos sal, más vida.”) Mom was doing amazing things among the missionaries, cooking wonderful food for their conferences, inspiring them with her selfless love and gentle demeanor. She was simultaneously the mother of 6 children and 170 missionaries.
 

Was I wrong to feel selfish? Was I wrong to want her to myself? More importantly, would this ever get easier? Trying to inspire some optimism in myself, I read the words of Edmond Dante, “Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words, - Wait and hope.” Two tasks that for me, were surely impossible. I felt that I’d already done my fair share of waiting.

An Important Journey

My dad took me on one of his travels. A zone had requested that I sing at their baptism. We rose and fell on the hilly roads, constantly submerging ourselves in the thick smoke that permeated the air, fed constantly by the wood-burning stoves of the little country towns. Only on the highest hills did we rise out of the smoke, like a swimmer coming up for air. As we descended into the rusty outskirts of Maldonado, fear started to clutch at me like an insistent shadow. In Uruguay, I’d learned to live with the constant discomfort of isolation and fear of being jumped. It seemed like we always stuck out too much, our pasty skin and light, faded hair shining like a beacon, and I was completely convinced that we were surrounded by people that wanted to take advantage of us “yanquis.” I longed for the refuge of the mission home.

Two elders stood at the tall iron gates that surrounded the church and let us in, locking the gates behind us. I hurried up the stairs and into the church. I didn’t even want to look at the gloomy streets outside the safe haven of the church because if I did, I was sure that I’d see someone looming there, waiting to rob us. But when I stepped inside, everything changed. The baptism was simple and poignant, celebrating the faith of a woman whose life had a complexity and difficulty that I would never know. I sang. I felt peace. I felt needed. I almost felt like I belonged but that particular sensation seemed to constantly evade my desperate fingertips.

 
Learning to Belong

Months went by. We learned, but slowly. Soon, we used the water filters without a second thought. The dehumidifiers weren’t sounding so much like monsters anymore, at least not during the daytime. The grocery store vocab started to stick. “Cuánto cuesta…” and “agua sin gas por favor” and “dónde están los ____.” The winter weather with its vicious coastal tormentas and humidity that pierced to the bone wasn’t so bad when you witnessed the staggering sunsets that it produced. The neon colors that saturated the sky were beyond vivid. It was like someone had turned the color filter all the way up on their phone camera. Those sunsets were like a reminder to me from God. He was there. And He could do far greater miracles for me in my life than paint an incredible sunset. Once again, the words of Alexander Dumas seemed to write themselves in my mind. “Often we pass beside happiness without seeing it, without looking at it, or even if we have seen and looked at it, without recognizing it.” Sunsets became my happiness.
 
I was always in the kitchen with Mary. I was like Not Mary like Jesus’ mother, Mary pronounced “Mahree” with a flipped r. But she might as well have been Jesus’ mother or Mary Magdalene or any of those famous Bible Marys because she was patient, kind, and gentle, and she connected me to God more than anyone had before. She always greeted me with an enveloping hug, cushioned by her soft mother’s body and sanctioned by her lingering beso. Mary taught me that being an outsider wasn’t a bad thing. She taught me that being an outsider meant that other people could make you an insider. She taught me that feeling out of place wasn’t a bad thing either, since it permitted me to make more space in my heart for new places and new people. She taught me all that while sitting at the kitchen table, up to her elbows in sliced vegetables and diced chicken. I couldn’t remember the words for all the vegetables that were supposed to go in the layered salads that she carefully constructed for the mission conferences in the church next door. She taught me that too.
Lechuga. Zanahoria. Pepino. Tomate. Cebolla.
y Amor.
 

The Joy of Being an Outsider

Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye once wrote great wisdom about being an outsider. She said, “All of us should remember that marginality is the purpose of God’s plan of salvation. We are all aliens, exiles, sojourners far from our spiritual home. The purpose of life is to come to terms with the depth of this alienation in ourselves and in others and respond with charity—to seek, receive, and share the pure love of Christ.” Dealing with our alienation, our abandonment, our loneliness was one of the most difficult things I’d ever have to do. Coming to understand that our same alienation, abandonment, and loneliness allowed us to be saved by others was one of the most important things I ever did. We were constantly saved by the strangers that surrounded us. The patient lady at the grocery store who didn’t mind our heavy accents. The kind mother who let us fawn over her adorable baby as we were missing our own cousins being born. The church leader who would smile as he stumbled through our interviews in his quickly-learned English. The missionaries who loved us like their own family.

I thought we came to Uruguay to be saviors, but we were the ones that really needed saving.