Respect in the Jungle

My rookie year in the African jungle taught me so many lessons; none quite as close to home as this one.

“Louis (pronounced Louie),” I called to the young boy, “how are you today?” The scrawny, seven-year-old boy clad only in the typical long tribal shorts and worn tee shirt, had just passed our tent. Hearing me, he stopped and turned to face me. “Bonjour!” I called to him, trying to force my memory to spit out the tribal translation for the morning greeting. I nodded as the boy pointed his index finger at his chest.

“Bonjour, Madame!” he said, without the hint of a smile.

Pressing my lips into the unfamiliar words, I said, “Ta not tee fay?” I hoped he knew I’d asked how he had slept. I’d put these words in my notebook in the way they sounded to me, because theirs wasn’t a written language yet.

The boy’s smile spread across his face. “Ta not te dere an fe?”

I laughed and said, “Thank you. Yes, that’s what I meant.” While I repeated the sentence out loud several times to reinforce the missing words, my young language-helper giggled.

Remembering Mom’s earliest lesson on relationships, I made it a point to call the little guy by name every time I saw him. I couldn’t be sure of the origin of his name, but each time I listened to his father calling for him, it sounded very similar to the French pronunciation of the name, Louis. I’d been relieved because many of the African names had been so difficult to pronounce that I found it a mammoth challenge to remember them.

One day when little Louis heard me calling him from the table outside our tent, he didn’t return my greeting. Instead, the boy walked over to stand in front of me and said, “Moise.”

“Moise?” I repeated, scrolling through the files of my brain, searching for some meaning for the word, other than “Moses”, the English translation for the French version of the same name.

“Shaking his head up and down, he said, “Moise!” Stabbing his finger at his little-boy chest, he repeated, “Moise. Moise.”

“You’re name’s not Louis? You’re Moise?”

The sober little African face broke into an enormous smile. Bobbing his head up and down, he said, “Moise.” Then, pulling his face into an exaggerated frown, shaking his head from side-to-side, he said, “Louis.”

My Swiss colleague, Anne-Lise, stood by, witnessing the drama. We both exploded into laughter, and the lad lost no time adding his tenor squeals of joy. Trying to figure out how we could have so grossly misunderstood the boy’s name, sobered us. Truly, I wanted to cry for Moise.

Throughout our nine years in that village, the only name I ever heard his father call him was not the two-syllable proper noun, Louis, but the very impersonal, single-syllable third-person pronoun, Lui, which is the French word for, him.

When the rains got too heavy for our tent, and the mud-brick clinic and lodging had not been completed, we had no choice but to return to the capital city to wait out those monsoon months. Little Moise walked alongside us as we hiked through the village towards the five miles of rugged, sandy path that led to the intercity road, where we’d catch a bush-taxi.

Putting my arm around the crying boy, I knelt to speak to him eyeball-to-eyeball. “We are coming back, Moise. As soon as the rain stops, we’ll be back. I promise.” I squeezed the little boy and fought back my own tears for him. He’d already become used to broken promises from adults in his young life. “You’ll see; we’re coming back.”

Several months later, Moise’s beautiful face could be found in the midst of the crowd of youngsters, clapping and jumping up and down at the sight of our bodies in the land Rover entering the village. We’d come back.

For the remainder of our stay in Moise’s village, we enjoyed a warm relationship with the growing youngster. Each season he carried fresh fruits to us, rolled up in the bottom of the tee shirt he wore.

When the sad day came for us to relocate the two-day journey northwest of Moise’s village, I listened hard, but never heard the deeper voice of the seventeen-year-old Moise in the crowd. He didn’t come to our house before we had to drive away.

In fact, though we did return for a two-week mobile clinic the following year, we did not see Moise again until eleven years later.

The little boy had grown into a strong young man; a soldier who carried the photos we’d taken of the three of us in his treasured possessions. He had no idea where we’d gone, and we had no idea where life had taken him, until one day when he spotted the mission emblem on our vehicle.

The army had assigned Moise to the very city we’d lived in for all of the ensuing years.

What a reunion we enjoyed that first visit with Moise. During the catching-up chatter, we learned that on our parting day eleven years earlier, the strong, nearly six-foot tall teenager had hidden away at home; he cried all day because we left. For several years, we ran into Moise around the city, and he stopped by for visits, until the military sent him elsewhere. Thanks to cell phones, we can continue our contact with Sergeant Moise.

Moise will be married next year and has asked me to serve as the “Godmother” for his wedding ceremony, a tribal custom of great honor.

Last year, my precious mother finished her sojourn on this earth; but even to the last days of her life, calling people by their name remained important to her. She knew the name of the bank teller, the grocery clerks, and even the men she saw rarely like the window washer and carpet cleaner. While she was like most mothers—mixing up the names of the kids when calling them, she never failed to address the postman by his proper name.

I doubt that Mom ever really knew how this practice she modeled for me changed the lives of many African kids. The comment most heard by the numerous service-related people I encountered immediately following Mom’s death in Spokane, echoes in my memory, “I remember Marge’s smile; she always called me by name.”

Making the effort to discover a person’s name and using it, often helps people feel a sense of worth—whether their jungle is formed by lush greenery or concrete walls.