From my Cooperant neighborhood, I biked north, to Heron, on a hot Friday afternoon in September. The heat index was 113 degrees Fahrenheit. I carried a backpack with two water bags inside, and, as soon as I swung it over my shoulders, my lower back began to sweat. I had two goals: to arrive at my destination on time and to witness the Divine Presence in this city, on these roads.
A block from my house, I biked past our guard, Abdo, a newly-married Ethiopian man. We were the only people in the street. He, in his red plaid shorts and green shirt, returning from the mosque at the end of our block. Me, on my purple bike, wearing leopard print spandex running pants.
Abdo is someone I know, sort of. He lives at my house. Sometimes his wife also lives at my house. But not in my house. They have a hut out back, though it is stuffy and hot, so mostly Abdo sleeps on our front veranda, beneath a fan we plug into our living room outlet, snaking the cord through slats in the broken doorway. And mostly, his wife is gone, so Abdo’s buddies sleep over, all of them curled up and wearing boxer briefs and charging their phones in the wall of our house.
Abdo and I barely share a common language. He speaks a few Somali words; I speak a few Amharic words. We laughed when our dog Addie chased his friend out of the yard, his friend howling with terror and lifting his sarong up over his knees. Abdo laughed so hard his pants fell down. Abdo retrieves the volleyball for me when my group of ladies knock it over the wall by accident on Wednesdays. I certainly don’t know Abdo well. He is not a friend, that wouldn’t be appropriate in this culture and context. But, like I said, he lives at my house. So, when I pass him on the street, what do I do?
Men and women aren’t kept strictly separate in Djibouti, but there is a formality, especially between employee and employer. I bike toward Abdo and raise my right hand in a small greeting, an acknowledgment that we are connected. And then I smile.
For a Minnesotan, this is perfectly normal. Expected. A greeting without a smile would feel creepy or insincere. Here? People don’t smile so easily. Abdo waved his hand and then he smiled in return. It was a strange smile. It came off more as a grimace, like it pained him to raise the corners of his mouth.
I rode on, bouncing in and out of my bike seat on the unpaved road and wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for inflicting a smile on Abdo or if I should laugh it off, knowing he would chalk it up as one more strange American behavior. Smiling weirdos.
I had about twenty minutes to ride and turned my attention to my search for the Divine Presence. I wanted to notice God’s handiwork, to delight in his creation, to experience something sacred.
I rode past the Republican Guard and their housing complex, which blocked the view of the ocean. One of my closest Djiboutian friends lived on the sixth floor. We’ve known each other fifteen years now, and she understands my American, smiley weirdness. She even welcomes it, a good opportunity for laughs.
I rode past Bouffard Hospital, the former French military hospital and where my youngest child was born on 9/11/05, a gift of life on a day of remembered trauma. Soccer games filled the parking lot, easily six or seven games running simultaneously. Balls sailed into the street, and I kept my eyes peeled for swerving cars or men chasing a ball. I waited to hear the inevitable insults.
“Sex! Sex!” Because a woman on a bike is surely masturbating. Or, “Hey lady, give me your bike!” Okay, here you go. Or, “Infidel! Whore!” Actually, I’m neither, but nice to see you.
I heard these words, I avoided the hands reaching for my bike or my body, and still, I wanted to see the Divine. Where was it? I neared the beach, Siesta Plage, where there would be hundreds of young people. I lacked the courage to bike through them, so I turned into town instead. More stoplights, more cars, fewer teenagers. A flock of parrots passed overhead. A little boy in sagging, damp underwear, lunged at me.
The roads were full of garbage. Coke bottles, plastic bags, cookie packages, discarded clothing, goat legs. Was nothing sacred?
I arrived on time at my destination, the first goal accomplished. But I felt disappointed. I hadn’t seen what I’d hoped to see.
Or had I?
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Kids, full of life, playing soccer on their free afternoon. Mothers taking their children to the beach and leading them by the hand across busy roads. Wild parrots. The sea, even if only through cracks between buildings. The hospital where my daughter was born. My friend’s house. My friend, who welcomed me, the foreigner, years ago and loved me well, despite our religious and cultural differences. Abdo, who smiled at me even though he barely knew why he did it.
I didn’t immediately recognize the Divine in these things. They seemed so small, so trivial, so hidden. They wouldn’t Instagram well. They were not the sunset over rolling hills at a farm. They weren’t dear friends gathered around wine and bread. They weren’t beauty or community. I saw them all through a comparison to my life in Minnesota or to the life in books, of other people. I saw the garbage and heard the insults and smelled the rotting goat corpses.
But this was a living, breathing community. They had community, even if I was outside it. I realized how disappointingly out of practice I was with this, how I had let myself, over 15 years in this country sink into a kind of cynicism, how I failed to appreciate or see God here.
I took the idea of searching for the Divine Presence from Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church. She coupled it with the verb “hunt.” To hunt is to stalk, to pursue, to search out. Synonyms include to scour and to look high and low.
I hadn’t been hunting for the Divine Presence on my bike ride that afternoon. I’d been hoping it would fall into my lap or slap me across the face. I had been passive, wanting to receive without effort or creativity.
But one of the best things about expatriate life is that hunt, the constant need to explore and redefine and discover, to look past the things I don’t understand or misinterpret, to willingly admit I have misunderstood or failed to truly see.
It is a hunt of the humble.
And just like that, I stumbled onto the Divine Presence. I looked back over my ride and saw the grand extravagance of it. The birds, the water, the children, my heart pumping, salty air on my cheeks, the grimace-smile, the gift of living here, the recognition at the end of the ride of the fleeting nature of all of it, and the opportunity I had to be thankful.
