I’m wrong most of the time. But I also now realize there are
varying flavors of wrongness. There’s the time where you realize you said the
wrong thing in the moment you said it. Then there’s the more dangerous kind of
wrong. The kind where you think you
know what’s going on, only to realize days or maybe even weeks later, you had
no clue. I’m convinced this is where the palm-to-forehead “D’oh” first came
into being.
Walter, one of the main community organizers here at
Cristosal, loves to tell me: “Hannah, you don’t listen!” He is always
challenging me to repeat what was said, knowing more often than not, I just
assumed I knew exactly what was going on, what someone will say, and I just ran
with it in my own little world. Because, as most of my family and friends know
full well, I know best. Or at least I think I do. I jump to conclusions, I
summarize, I assume. Translation… lots of D’oh moments.
I think that about covers it...
It’s not required that you live in a foreign country to
experience these various degrees of incorrectness, though speaking and working
in a new language certainly helps. It’s humbling to be moving full speed ahead,
aglow with confidence and relief that at long last you’re getting a handle on
things, only to have your feet knocked out from under you.
But perhaps the best lesson of all has been to slowly learn
to relish rather than resist these moments. In capoeira, we’ve come to
celebrate those rare conversations when I understand the dirty jokes, the
slang, the inside stories, the nicknames. We throw our hands in the air and
everyone says with an exaggerated Salvadoran accent: “Lua understands!”
At work, I keep a running mental list of how much I
understood at each bimonthly meeting: 15%... 50%... 75%... 90%! It’s so easy to
jump to critiques – everything I should be able to do by now. But instead this
simple shift from being wrong to being wrong right now has made an
enormous difference. I could make it mean so many things – I don’t belong here,
I should just keep my mouth shut, don’t try anything new because you’ll just
fail. Or it could mean a new chance to start over, to reassess, with more
information. It could be a sign that I’m moving forward, that I’m trying new
things, that I’m being courageous. I most definitely prefer the second set of
interpretations.
This difference shows up most at my job. It’s all brand new
and nothing short of fascinating! To move from organic compounds found in
petroleum waste to developing social business models based on human rights is a
whole new whirlwind of terms and structures and ideas. And one distinct
difference (among many): at my former job, there were very clear binaries –
very obvious rights and wrongs. Either the numbers add up or they don’t. There
was a certain comfort in the redundancy of doing work that someone else could
easily check. Now, talking about human rights, about development theory, about
how exactly do you accompany a community while at the same time working to
inspire and encourage a vision beyond basic survival and near-starvation… well,
let’s just say we use very few true/false statements.
Thank goodness for Walter. For my capoeira group for treating
me like a sister rather than a stranger to coddle, to tip-toe around. There is
a frankness, a raw, abrupt check that makes it nearly impossible to zone out,
to default into a rhythm. And I love it. Every day is an invigorating,
challenging, wipe-the-board-clean lesson in humility, in learning how to dust
off your ego and jump back in with just as much vitality and gusto as before.
And through a magical combination of forgiveness, optimism, community, (and a
few calls to Mom), I’ve been able to reach out to these moments of wrongness,
not with anger and frustration, but with gratitude.
