The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [90]
When I think about the ways in which the poor teach us, I remember some of the refugees I knew in Kenya. One had the wonderful name of Gaudiosa, which means “joyful” in Latin. Gauddy, as everyone called her, was a Rwandese refugee. She had settled in Nairobi in the 1960s with her family, a victim of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict that had long plagued her homeland.
She was also a talented seamstress who, the year before I arrived, had received a grant from JRS to purchase a single sewing machine. From that modest beginning, she and several other Rwandese women built a flourishing tailoring business called the Splendid Tailoring Shop.
One day Gauddy dropped by our office. At the time, we had just decided to open a shop—called the Mikono Centre—for refugees to market their wares. And I was trying to interest priests and members of religious orders in purchasing the handicrafts made by the refugees.
Gauddy and I discussed making liturgical stoles for priests with kitenge, a colorful cotton fabric used in Rwandese dresses and shirts. For a talented seamstress, a stole is an easy venture: just two long pieces of cloth sewn together in a V shape. Stoles, I suggested, might be big sellers to visiting Western priests as well as to missionary priests working in local parishes. And Gauddy always had plenty of leftover kitenge in her shop.
Gauddy’s kitenge stoles flew off our shelves; we could barely keep them in stock. When I ordered twenty more in the first week, Gauddy folded her hands in her lap, bowed her head, and said, “God is good.”
“Yes,” I said, but why did she think so?
“Why?” Gauddy laughed and clapped her hands, evidently surprised that I would ask such a ridiculous question. “Brother Jim!” she exclaimed. “God is helping me get rid of this leftover kitenge. God is giving me money for making these stoles, which are so easy to make. God is giving me this business for my shop, and for my ladies. Surely you can see that God is very, very good!”
As with many refugees, Gauddy’s thoughts, in good times and bad, turned to God. Perhaps I would have eventually discerned God’s hand, but Gauddy saw God immediately. She typified the relationship that many refugees had with God. To use the analogy of friendship, Gauddy had placed herself closer to God, and so was a better friend to God than I was.
Another friend was a Mozambican wood-carver named Agustino. We first met on a busy street corner in Nairobi, where Agustino was sitting on a piece of cardboard, carefully carving his beautiful ebony and rosewood statues and trying to sell them to passersby. When I asked if he wouldn’t rather sit under a tree outside the Mikono Centre and sell to more customers, he readily agreed and showed up at our shop the very next day. He has worked there ever since.
One morning Agustino showed me with great enthusiasm an enormous three-foot-tall sculpture carved from a single piece of ebony. It was called the “tree of life” and depicted men working in the fields, women nursing children, and children playing. Though beautifully made, the price was very high. I doubted we could sell it in our shop, and told him so.
After Agustino tried unsuccessfully to convince me to buy it, I agreed to take the piece on consignment. “Will you pray that it sells?” Agustino said. Yes, I said, I would. But I had doubts: it was too big and too expensive. We lugged the heavy piece of wood inside and set it atop one of our display tables.
A few minutes later, a woman in a green Land Rover pulled into our driveway, walked into the shop, spied the enormous sculpture, and promptly bought it—for a few hundred shillings more than our asking price.
“See?” said Agustino. “Your prayers were answered.”
When seeking help, Agustino’s first recourse was to ask God. When expressing gratitude, his first instinct was to praise God. He relied on God more