Coming Home, at Long Last

Say you’ve just come home to Montreal from a teaching stint abroad: your life is suddenly once again one of bubble tea in Chinatown, Romanian architects at cafés, and Tamil separatism in Sri Lankan community theatres. And poker-faced men at Indian restaurants who bring you extra food for free because they see you finishing everyone else’s curry. And apartments full of young writers. And musicians. And artists. And holy crap, you’re back, you’re back in Canada, back at home. Sitting in front of you on the bus from the airport are two well-dressed young Haitian men - one of them is looking out the window, and breathes the word in awe: “Montreal.” The other slowly shakes his head and says: “Gwo moun.” Gros monde, big world.

Canada’s a pleasure-and-a-half, because it takes in so much of the best that the world has to offer, and leaves so much of worst outside its doors. When you’re finally back in your old familiar surroundings, it’s so easy to treat your quality of life like a big-game dose of aspirin, lose contact with your new friends abroad, and slowly forget about your God-given duty to deal with the pain out there. After a long trip of mine to Brazil in 2003, I was haunted in many ways - partly by a passage from Anil’s Ghost, a novel by one of Canada’s greatest writers, and from a Sri Lankan immigrant family himself: “American movies, English books-remember how they end? …The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s reality enough for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”

Obviously I was biting my nails at the thought of coming home in exactly that way. Bahá’ís are past masters at easy fellowship, which is redeemable for rapturous encounters at five million points of service around the globe - but then, what prevents us from boarding our own planes like spiritual tourists, as if our souvenir high might matter as much or more than the commitment it entails?

When I got home from Brazil, I took my dose of aspirin and settled into a very pleasant state of shock. Instead of trying to reconcile my commitment to Brazil with my sudden, contradictory presence in Canada, I called up old friends in the mountains where I’d grown up, and floated down slow rivers in the sunlight. At night when I tried to pick up a book on Afghanistan, I could only get a few pages in before I felt like a traitor to the whole wide vertiginous universe, and had to call up my friends again. A traveller may also burn his bridges out of pain, at his own sense of separation from where he's been. The point of our entire life is communion - with other people, with some sense of the divine - and if ever we’re caught drinking, and that communion is snatched away, the wine can begin to turn bitter on our tongues.

That’s why every foreign friend you keep in touch with is a victory. That’s why every time you involve yourself in the lives of the people where you used to travel-teach, even from so far away, you’re beating the system and really making one country out of this divided, far-flung world of ours. Here's one thing I learnt about Montreal summers, when I came back: they feel exactly like Brazil in the slaphappy week just before Carnival. The winter snow has finally melted, and the whole world comes out to celebrate. Let this be our story: no more abandonment, not anywhere on earth. Let everyone join the party, and let the party never stop.

Before You Head out the Door

Haiti changed my life - so the first thing I did when I got home, naturally, was tell everyone to stay away. If you’re anything like I was at 19, and you come back from a country like that (where for the first time I met a little kid who could barely keep his eyes focused from lack of food, where pretty teenaged girls who talk to you on the street turn out to be pretty teenaged prostitutes, and where at goat-filled downtown marketplaces grown men strip naked to protest the breakdown of society, or their own lunacy, or maybe both) you tend to come back a little bit drained, a little bit cranky, and a little bit confused about the world. It was a triple-hit combo to my system … and I didn’t feel quite myself for quite some time.

So picture Counselor Ghadirian coming all the way over to my mountains in B.C., wanting to stir up the local youth, and my travel-weary body perched in a chair right beside him at the front of the room. He turns to me and asks me to say a few words about my experience in Haiti, and all I can come up with is, “It was hard. Really hard. Way, way harder than anything you can remotely imagine.” The Counselor bit his lip for a second, then changed the subject. Possibly not quite what he wanted to hear. It was only climbing into my pickup after the meeting that I realized he wanted me to try and inspire those kids to travel-teach too, and I thought, man, I could just as easily have said something positive, like that all the trouble was worth it.

In Canada, I grew up to have a smart, sarcastic personality, which I used to sail through pretty much any social situation I might encounter. In Haiti, that personality suddenly didn’t fly anymore. Wisecracks weren’t a legitimate response to street kids, or to the whippings given to the lucky ones who went to school. Problem was, I didn’t have a plan-B personality to fall back on - and so I clammed up tight, scared speechless about reacting in the wrong way, and all I could do was open my eyes and hope for an answer. Gabrielle, who was on the Haitian NSA, reacted to streetkids by adopting two teenaged boys by the age of 24. Glen, another NSA member, reacted to whippings by climbing on the back of a motorbike and meeting with principals of rural schools all day long, coming home at night and collapsing onto his bed in a thin, sunburnt heap. I barely said a word, but I scribbled everything down in my diary like a man possessed, and I thought - “I don’t know how to help here yet. But I’m going to go home and get the training I need, and I’m coming back.”

There is training we can get. Engineering and teaching degrees, and everything else we can study will help. The Guardian wanted us “to study more, not to study less”: Glen was a Harvard medical anthropology grad, and this opened doors with school-reform NGOs so he could help those kids. And my trip to Haiti was just before the days when Ruhi became a plug-and-play system for serving abroad … the second you train yourself as a facilitator, you have a tool to help transform communities from here to Zanzibar.

The other half of the equation, though, is developing a personality that’s at home in the world, that’s fueled by the urgent miseries out there instead of freaked out, that bursts with the same kind of committed compassion that made Gabrielle adopt her boys. “A world … enmeshed in the coils of economic anarchy and strife-such is the spectacle presented to men's eyes … So sad and moving a spectacle … far from casting dismay into the hearts of His followers, or paralyzing their efforts, cannot but deepen their faith, and excite their enthusiastic eagerness to arise and display, in the vast field traced for them by the pen of ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, their capacity to play their part in the work of universal redemption proclaimed by Bahá'u'lláh.” And that’s a change you can’t learn in any school. It’s something you can only figure out in the thick of things, depending on your community and your own frail prayers to outwit your fear and see yourselves become “the stars of the heaven of understanding, the breeze that stirreth at the break of day, the soft-flowing waters upon which must depend the very life of all men, the letters inscribed upon His sacred scroll.” That right there is what I should have said to those kids in the mountains of B.C. You are the instrument through which this world will be changed - and there is no better way to discover the might inside you than by travelling and putting it to the test, time and time and time again, until it sticks.