Yours in the Dharma:  Essays from a Buddhist perspective by Sandy Garson

This blog, Yours in the Dharma by Sandy Garson, is an effort to navigate life between the fast track and the breakdown lane, on the Buddhist path. It tries to use a heritage of precious, ancient teachings to steer clear of today's pain and confusion to clear the path to what's truly happening.

Friday, September 02, 2011

Lost and Found

A year ago I wrote about my friend who had adopted three Sudanese siblings so that after the horrors they'd witnessed and survived, they could stay together as a family. Last week I got to spend time with my friend and her youngest "child", Adut, who is 15 and already 5'9" tall. I want to share the beautiful news.

As I said earlier, my friend is raising Adut pretty much from scratch. As one of the "lost children of Sudan", she got out with only her budding life, no skills whatever at all. She was illiterate and couldn't count or cook. My friend likes to say all the limelight was put on the 200 or so lost boys, thanks to Dave Eggers' bestselling book, but there were also 89 girls and nobody noticed them because females don't much count for anything in much of Sudanese, read that Islamic, society. Adut and her siblings came from the south, where people were massacred merely because they were, like her family, Christian. As a Chinese woman once said to me: "I can't understand how people can kill each other over an idea when there are so many ideas in the world."

Thanks to the extraordinary compassion--and finances--of my friend today Adut is a seemingly normal teenager. She has braces, she is reading the Twilight series and is mesmerized by the movie versions, she's playing sports at school and she just loves ice cream. She also loves her faithful but frisky black lab, now one-year-old, whom she named "Addie."

Me being me the food finder, I asked Adut if she ate Ful, the stewed fava bean dish beloved by Egyptians, Libyans, Ethiopians and Somali. Once we cleared up what I meant, she brightened noticeably. "Yes, sometimes we did," she said. I asked her to tell me about other Sudanese dishes. She told me her sister made really good injeera, the spongy flat bread I discovered not that long ago as the basis of an Ethiopian meal. The Sudanese like the Ethiopians use this not only as a plate and sauce absorber, but the way to get food into their mouth. They break off pieces and mop. I noticed however that Adut didn't have any trouble using the knife and fork for my dinner offerings. She had lovely table manners.

Adut was so delighted that I knew something about her world, she invited me to go to her sister's house in Boston to have some Sudanese food. And when I produced a can of Congo peas, aka pigeon peas, from my pantry and asked if she knew these, an enormous smile lit up her pitch black face and she hugged me. That's what I love about food: it's so primal, common and joyous. We all share it; eating, we are all one.

I'm headed to Boston next week for book signing events and Adut was really happy to know I'm going to be staying at "her" house, even though she'll probably be really busy with homework and stuff. My friend makes sure she has full time access to a therapist, tutors and via her own smartphone, her sister and brother. So there it is: wisdom, compassion and skillful means. One of those lost children of Sudan has been found and liberated from suffering.




~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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