In this engaging conversation, Rachel Pieh Jones and Susan Smetzer-Anderson share their insights on the challenges and lessons learned from living in a cross-cultural context. They delve into topics such as cultural divisions, finding a church community in Djibouti, serving the poor, and the discomfort of returning to one's home country. Rachel's personal stories and reflections underscore the importance of being present with others, fostering a sense of connection and engagement. The conversation underscores the need to recognize and embrace diversity, both in our local communities and in our global perspective. 

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🔗 Links to episode one:

YouTube = https://youtu.be/lrp6LuR056M?si=e2dCJTYSsxzUTPQd

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Spotify = https://open.spotify.com/episode/0H8OOco9Wo7T69Xh1df2rO?si=13dae89c52c842bb

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🖥️ View this episode on YouTube

https://youtu.be/AjbF0r0bijc

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📙 Get Rachel’s books:

https://rachelpiehjones.com/books/

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And then also the challenge to my own heart of how do I think about people in poverty? How do I think about my own excess and abundance, and what do I do with all of that, all the complicated things that stir up, and I still don't have answers for all of it that will never go away. We also know that you will have the poor with you. But here's the crux of it is, are you with them? Are they with you? Right? When someone looks different, talks different, dresses different, worships different, somehow feels threatening to us, threat then makes us judge negatively. Learning to recognize that, learning that they're seeing me that way has helped me to kind of try to turn that over and try to stop that instinct in myself.

Hi, my name is Susan Smetzer Anderson. I am senior writer at Upper House, an initiative of the Stephen and Laurel Brown foundation. Today I continue my conversation with Rachel Pye Jones. She is the author of how muslim friends led me closer to Jesus. I started this conversation with her about a month ago, and then today we picked up where we left off. I actually asked her a little bit more about what pilgrimage is, how the muslim community experiences pilgrimage. And then we dug deeper into her experience in Djibouti and returning to Minnesota and what it's like to live as an expat. There is a lot of depth and wisdom here, and I pray that you enjoy it as much as I did.

Welcome to the Upwards podcast. Glad to be back with Rachel, and I am thrilled to be talking with her more deeply about her book, how muslim friends led me closer to Jesus. I really enjoyed our first conversation, Rachel, and I'm really excited to dig deeper into some of the things you learned about the muslim faith, as well about yourself as a believer in Jesus Christ. And last time we talked, I think we talked mostly about prayer and fasting. In relation to your new experience in Somaliland. As a mother of two toddlers whose husband was working there as a teacher, and this time around I'd like to dig deeper into other types of pillars, including the pillar of pilgrimage. The muslim faith has some aspects to it that I know very little about, and some of the things I see on, on the news about the Hajj pilgrimage have always really intrigued me and I haven't understood. So today, would you mind outlining for us what the hajj is?

Sure, and it's actually happening soon. When we're recording here in early June, the hajj is coming up. So the hajj is one of the five main pillars of Islam and all Muslims if they can afford it, are supposed to go to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, where there's the Kaaba, which is the house of prayer. And they have a whole set of rituals and things that they do for this pilgrimage in which they circle the Kaaba. They have certain clothes that they wear. They have many things that they do. Like there's a ritual of stoning Satan. There's a tradition in which Satan has interfered when Abraham is going to sacrifice his son, which in Islam would be Ishmael, instead of Isaac.

And so there's the idea that Satan was trying to interfere in that situation. So people will stone a metaphorical satan. And there's also a part of Hagar's story. Actually, Hagar's story plays a lot of. Has a lot to do with the hajj, where she's looking for water. In. When her and Ishmael are out in the desert, she's looking for water. So she runs between these two mountains, looking, searching for water, hoping to survive.

And so pilgrims will follow that trail, and they'll run between two mountains as part of one of the rituals that they do on Hajj. And so the idea of pilgrimage is they're supposed to do it once in a lifetime. Some people will do it more than that. Some people will do it on behalf of someone who maybe is too ill or too elderly or can't afford. They can go in their stead, so to speak. Yeah. So it's a quite different tradition to the other ones. Like, as a Christian, I found it the hardest one to relate to because I don't have something so specifically universally expected of a Christian.

The fasting and prayer and belief in one God. These are things that I can relate to easily as a Christian. But pilgrimage felt like, I really don't know. And christians can't go. They're not allowed to go on this. And so there's really no outside perspective and I can't participate. And I can just hear about it from France.

I thought it was fascinating when you described in the book the removal of idols from the Kaaba, is that something that Muhammad did?

Yes. So in the days of Muhammad, when he was first coming into his prophethood, there was a lot of idol worship in that part of the world, in Arabia. And so the Kaaba was a place where these idols were kind of housed. And there was. I don't want to say specifics, but many, many, many titles, including, I believe it was an image of Jesus and Mary. And so Muhammad, in his zeal for the oneness of God and to kind of physically show that these other idols are not powerful. They are not. God destroyed all of them and then maintained, actually kept this image of Jesus and Mary.

But that was really what sort of, that's one of the stories around the importance of that Kaaba center for Islam is that this really shows the oneness of God, that God is one, that idols have no power. And that the prophet Muhammad really initiated that with this powerful moment in Arabia.

And to me, it is very striking that he kept the Jesus and Mary out of all of the idols. And that, again, speaks back to the fact that Jesus is mentioned in the Quran, right?

Yeah.

So frequently. So when people go on this pilgrimage and it's a huge investment of time and energy, what have you heard them say about it? What has it meant to them?

That is a great question. I love hearing the stories because again, it's not something I can participate in. So all I can do is ask my friends what they've experienced, experienced a lot of them. It's the trip of a lifetime. They save up and they plan and they are so excited to go. And so when they do go, what people have talked about is the sense of community. They are struck by the fact that Muslims from all over the world, all shapes, colors, sizes, languages, they all come and they do the same thing. So they will even wear the same clothing.

So you take off your traditional cultural clothing, whatever you've come in and you wear the same thing as everyone else next to you for those days. And that's really a powerful image of people of such diversity and yet such unity. So that's something people have talked about. They've talked about the power of finally fulfilling these rituals that they've been told about for their whole life. One of the things that they often will do. So when Hagar was running and looking for water, then in the islamic tradition, an angel comes and taps the ground, or Ishmael's feet and heels kind of kick the ground and water springs up. And so where that water springs up is now known as the well of Zamzam. And that well is still there.

And it's this naturally occurring well in the desert of water. And so people will go there and collect that water. And it's kind of a, kind of like holy water you could compare it to, and they will bring it back with them. And then some people believe that it has healing or I sort of supernatural power. And so I was at one party where a woman had come back from a hajj. And so when you come back, then you're if you're a man, you're called a hajji, and if you're a woman, you're called a hajj yet. So she had a hajj yet party, and my friend invited me to come. And I write about this in pillars.

And she had this water from Zamzam. And it was her joy to share the water with all the women that had come, and I didn't know what to do. So a tray was coming around the room with little glasses, each filled with water. And the women just pounced on it because they were so eager to have this blessing of the water, and I didn't know what it was, and so I didn't get any of the water. And my friend said, hey, you know, shame on all of you for not giving Rachel any water. And then she went back to the kitchen and got some more for me and brought it out. And then the women, they were just dousing it on themselves, pouring it over their heads, drinking it, splashing it on each other. And so these, these women are dumping it on me too, you know, and I.

And then I drank some of it as well. And I remember thinking, I know some christians would feel very uncomfortable with drinking this water. And also, like, physically, I don't know how clean it is. She had carried it back in a bleach jug. There's that plus this well. And so I just thought, should I drink it? And I thought, you know what? I think Jesus would drink this water. I think he would participate in this ceremony of blessing just to be part of the community and to say, yes, I want to be with you, and I want to share this special moment. And so I did end up drinking it, and it was fine.

I didn't get sick. I didn't get a nothing negative happened. Supernaturally, it was beautiful.

Well, I just love that you were included in that community experience. So there was this in Djibouti?

Yes.

Okay. Because your experience in Djibouti was somewhat different than your experience in Somaliland. And I think it's important that we point out that you had to leave Somaliland. This is kind of my idea here, is thinking about your pilgrimage as a christian believer in these two different places and what you had to go through just as a human being who, in a sense, became a refugee for a while. So can you tell us what happened at the end of your time in Somaliland?

Yeah. So our time in Somaliland was very short, actually, although extremely foundational to my experience in the horn, we were there for less than a year when there was an italian woman who lived in our same village, and there was only a few, a handful of foreigners in that village. She had been working among Somalis for 33, 34 years to develop treatment for tuberculosis among nomadic populations, which eventually actually the who used for developing their own treatment, known as dots. And so she was kind of a mother Teresa figure. Somalis really loved her and highly respected her. She was very part of the community and the culture. And yet in October of 2003, someone came into the hospital and assassinated her in the hospital. And at that moment, we knew, you know, things just got very unsettled for the other foreigners in the village.

And then within ten days, two more foreigners, two british teachers, were also assassinated and shot in their home. And so at that point, our organization said, you cannot stay. Every single person is leaving. The university where my husband works said, we can't protect you anymore. We just don't feel like it's right to stay. And so we fled, and we had 30 minutes to pack up our house. I had a previously packed emergency go bag. They call it just because it's Somalia and you don't know what's going to happen.

So I had that bag, and then I added a few more items to it that we had time to grab, and we ran out the door, and I didn't go back until 2014. So that was eleven years later. So at that point, we did not know what to do and where to go. And I remember thinking, this is a little bit like being a refugee, but not really, because we had. I had an american passport. You know, I was not. I was not comfortable. I just had to leave against my will, a place that I had decided to call my home.

But I had money, I had support. You know, I had all these other things available to me. But it was still incredibly. It was traumatic and scary. It's very traumatic, yeah. So we ended up, you know, getting out to Ethiopia and then to Kenya. And then from Kenya, we're trying to determine pray, but where should we go next? We didn't want to go back to the US yet. We felt like we just got started.

We're really making progress in language learning and culture adaptation. We'd like to stay in this part of the world. And so then some somali friends from Somaliland actually said to my husband, hey, we see that you're committed to staying. Why don't you come to Djibouti and teach at the university there, which is right across the border. So close, actually, across the border, that when we landed at the airport in the airport just happened to be my husband's language tutor from Sweden who was visiting a lot of go back and forth, you know. And so in 2004, January, we moved to Djibouti, where then we stayed for the next 20 years. That was the real kind of, I guess, the second step of my pilgrimage. The first step was leaving the United States.

And then the second was this undesired, against my will, sort of forced departure and reentry to a new place I hadn't intended to live and yet made home for two decades.

Yeah. For some reason, as you were talking, Hagar also came into my head again. And you and I both really love this story about Hagar. And did it make you more, identify more with women like her who have been, I don't know, just cast out, if you will? And does it give you a sense of identification with people who have been forced to leave places that they were prepared to love?

I think it does. I want to be really cautious of saying, holding that too closely because I wasn't a refugee, but I was kind of exiled from a place that I had been initially welcomed to. And so I think there's, like, on the spectrum, I guess you could say I've never experienced anything like that before to the worst kind of thing, where you're kicked out of your actual country with no place else to go.

Exactly.

So we moved so close, in fact, across the border to this new country that when we landed in the airport in Djibouti, my husband's language tutor from Somaliland was there just because there's a lot of crossover, and he was visiting and happened to be there. And so we felt immediately a sense of welcome into this new place. But it was a place that we didn't intend to be. And so we had to rethink about our vision, our goals. You know, we had spent a couple of years preparing to go to Somaliland. And so I don't want to compare it to someone who has literally lost their home country with no place else to go and can never go back. And yet that experience really did, does continue to help me relate to people who have lost something that they had started to love and were starting to root to. I'm really thankful for it now in retrospect, even though it was so painful at the time because of that lesson of connection and relating with people.

But also I can forever say that I started living in the Horn of Africa, in Somaliland, and what I learned there because it was not so westernized. I mean, Djibouti is not very restinized. But there is a french influence there. And Somaliland was a rural village where I was deeply immersed. And so the things I learned there were really transformative for the rest of my time of living in the horn of Africa. So there was pain and fear and all of that. And there's also the sense of community. And now even somali friends will tell me that they appreciate that to some degree.

I understand a little bit what they've gone through and that sense of, like, when we ran, when we left, we didn't know if we were the next target. And now later we learned that we may have been, and so we didn't know if someone was coming after us. How fast do we have to move? So there is all that that some people really have experienced viscerally.

Absolutely, yeah. When I was very young, we lived in a place that we had to evacuate to. So as you were relating that story in your book, I remember very viscerally that fear that was running through our family and our community of expats. And it's so unsettling to realize how little real control you have over the externals of your life. And so much, I think, of our effort is spent in trying to have a sense of control. So I think that was part of your spiritual journey in this situation, was to grapple with your maybe illusion of control, that you were just, you know, you just lost it. You no longer had that illusion of control. And I think being a parent in that situation is even more difficult because you're so worried about what'll happen with your kids.

But you did find a new life in Djibouti. And just briefly, what did you do there? What was your role there? And then I'd like to get more into the difference between the community experience in Djibouti and the one in Somaliland.

So my husband was a professor. That was the main thing. And so my main thing then was a lot of initially family and home maintenance. I gave birth to our third child within a year ish year and a half of living in Djibouti. And so there's three little kids at home. But the twins then eventually started school. So they were learning French. So I was learning French alongside them with their kindergarten homework.

And I started teaching English. And then I eventually started, launched a girls running program.

Oh, wow.

Helped to oversee for several years. So I did various things. I did micro enterprise loan projects and spent a lot of time with, in community with women, mothers and children especially.

Yeah. So tell me a little bit about the difference in the muslim community and Djibouti versus the one that you were in, in the Somaliland.

So one thing that was just really silly that I had to understand and learn was that Somalis are not the same. You know, I mean, there's, like, a people group and there's some general cultural things, but just like, an American is not an american everywhere. We're not the same. And so I remember the first time I went to the house that we were going to rent in Djibouti. We were living upstairs, and there was a djiboutian Somalia family living downstairs. And I went downstairs to greet some of the guys who lived there. It was a huge family, I think 13 children. And so some were my same age and older, younger.

And these men who are my same age, I went to greet them, and they came toward me and, like, grabbed my hand and pulled me close and kissed my cheeks french style. I was like, what is happening? Because my, in Somaliland, I never had ever touched a man there besides my husband, even our guard, you know, the day we left was, like, the only time that I touched a somali man. And so it was a real kind of immediate eye opener of, like, this is a different place now. And so Judy has more of a, it's more developed, it's more stable for a longer time and has more of a western influence because it was a former french colony. And so there was some of that. And there was things like playgrounds. And eventually, not initially, but after about ten years, there was coffee shops that women could go to.

Oh, even women could go to.

There were ones before that that men could go to work at them, but I wouldn't ever go there just to hang out with the food. Whereas within about ten or twelve years, those things happened. So in some ways, it felt a little bit more. It was like a rural village. And then Minneapolis.

Yes. So the experience that you had praying with other women was also different. And there was a woman that you were microfinancing a loan for her mother, who worked in the market, and she invited you to pray with them during one of the daily prayer times. And you were very excited about that because it was an opportunity for you to finally experience prayer and the muslim tradition. But you were speaking your own prayers in your heart. But there were some ramifications of that. Yeah.

Yeah. And in Somaliland, I had been at a party, for example, where the women all left to go pray, and I was welcome or invited to come with, sat in the room by myself and waited for them to come back. Whereas in this situation, this relationship. Yeah. She said, would you like to pray with us? And so I did. And I told her, I don't know the right motions, and so I'm going to follow you. I'm going to mimic you from behind. I certainly don't know the Arabic, because they pray in Arabic.

And so I'm just going to pray my own words. In the name of Jesus will bow and kneel. And for me, it was really a profound experience. I loved moving my body with my prayer, and I loved, you know, putting my head on the ground, feeling the earth on my forehead, physically manifesting the worship that I was expecting in my words. And that's not something that I was used to in my Baptist bringing tradition. And I thought that in the moment that I had been a beautiful experience. However, afterwards, she told me, she came to my house, and she said, you know what? That was? You just can't come over anymore to my house. It was very uncomfortable for her, not only that moment of prayer, but just my presence as a white american foreigner.

I stand out and I, even if I walk in or if I drive in, having a car, which would make me more hidden, but the car obviously more visible, if I walk, I'm very exposed. And so the. The neighborhood all knew that this foreigner was there. And as soon as I would leave from visiting her, they, many of them would descend and say, who is that? Why was she here? What is she giving you? Can she get you a job or a visa or money? Or is it about religion and conversion? And it was just a lot of neighborhood pressure that she hadn't even expected. It was kind of, oh, this is what's going to happen if I have a visible friendship with a foreigner. And so she had said, you know, just don't come to my house anymore. And that was really painful for me and also very humbling to realize, I know, that I was going to cause that kind of trouble for her just by my presence. I thought maybe something we do together or talk about that might cause some tension.

But it was really interesting for me to wrestle with that and to recognize that I hadn't been aware of it previously when I visited other friends. And so I took that lesson into the future, just trying to be very much more sensitive to the fact and the reality that me coming in someplace is going to put pressure on that person. And so are they ready or willing or is it not that important? And they can just come to my house or we can meet somewhere else? Like, how can we navigate that? Because they still often want to be friends with me, too. But that pressure is just too much. And so that is something that for an american, white American, is not something that I had been forewarned or trained or prepared to think about. And I'm so thankful, actually, that she was willing to say, this is why not just come. I'm mad. And, like, you know, ghost me, to use that term.

It wasn't a term in those years, but I was glad she was able to articulate why so I could learn from it.

Well, and it just brings up to the surface the fact that these cultural divisions are so buried, deeply buried in the way we navigate the world. And so there's that suspicion, right? Like, are you there for good? Are you there to, you know, work for the CIA, as we talked about before? And our perceptions of the other are so profound sometimes. And we see the same thing happening in our country. Right? Like, when you went back to church, sometimes in Minnesota, you sometimes had a interactions with people who were very concerned about the motives of muslim people, and you would have similar kind, not quite the same, but interactions where suspicion is kind of the rule, I think we're.

Still, unfortunately, naturally inclined to think negative of something we don't understand. Right. When someone looks different, talks different, dresses different, worships different, somehow feels threatening to us, threat then makes us judge negatively. Learning to recognize that, learning that they're seeing me that way has helped me to kind of try to turn that over and try to stop that instinct in myself so I can feel it rise up. Sometimes someone's different. I might feel scared, but I just try to recognize, wait a second. Stop that and reevaluate what's actually going on here.

That is good. When you moved to Djibouti and you were looking for a church, what was that like?

Complicated. So in the beginning, I don't remember how much I wrote about this in the book in the very beginning, but we would worship as a family in our house. And then we started actually going to the us military base. They had a chapel on the base at that time. They allowed civilians to access. So we started going there for a while, but that kind of felt uncomfortable. Like, we're in this muslim country, and we're going to worship at a military base. That feels weird.

Also, the soldiers would turn over all, every three months. And so there was never any community, and it wasn't a church that you could actually participate in the life of the body where you're tithing and you're volunteering and you're knowing each other outside the building. You know, we would just go for worship and leave. And so we stopped doing that. And then we thought, okay, what are we going to do? But then there was, in the. In Djibouti, there are three church structures. There's an ethiopian orthodox building with a gold dome and a cross on top. There's a cathedral, a catholic building with also a cross on top.

And there's a protestant church building also with a cross on top. And the. The pastors and the bishop of these buildings have religious visas to be in the country for those purposes. They're all, the Ethiopian Orthodox is Ethiopian Amherc speaking. And the protestant and catholic church were French speaking, and we didn't speak French at that time, so we just were like, well, we're not going to go to church. We'll just do it at home. But as the kids learned French and then my husband and I learned French, we thought, let's go. Why don't we try this french protestant church? And what I love about these buildings, actually, is there's one point on the Corniche along the ocean of Djibouti where you can look across the water and you can see one of the biggest mosques with a bright green minaret shining up into the sky.

And the same time you can see the protestant, catholic and orthodox church buildings all in the same view. And so it's a symbol to me of the way these faiths have learned peacefully to coexist. I mean, not very many local people will go to the churches, but they're there and they are allowed to if they wanted to anyway, so we started going to this french community. I say French because French was the shared language. Very few french people actually went there. The pastor was German at that time. Now the pastor is a man from Senegal, and the population is just from all over the world. And so it is a complicated, diverse, beautiful, hard place to worship.

But what I love about it is that it's an actual place to practice the fruit of the spirit in church together, being part of the body. You have to be patient, you have to be gentle. As you're all trying to exercise your own cultural, theological, denominational things, working it out together as a body. It's very, very different to my experience in the US, which is quite homogenous, right? And I loved that. And it feels strange now to say that I love the challenge of it because sometimes it was really hard want to go, but it really mattered. It mattered that these strange people who don't understand each other naturally come together around one thing we have in common. Which is Jesus Christ to worship. And that, I think that felt so precious to me.

The midst of all that complicated diversity. The board of directors for the church has been, in the past eight people from six different countries and eight different denominational backgrounds. And so that's, you know, the diversity I'm talking about learning to work together. It's hard, and it's beautiful, and it's. It's really good.

That is just so astounding to me to think about, because even in homogenous, so called homogenous churches, there's difficulty coming together around ideas and decisions. So I'm trying to put myself in that room, thinking about all the different things that would come forward. And I actually think it would be fascinating. I would learn so much just from listening to the different types of questions people ask. What's important to them? What do they bring to the fore? What are they passionate about, and how do they express hospitality? I mean, I think hospitality itself would be just a fascinating thing to unpack in your book. I was really struck by, and you admitted it just a few minutes ago, that you found going to church to be a hard experience. Not very life giving, like, there was. There were times during that experience, I think, that you wished you could be, maybe with the muslim community across the street, which seemed a little bit more.

I don't know. What. Why would you want to do that?

Yeah. I don't know. More straightforward. Because they knew. I don't know if that's exactly what it was in the moment, but in the mosque, when they're praying, they're all praying the same thing in Arabic, which maybe they don't even speak or understand, but they know the prayers. They're doing the same motion. It's simplified. And that's oversimplified of me even to say, but, yeah.

Whereas we've got this kind of mess, okay, we're all speaking French together, but none of us are native french speakers, and we've got this kind of loosely protestant label. I mean, think of anything, and you've got 20 different opinions, whether it's grape juice or wine for communion, or it's how you serve communion, or it's cracker dunking or sprinkling or. You know. And those are just the big things, not even there. How do you sing? How much do you talk about the Holy Spirit? Do you speak in tongues? I mean, it's just endless. Endless.

Yes.

And I know that in the mosques, there's also diversity and complex theological debate and discussion. But when it comes to the practices of, like, the pillar of salat, that prayer pillar is the same. There is something appealing about that. But I also then just came to love the chaos.

Yes. Yes. I think it would be an adjustment, but maybe it's like going. When I went to Peru once and we were invited to come to a church to worship, and the pastor did not show up to give the sermon. And this little congregation where the walls are like barely standing firm and there's like 20 people, and they read the scripture for the sermon, and there's no pastor to deliver the sermon. And so they decided they'd make their own sermon, and that was the way they handled it. They all contributed their insights about that scripture passage, but that ingenuity, that way of creating the church experience among this body, was so eye opening to me because I'm so used to the regularity that I experience every week with pastors that are paid and housed, etcetera. So it's very fascinating to go to different places and just see how they operate as church.

Yeah, yeah. I loved how, how there was no performative aspect to it. There's no performative aspect in this church building. I mean, everyone's there just trying to understand, even the music. The people who sang, they just sat in the front row with microphones and looked forward with everybody else. There was no worship leader, there was no kind of team up front. It was just these people are in the front, so they get a microphone. I mean, they practiced before they knew what they were going to be.

But. But that idea of even the sermons were not a big show. It was more about being the body together. And again, like, you're all pretty. Almost everybody, I'd say 99% of the people in the church were foreign to Djibouti. We are family for each other. During COVID for example, people couldn't leave. And so someone's father in Congo passed away from COVID Who was going to care for that person in their grief? It's the body, you know, someone in Madagascar had, whatever happened, you know, like.

So we had to really care for each other in ways that were felt more tangibly like church than the ritual of a singing or a specific way of doing communion. We were the body and I felt it.

Yeah. And I think what people were doing in those situations is recognizing the call to care, right. To express love and to be present to one another, as Jesus called us to. And so when you were invited, for example, to participate in a remembrance of someone who died, somebody, it was the mother of somebody that you knew, and you went and sat among the muslim women in this house in this remembrance experience. And this is in your book. And there's all the prayer beads that people are holding, which kind of parallels a little bit of what happens in the Catholic Church. Right. It's the prayer, the prayer beads.

Can you talk a little bit about that experience? Because I was struck that what unified you guys was your recognition of God and his characteristics and his names. So can you just bring that forward a little bit for us?

Yeah. There are 99 names of God in Islam. And there's actually a somali kind of joke that there's a hundred names and the camel knows the hundredth name. And that's why the camel always looks like it's smiling because it has this precious secret. Anyway, so 99 names. And the two spa or the prayer beads usually have some multiplication of three. So 33 or 99 beads on a chain. So you can thumb one bead for each name of God.

Some people will even do it with their knuckles as they don't have access to prayer beads. So at this, after the woman passed away, after she died, the house becomes a place of gathering for three to seven days. People come, and all you are expected to do is sit and just be together, kind of like sitting Shiva. And then there's this pile of beads in the middle of the room. And if you wanted to, you could grab one and just start thumbing through them. And so my somali friends are doing that. They're grabbing them and just kind of under their breath or in their head or however loud they want. They're reciting this ritual of 99 names of God.

And so I took one up, and I can't remember how many names of God are in the Bible, but it's hundreds. And so I just started to name, and I don't have them all memorized either. But with each bead, tried to remember a characteristic or a name of God that I hold precious. And, you know, just going through and sitting with my friends. And I didn't know the woman who had died, but I knew the woman who loved her, and I cared about my friend. And so to be able to be there in that room having something so kind of simple and yet intentional felt really profound and soothing in a way. It was very calming, very soothing. And I felt like I could participate with them again, not in the same way exactly, but bringing what I had and then taking up what they had, which was these beads and this ritual and, and being blessed from it.

Yeah, I love that story because it's a picture of people worshiping together and even in the midst of saying goodbye to someone or honoring a friend as you did and her love for her mother, you're bringing into the center of that experience your acknowledgement of God and his beauty. I think you wrote psalm 70. You wrote in your book, you mentioned psalm 77. And I'm just going to read this little section. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes. I will remember your miracles of long ago. I will consider all your works and meditate on all your mighty deeds.

And this reflection on the character of God through his names, I thought was so powerful. And the fact that they do that in the muslim culture, and we are actually called to do a similar type of remembrance ourselves is, for me, extremely encouraging. I mean, that just lifted my heart because it gives me a sense of hope that we can find our way together if we focus on these commonalities and the beauty and the power and nature of God. So I was really blessed by this story in your book. And I think that was why this book also resonates with me so much, is because you tell very clear and detailed stories that really bring forward the life of the community. And so when you're in Djibouti, there's other story that leapt out at me, and partly because the whole idea of the gulf between the rich and the poor is on my mind when I drive around and see all of the people asking for money at the intersections where I drive. But you have this story about a woman named Hebo. And in muslim culture and in Christianity, we are called to be aware of the poor and to serve the poor and their stories in the Bible about this.

And so you kind of elaborate on this in your book and also reflect on this story of the woman named Tebow. Do you want to share a bit about that?

Sure. So Hebo was essentially a widow. Her husband had given her aids and children and then left. So she's on her own. She has no way of making any money. She's very, very poor also essentially living on the streets. She did at that point have a room in a house. So I was helping her to build a little tea stand where she could have sell tea on the side of the road for a small amount of income.

So we'd gone to the market, and we were buying also some pasta. So pasta, some tea things, all the supplies she would need. It cost maybe $100 for me. And while we're in the market, a blind man comes up to us. He's led by a younger person, and they're begging. And so I said, no to the beggar. I didn't say just no. I said, like the culturally appropriate way of saying, may God bless you.

And then Hebo takes out of her little pocket coins, two small coins, and she gives them to this person, which was her bus fare and probably all she had for the rest of the day. And we go back to the car, and I just felt so convicted, you know, we know another story where there's a woman, a widow, giving two small coins at the temple in the New Testament, and Jesus says to the other people, look, this woman has given more than everybody else. And I remembered that story later, not in the moment, but as I reflected on it, here I am. I think, look how generous I am. Look how great I am being and how kind and thoughtful, whatever. Generous. Giving my $100 to this woman. And then all of a sudden, she comes and gives these two coins.

And I just recognize, especially when I drove her back to her home, because she didn't have a bus, any bus fare. Then I drove her home, and she has no electricity, and there's her and multiple children living in one space with nothing in it, some sort of bangles hanging on the wall as decoration. And I'm going to go home to my kids, who have more food than they know how to eat, air conditioning in my car. You know, just the discrepancy was so glaring, and yet she was the one who had given these coins to the man, and I had not. And so it was such a powerful moment on multiple levels for me of seeing the Bible come alive, of just seeing the story that I knew so well lived out in front of me. And then also the challenge to my own heart of how do I think about people in poverty? How do I think about my own excess and abundance, and what do I do with all of that, all the complicated things that start, but I still don't have answers for all of it that will never go away. We also know that you will have the poor with you. But here's the crux of it is, are you with them? Are they with you? Or are you just, like, throwing $100 bills at them across a chasm? Or are you actually with them in their homes and in their lives? And relationally, that's what Jesus said.

They're going to be with you. And so I needed to learn how to let them be with me and not to be with them without having a strong dichotomy dividing us.

Yeah, that story really resonated with me because, well, first off, what you go through after that is a real soul searching. Right? And I think I feel that sense of discomfort often. And I'm a limited person with 24 hours a day, etcetera, so. And I don't live in a poor place. I have abundance. I have more than I need. And yet I do believe there are simple ways I could be more a participant in the lives of people I don't necessarily run into every day, but I just don't know how. And I didn't sense that.

And by the way, you were really good at teasing out the issues here. You did not. In your book, you do not, like, browbeat this topic. You did not sermonize on it. You just acknowledge the complexity and the brokenness of our world. And that in the muslim communities that you lived in, where poverty was kind of equally shared, they found ways to serve one another. It wasn't like through creating a program. It was by paying attention to how their neighbor is doing and figuring out a way to serve their needs through the neighborhood.

And I think that whole idea of neighborliness is so fascinating. I mean, those you really paid attention to what it means to be a neighbor.

During COVID I remember having a conversation with my language tutor who had to stop coming to our house. Actually, she was my daughter's language tutor by that point for Somali, because my daughter was home from school because of COVID But then they shut the buses down, so she couldn't come. And I asked her, are you going to be okay? How are you guys going to be okay? Her section is extremely poor. And she looked at me, she said, rachel, we know how to take care of each other. We'll be fine. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then also, as you were talking, my daughter, the same daughter, she's just finished her freshman year right now at Madison.

She said to me and my husband just last night, she said, I've been really wrestling with how do I practice kindness in the United States? And so we had this beautiful conversation about kind of trying to get at the heart of the question, which was in Djibouti, it felt so obvious when someone needed help and how to reach out and how to be involved in the community and how to be neighborly. Felt very. Just was right there, literally in front of you. And she's had a harder time because there does seem to be so much abundance here. And so we talked through some different ways of how to be practice kindness, which is really that generosity. And there was a woman at my church here in the US once. We were doing this this year also, we were doing a Bible study in the book of James. And there's the story in James of when a poor man comes into your gathering, how do you respond to him? Do you treat him the same or differently to the person? And this woman said, well, we don't have any poor people at our church.

And it made me so. I was quite shocked. I thought there's two problems with that. One problem is, why don't you, if you don't have any poor people at your church, there's something wrong with your church because it's supposed to be with you. And the second one was actually, there are. I know, because just that morning, I'd been at a different study with women whose husbands had lost their jobs, and they were giving blood and plasma to make enough money for groceries, and they were at the same church. And so the poverty in the US might not look like someone on the street, it might not look like a blind beggar holding out their hand to me, but there is people. There are people in need in our churches.

It just. They maybe live in a house, but they're struggling to pay their electric bill or their medical bill. They're so underwater. Or the burdens are not financial, they're something else.

Right.

Just trying to help my daughter think through that also of how do we, in a place that looks like we have so much abundance, there is still so much pain and need, but how do we look for it and pay attention to it and contribute?

Yeah, I was thinking about that in light of the alarming mental health issues in our country, the anxiety and depression and so forth. And it's alarming on campuses, too. And I honestly think that part of serving the poor and thinking about poverty as in being multileveled instead of just financial, is to keep our eyes really wide open, to deliberately look and see the people in front of us, because it's so easy just to be looking down at your phone or to be looking past people. And I think we miss out a lot on growth opportunities that way, because if you're not keeping your eyes open, you are not also going to be able to be honest with yourself about where God might be asking you to grow a little bit. And when you. Right. You are asking tons of questions. And we are called to be curious.

Right. And to ask about our neighbors and ask about what God is doing in the world. But that's uncomfortable. And so your cross cultural journey, which you described so beautifully, is really one of discomfort. Yeah. So. And I think it changes you so much. And when you came back, you are not the same person who left.

So how do you find yourself grappling with the journey that you continue to live, the pilgrimage? You continue to walk in Minnesota?

Yes.

Yes.

This is part of the pilgrimage. It's so true. And I need to remember that. Our small, complicated church in Djibouti, on our last day of worship there, they had my husband and I come up to the front and prayed for us. But one of the, one of the other elders, he said, we are sending you back to the United States. And it was such a beautiful framing that I had not had in my mind yet until he said it. And so part of it is recognizing that we're coming to a new place, and I am a new person. Not exactly the same way it was 20 years ago, but similar.

And so how can I look around this new place and feel as curious about, as humble toward, and as willing to delight in this place as I was in that place? And that can be hard to do because sometimes it drives me crazy, like what the woman said about having no poor people at church. I just feel like, oh, I want to get into that, but can I be gracious and curious and humble and delightful, and can I learn here, too? That's hard. And there are ways in which just look like every other Minnesotan. Not every other, but I look, you know, I'm white minnesotan, swedish, german background. I blend in more here than I did there. And I actually just was back in Djibouti recently, and I recognized that I know how to stick out now. I spent my whole life, adult life, sticking out, and I learned how to navigate that, and I learned which boundaries I could push and which ones I couldn't and what I felt comfortable with and didn't and how to interact. And I.

It is an uncomfortable space that I'm comfortable in, if that makes sense. And that was kind of contrasted to being here, where this is a comfortable space that sometimes I feel uncomfortable in because it's just all different, and I look like I should know things that I don't know. Or maybe I just have a different perspective on something now that has. There's no opportunity or space for that perspective to be welcomed. It's so kind of bizarrely out there, beyond what people experience. You know, I was recently, a group was sharing in, a chat group was sharing some beautiful pictures of where they had been the last week, and my beautiful pictures of where I had been last week were all in Djibouti. And I felt like if I just dropped one of those in, it would kind of shatter the conversation because it would kind of hijack what they were doing together in the moment. And so there's things like that where I struggle to know, how are my experiences relevant? What can I contribute? And I know my kids feel that same way.

A lot of expats, when they come back to their country feel that way. How do I contribute here in a way that it's not going to hijack or turn? I just knew the conversation would turn toward me and Djibouti, and that's not what I wanted to do because it's so shocking.

Right.

And so how do I blend in when I don't. I don't know. I'm not sure yet. Trying to. I'm on the pilgrimage right now. Yeah. Actively trying to figure it out.

I actually, I really resonate with that for all sorts of reasons. And I also have a friend who spent several years overseas, mostly in Ukraine, doing international student work. But what was so depressing for him was to come back to this country and nobody would ask him about his life over there. The lack of curiosity was really painful for him and he didn't have any opportunities to share his life. And. And I think for us, the challenge is to be openly curious about people we don't know and get outside the questions of what do you do for a living, but ask more about what are you really passionate about right now? Or something else that would open up a conversation a little bit more broadly for me. I would love to see your pictures about Djibouti, but of course, I would probably do exactly what you said, like, suddenly focus in on that. So how do you navigate that? I don't know, but I think it's important for the community around you to learn how to navigate, you know, to learn how to welcome the alternative story and to take detours into those other places because we need our eyes to be wide open a little bit more widely.

So that would be my exhortation is just don't be afraid to throw out something random or what seems random to other people, but that's your life, and then say freely to them, I don't want to hijack the conversation, but this is what my reality was like. And what I'm learning right now is dot, Dot, dot. That was just.

That's good. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that.

No, it's so precious. I mean, I don't have your story, you don't have my story. And yet I would be so remiss if I didn't understand a little bit about your story and have this opportunity to talk to you. I mean, what a joy for me to get to hear your story. So I guess this is a great way for me to say thank you again for talking to me today. And it's a conversation I hope to one day have in person with you. If you ever come to Madison, it would be wonderful just to go to a coffee shop where there's a lot of women and hang out. All right.

Thank you so much, Rachel.