broken bread

Time for breakfast on the road. With friends. You’ve not lived until you’ve broken bread with refugees and pilgrims gathered at a junction of life that may never cross again. At that table none eats the bread of his own culture, so the salt of memories of distant lands torn away by war is balanced with the pepper of anticipation of what the future could potentially serve up. “MY father was killed in the Sudan, you know. We fled Niger when I was a boy, when my dad became a Christian. But I was left orphaned and had to learn Arabic. I met my wife there. Her family had to flee Ethiopia because her family did not leave for Eritrea on time. They waited too long and now could not be a citizen of either land. So the Sudan was their only option.” Their perky one year old daughter bounces on my knee with beguiling smiles and sweet hugs. At home on the pilgrim road, her life is en route, not knowing anything else. She has spent much of her young life in prison already, captured with her parents and locked up for crossing into this nation. Now awaiting crucial papers from the UN, their lives hang in the balance. If they are given refugee status they can breathe again. Meanwhile anxiety is a heavy mantle. Barely tolerated, evidently disliked by their current host country, they find it hard to plug into the here and now. The past haunts, the future is daunting. Inwardly atrophying, they struggle with bursts of depression and anger.

So we break bread together. Flat bread, Foreign to all of us. To us it is the bread of adventure and pilgrimage, dipped in the humus, hot pepper, and poppy seed spread. To the refugee it is alternately eaten, with tears or it sticks in their throat. They miss their injera bread, not so much because they are stuck in the mud or inflexible, but because they are flotsam in a world that could so easily embrace them, if only it would. While we relish the fried cheese, candied green walnuts, and quince jam, they long for the “onions and garlic of Egypt”, and I’m struck at the reality of Exodus. We read the book knowing it’s end. For the Hebrew following Moses there had to be a moment of choice. At some emotional crossroads they had to leave their baggage and take up the Call.

This young couple have potential. Yes, they struggle, but as we talk they come to realize that this season in their wilderness will set the course for their lives. In this era of internet and communications we part only after a new dream is planted. They will use this time - this season when they are forbidden to work locally - to get a degree online. Now in the safe haven of an elderly Christian woman who gives them free room and board for help around the house, they have a springboard to function from. Multi-lingual in a city where most other refugees speak at least one of the languages they know, they perceive finally that they have the potential to help new arrivals. With a new light in their eyes we part ways.

They have chosen a third way to eat bread: with thanks in spite of everything. The crumbs of this meal are worth treasuring.