O Brother Where Art Thou

“Are you my brother? …You look like my brother…Yes, you are my brother”

Those were some of the words that Marina, my host sister, said as she hugged me when I returned home in the afternoon following the cultural food event. They were small words, uttered by a small child, but they meant a lot to me. I had felt the same way (leave it to a child to say out loud what we adults sometimes fear to), that these people were like family to me. No genetics or bloodline (maybe thousands of years ago, since we are all connected) bound us to each other. They didn’t have to take me in, to look out for me, to care for me, and I in return didn’t have to stay with them, to spend time with them, or take interest in their lives. But the beautiful thing is that even though we didn’t have to, we chose to. We chose to reach beyond blood, beyond culture, beyond race, beyond all the unknowns…to unity, humanity, and to love, the one true known.

They had seen something special in me, and I in them. If I were to leave and come home this very day I would feel proud of the work I did here in Namibia. I may not have anything to put down on a report, nothing that will look good on paper to headquarters in Washington D.C., nothing really tangible or measurable, and I’m sure nothing that will impress too many people. But I have a special relationship with at least five Namibians, and that’s something incredibly magnificent. Wherever I go in life I know that there is a little girl, my sister, and my wonderful newly acquired family that know there are people just like them in American that care about them. And I know that Namibians, like all the other inhabitants of this planet, are good, wonderful people, waiting for us to rediscover just how wonderful they truly are.

Together, me and the Kupembonas have built a bridge, a link of humanity. They are being built all across the world as we speak, by people willing to give of their time and resources to others, to show them that they aren’t alone, that there are people who care about them. When they do this, the illusion of separation, of differences, of inequality, the illusion that allows us to hate and kill one another instantly dissolves and we remember that we are one, that we are all the same, that we are members of one big family… and that we are loved. When enough bridges are built, when enough people once again remember the great truth that we are all brothers and sisters, then we can finally learn to live together in harmony, war and conflict can end, and World Peace can at long last begin.

This is the work that I am part of, the work we can all be a part of. All we have to do is go back to the innocence of our childhood, the time before we learned how to hate, before we learned to close off our emotions, before we started fearing what people thought, before we began to believe we were better than others, the time when the world hadn’t yet clouded our souls. We have to look at our neighbors, the ones in house next door, the ones in the bordering country, in the shelter down the street, in the mud hut thousands of miles away…and we have to ask ourselves, “Are you my brother?” Then with the freedom and unbound spirit of a child, allow ourselves to believe, to remember, to know that, “Yes, you are my brother.”