by Presley Scott, 3-month Namibia Immersion team member in 2015
I shut my eyes.
I started to go back, feeling the crisp air and smelling the aromas of the kitchen, again.
Suddenly, I began to picture her. She hunched forward, both arms submerged in murky water, sloshing her makeshift sponge onto the plates, while gazing out the window.
She is Belinda.
A small pair of glasses adorn her face, she pulls her hair back, securing it with a colorful scarf to accompany the pink dress that wraps around her.
Surely she felt my eyes on her as she turned over towards me with a somewhat serious face that had intimidated me the first two weeks of our time at JP Brand. I was always a little nervous, fearing that I might mess something up in that tight ship of a kitchen they ran. Some days, I was sure that we were actually hindering their work in that kitchen as they could clean about 100 plates in the time I went through maybe 20. I tried not to feel bad about that and just convinced myself it would take some of the kitchen ladies some time to appreciate my presence over my usefulness.
Anyhow, Belinda approached me as I dried to large yogurt containers that we had finished off. We learned that the ladies liked to hold onto them. I had been accustomed to always giving them to Albertine, who had a more approachable demeanor and became quite insistent that all the containers were for her. Belinda caught on, though, and decided it was her turn to get a container. When she asked me for it, I excitedly responded, "of course!" as this was the first time she had spoken to me and I was eager to keep forming relationships.
It's funny thinking back to that simple first conversation and knowing what would happen two weeks later on my final day. The kitchen was my last stop on the goodbye train. I trudged in with my head hanging low, my heart pounding intensely and cotton balls in my throat. Over and over in my head I said "keep it together" "no crying." But if you know me, you know that was a lost cause! I looked up and there was Belinda, staring right at me mouthing "no tears!" All I knew was to run into her arms and just weep for a moment.
In such a short time she had become so very much to me.
Like I said before, Belinda couldn't love me for being useful to her. The reality was, I was probably less than useful in that kitchen. If anything, I slowed them down. But that didn't stop Belinda from loving me. She loved me because I was me.
I was once taught that all things in life are loved for either being beautiful or being useful. Belinda showed me what that beautiful kind of love is. The love where something has so much value to us just because of what it is and not because of what it can do for us.
Over the weeks, that kitchen and the sweet faces that filled it came to represent so many things for me. It was a place that, at first, I was so afraid of, but it somehow became a place I was eager to get up at 5am for (okay, some days I was maybe less eager). It became my refuge. I looked forward to my time being surrounded by these women, who tirelessly work for these kids as if they were their own. Most of all, though, I loved that kitchen because I could just be me. It was simple, they opened up their space to let me stand beside them and just "be.".
I'm learning to cherish those people with whom I can just be, those special spaces in which I can just be. A haven of comfort, a room of peace; somewhere we can be ourselves, where we can take off the masks. I'm learning that just like Belinda loved me for being beautiful, I, too, need to learn to love myself for being beautiful.
Somewhere along the road we've all made up this idea that we are only worth our "usefulness." We've decided that whatever we can do somehow determines how much we deserve to be loved. We are so very wrong. In fact, it's quite the contrary. There is nothing we can DO to deem us worthy of loving. It is simply in BEING who we are that we somehow become deserving of that BEauitful kind of love. That love that we have done nothing to earn.
So, Belinda, I know your arms are yet another day submerged in that murky water, but I am so very thankful for you. I am overcome by the beauty that you saw in me and that I am in my own way trying to see in myself.
You are beautiful and it is because of that, that you are so worthy of love.
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