Stranger in a Strange Land

To be a stranger in a strange land. This can either be a pleasure or something that hurts beyond belief. I have spent twelve years as a stranger in strange lands and sometimes the lands were hostile. The most unpleasant has given me memories that can never be equaled and taught me a lesson I have never forgotten.

Our house in Georgetown

               It was the early seventies; I was nine and my family was living in Guyana, a small country in South America. Guyana is and was a country torn by violence and politics, by wealth and poverty. It was a country where the rich remained rich and the poor got poorer. They saw what they could never have and the country grew even more violent as they tried to take it away from the wealthy. There were not many American s in Guyana. It was not an ideal place to live.

               It was in Guyana that I learned how to chain a car hood down to keep the engine from being stripped. I learned how to stand at a window and talk to strangers in the street, kept from us by a chain link fence. This was for safety. Every day, people disappeared or were murdered in broad daylight. And I learned about walls. We were not allowed outside unless one parent or Mrs. King, our housekeeper, was with us. We were escorted from the fenced house to the convent where my sisters and I went to school.

The convent was surrounded by a high stone wall. Its top was covered with glass shards and broken bottles. After school, we would walk a short distance to the car and be taken to the Pegasus Hotel, also ringed with stone walls and glass shards. Walking around the block to my British friend Dandra’s house was out of the question. Her house was also surrounded by a high stone wall. Iron spikes, not glass shards, guarded the top. My life went from compound to compound, always surrounded by high walls and glass shards.

Only once did I escape these tall walls. We were in the interior, hiking to Kaieteur Falls, set way back in the rain forest. Too young to keep up with the teenagers, I walked with the older people. Once I went running up the path, fascinated by the deep greens and scarlets of the rain forest. I stopped to look back, not seeing anything but green. Something screeched in the trees and I turned to face forward. At my fee was a beautiful brown and silver tarantula about the size of a saucer. After a frozen second, he leaped one way and I the other, jack rabbiting back to adults who thought it was all imagination.

Looking over the edge

Later, I again escaped the parental clutches. This time nothing would stop me. At a fork in the path, I paused, trying to decide which path to take. I listened for a clue. The jungle was silent, but it was a full silence, like the quiet after a bell is struck. I followed the smell of tangerine and bounded up the path to the right. With the happy-go-lucky attitude of a nine-year old, I arrived at the Falls, never doubting that I would find them. When my mother arrived, she was in tears. My sisters were furious. My father said nothing. He, like me, had been born for a land without fences.

Leaving them, I hung my feet over into the water where it plunged a thousand feet over the falls into the foam below. I didn’t care. For a moment, I had been free of the high walls, alone in a vast jungle. When we finally moved from Guyana, it took me three months to be able to play in the unfenced yard of our Costa Rican home. I preferred the high walls of the back yard.

Sometimes, I forgot about the walls. Once, at the Pegasus, as the sun was going down its rays lit the huge white trumpet flowers and the tame toucan screamed in the distance, four black men in the beautiful shirts that the Guyanese wore, were setting up a steel drum band. Laughing softly, they began to play a haunting Calypso tune. The clear bongs of the steel drums echoed off the walls and faded away, so the song was heard over and over again. As we left, the men began to speak in Calypso, the singing speech of the West Indies. The sun went down behind the walls as they began to play again.

There were other times. The markets with their pungent smells and loud arguing women with legs swollen from elephantitus.  The East Indians who lived across the wall from us, drying garlic and red beans in woven baskets. The mosquito netting that made a bed look like a princess’ bed. There were little things that make up memories.

First day of school

There were bad times. Being put in the wrong grade and then ridiculed for not being able to multiply and divide or write in cursive. Being a normal American second grader and having nuns shame you for being unladylike…so American.

I learned that American were capitalist pigs. I had never heard of capitalist pigs. I wasn’t even sure what a capitalist was. All Americans were rich. Dandra’s family was better off than mine, but they never called her a Rich Brit. All Americans were atheists. My sisters and I did not take sacrament. We were not Catholic and it was wrong to take sacrament in a Catholic Church; something called hypocrisy and sacrilegious because we were not one of them. They told us all Americans should go home. That was my sentiment exactly, but my father was in their country building them a road. We were there only because their government had asked us.

It got so that I was ashamed to admit that I was an American. An American was a bad thing to be. I forgot the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance.

The day dawned with a faint promise of rain. The house buzzed with excitement. Today was the Fourth of July. Today, we were going to the American Embassy. The building was large and white, surrounded by a high wall. In later years, I would call it gracious. The Marines were polished to perfection. The grounds were spotless. There must have been forty Americans in the compound. After a shy moment, I was screaming and playing games and being as unladylike as possible. The adults smiled at us and left us to our games. There were actually boys to play with, a novelty after our all-girls’ school. It rained a hot tropical rain, but we did not stop playing. The rain as part of life and it cleared the sky to a brilliant blue.

The ambassador cutting the cake

We gathered around a flag pole and my parents explained that we were going to salute the flag. I could sing the Guyanese anthem by heart. The flag they ran up the flagpole was not the black and yellow Guyanese flag. It was the red, white, and blue of the Stars and Stripes. It caught in a faint breeze and snapped out against the sky. The Americans at the base of the pole were silent, staring in awe at this reminder of our heritage.

The anthem began quietly and gained in volume until only the flag and the sky and the music existed. I was suffused with pride. My heart felt full to bursting. I was an American! It was something to be proud of, not to hide.

I forgot the Guyanese national anthem. I quit hanging my head in shame at the word American. And now, when I hear people cursing at America, I hold my head high. I remember the flag floating in the brilliant sky and the pride. When I hear Americans dishonoring our country, I wish them an opportunity to feel the shame and then the glowing pride in our country.

To be a stranger in a strange land, they say, teaches you about yourself. It delivers life lessons, sometimes gently and sometimes with pain. What I learned was that I was not who they, those hostile strangers, thought I was, and that I could be myself without compromising who and what I was. It was a bitter gift. Looking back, I can see where learning, and caring, to fit in might have made life easier. Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own land, but I will always hold dear that moment when I discovered that I had a place and a pride in my own land.