From my journal, April 14, 2010
“I know that the experiences f our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work that he will give us to do.” – Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
I opened with this quote because I’ve been inspired by it ever since I read it in The Hiding Place years ago now. I love the idea that God can use every moment of my life—my joys, my sorrows, my frustrations—for a purpose that perhaps only God knows. No tear shed this year, nor knowledge gained, nor lesson learned, nor hand held, nor laugh shared will be in vain, because each is an integral part of this experience and an opportunity for growth. I’m grateful to God and the people beside me for helping me make sense of it all and learn through it.
Juli, a friend of mine, in her beautifully tended (and huge!) garden in the spring. Juli hosts the Tuesday evening Bible study. She is the most gracious hostess and always has baking or some other snack for us to enjoy after the Bible study. Several times she's sent me home with fresh garden produce.
Today was certainly a learning experience and an eye opener. Yesterday at Bible Study, one of the ladies invited me to go snail collecting with her. “If it rains, I’ll come to your place at 7,” she said, indicating with her fingers to make sure I got the time right. Sure enough, shortly after 7 am, I heard knocking at my window, which opens onto the sidewalk.
I later learned that she’d been up since 5:20 (her usual time), tidied the house, and got ready to go to another town to work in the vineyard—where she works trimming grape vines for 400 ft (less than $2) an hour, only to find out it was raining there and so not possible to work. So she hurried home, changed clothes again and came to pick me up so we could go snail hunting instead. Meanwhile, I’d set an alarm, woken up and seen that it wasn’t raining, and thus that my friend had gone to work, and fallen back to sleep. Talk about lazy by comparison!
Sporting rubber boots, she and I made our way to a field near the cemetery, where we began plucking 2-inch snails from stumps and branches where they’d come out of the soggy soil, and dropped them into plastic bags. I tried to disguise my reluctance to touch the snails, but even after a few, “bátor legyen!” (“be brave!”)’s, I was still careful to touch only the shell in order to avoid anything potentially slimy.
We did this for about an hour and a half (far less time, and covering far less ground than she would normally). It’s reasonably tiring work, with lots of walking through wet grass and rough terrain, and bending over. To my surprise, we ran into more than half a dozen other people doing the same. I had no idea such a practice existed.
The sun started to come out (not so good for snail hunting, plus it might mean my friend could go out to work after all) so we stopped at her meticulously tidy home for coffee and a short visit. She showed me a photo of her son, who hanged himself in the back yard when he was only 20. He had trouble in school, his mother said, and I remember hearing months ago about some cutting remarks made by a teacher about him being a gypsy that may have contributed to the suicide. This was years ago now, but she still keeps photos of him in her cupboard to look at when she works in the kitchen.
She proudly showed me paintings of Jesus and the two Bibles that she keeps in her home—one at her bedside so that it is beside her always. She also read aloud from the útmutató (daily devotional with Bible verses published by the national Lutheran church), because she forgot to in her rush in the morning. She seemed proud of her faith, saying several times that she goes out to work and collect snails because it’s “muszai” (necessary), but also that she trusts in God to provide.
We then brought our now heavy bags of smails to the home of the daughter of one of the other ladies I know from Bible study. This woman buys the snails people bring to her and sells them to somebody else and somehow they make it into the market as escargot. When we arrived, they were trying to affix a handwritten sign to a cement post: “csiga: 70ft/kg” (snails: 75 Hungarian forint/kg). That’s about 35 cents for an entire kilo, and all the work that it entails. The woman measured out our bags on an old wooden balance-scale, chatting friendlily all the while. For an hour and a half of work—in which time I collected 2 ½ kilos of snails—I received 175 forint, less than 90 cents. My companion collected 4 kilos. Until then I thought I’d been doing pretty well with my collecting. How she worked that fast I don’t know.
I had tried to—with a variety of different methods—just add my snails to her’s so that she could take the entire profit home for her family. After all, if I hadn’t been there, there would have been all the more snails for her to find. But she would have nothing of it. “It was your work,” she insisted. I badly wanted her to have the money, but out of respect I didn’t argue. It was a humbling experience, though, walking away with my 175 forints. At home, not even enough for a chocolate bar, and here, maybe enough for a loaf—or at least half a loaf—of bread. I wouldn’t normally notice 90 cents in my wallet. Here, people went out of their way and worked hard for an amount I consider inconsequential.
Snail collecting is, in fact, relatively undemanding compared to the work this woman does in the fields. I see my friends when they come back from a day’s hard labour--getting up as early as 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, working, often more than 8 hours in 35 degree + heat. Their skin is so dark they barely resemble the people they were in winter, their feet are chapped and swollen, the weariness shows on their faces. They receive a few dollars for all this. The international studies major in me could turn this reflection into a comment on the injustices of the global economy. There is another aspect that strikes me, and that is the unfairness of stereotypes that blanket an entire people without regard to individual traits. My Roma friends here in the village, who surprise me continually by their work ethic, still face the stereotype that they are lazy and don’t want to work, based on nothing more than the superficiality of skin colour.
