March 1, 2008

Tang Gah!

Read James 1:17, Luke 12:22-34

“Hi Honey, Come In, Come In, Sit honey sit, you my son. You hungry? No? You just had lunch? Good, I make you some grape leap, meat pie, piece o rice or two. Fresh kibbie, eat honey eat. Ows you mudda? Ows you fadda? Good? Tang Gah! honey Tang Gah!.”
And so it’s gone for nearly 40 years when I see my friend “Bodian” at his mom’s house.

So many times I’ve heard people say “Thank God” for one thing or another, but I’ve never heard anyone say it, and mean it, like my friend’s mom.
You see, she was born and lived in the mountains of Lebanon. As a young girl her family made arrangements to send her to America so she would have a chance at a better life. In her early teens, she said goodbye to her parents, and all she knew, to land in a giant foreign place where she didn’t speak a word of the language. It would be a lifetime until she saw her mother again. She learned the language, made her way to Michigan, married Lou, a man of similar background, and together they built a family and raised them here in Grosse Pointe.

When she was a girl, when people were hungry they put some seeds in the dirt and waited a few months for some food to pop up. In the meantime they were hungry.
If they wanted water, they waited for rain, or took a hike to scoop some from the well or a stream and hoped it didn’t make anyone sick. If it made someone sick, it was a few days hard travel to a doctor. Imagine the trip to the doctor could be as deadly as the thing that made you want a doctor in the first place.

More than once, I woke up in Bon Secours hospital to see Madium pulling the curtain away and announcing to the world, “You my Son! I take care of you now! I make you kibbie, eat honey eat!” She worked as a nurse’s aid in that hospital for over 40 years. If you needed a nurse, you couldn’t do better than Madium.

The point is, the things most of us take for granted, she looks at as Gifts from God. She knows what it is to be without the basic necessities of life and how precious food, water, shelter, and health are. Where she comes from these four things are Everything.

In a moment, you’ll be done reading this, and maybe you’ll forget it just as fast. Or maybe, the next time you see your doctor, or turn up your thermostat on a cold winter night, or see aisle after aisle of food in a grocery store, or tap a glass of water from your faucet, you’ll think of my friend’s mom and say, “Tang Gah honey Tang Gah!!”

Ron Draper