I had met Rita Dove in Ohio at a book signing event. I talked to her for thirty seconds or so, and she was very gracious. I loved her poetry and the history reflected in it. As a matter of fact, her book, Thomas and Beulah, was one of three books I took with me when I went off to Yemen as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
After three months of training near the capital city of Sanaa, I moved to the small village of Al Khawkha on the Red Sea. I moved into a shack in an Eritrean Refugee camp while helping another volunteer build a school. It was a small room with a few open windows (it only rained once in the two years I was there) and a dirt floor. I slept on a Tihama bed (named after the coastal region there), a rope bed suspended on four tall legs resting in coffee cans. The idea was to keep nasty things from climbing up into the bed. I had a thin foam mattress and a crocheted cover that the women of the camp made me. There was a small desk and chair in the room, and I had a little kerosene cooker on a stand by the bed. Life was good!
I split my time between the local village school and the camp. During the day, I taught English at the school, and would return to work on the school in the camp. Gradually, I got to know many of the families in the camp, and I spent a lot of time in the orphan section. At night, my shack would be a hangout for the children, slowly developing the courage to drop by. I would later move into a small tent, but those days in that shack were fantastic. The ladies of the camp eventually wove me straw mats, so the place became very homey. For the first six months I was there, the camp generator worked, at least for a few hours each day. I would line up the cassettes I wanted to listen to in eager anticipation. I would read, listen to music, and try to manage the growing number of children milling around in the room.
On one evening, a small group of girls (probably ages 7-9) were sitting on the floor, listening to a tape they had requested that I play. I had gone to letting various groups of kids in on different evenings. I was reading Thomas and Beulah, when I laid it on the floor, upside down. There was an audible gasp amongst the girls that startled me. They recovered and began to jabber excitedly in their language, Afar. I could only get a bit of it, so I tried to calm them down and speak to them with my slightly better Arabic. It turned out that they were very, very shocked that anyone would let a woman, let alone a black woman write a book - Rita Dove's picture was on the back of the book, staring up at them.
Once they recovered from their shock, they turned to me and demanded to know if I knew her. I tried, with my limited language skills, to explain that I had met her. It must have came out that I knew her, and they got even more excited. They sat down in a huddle, earnestly discussing a plan. One girl stood up and spoke for the group: They had decided to make some cards for this woman (it was Eid soon, an Islamic holiday) and I would send them to her. I tried to explain that I would try but was not certain, etc. but they nodded and bolted out the door into the night. Two days later I had five beautiful Eid cards on my desk.
I put the cards in the envelope and sent them to Rita Dove, c/o the University of Virginia. The girls questioned me daily if I had heard back. It was very cute, eventually I would see them coming, shake my head, and they would feign bitter disappointment. Finally, we received a response from Ms. Dove. She had received the cards, hung them two-sided on a mobile of sorts in her office. She had been delighted to get the cards and was very touched. The girls took turns with the letter, kind of a traveling trophy. They wrote back, and Ms. Dove responded. It really was a moving experience for me.
I had read articles and books about culture, race, and gender issues in college. I believed I was fairly open-minded and progressive about those sort of things. But I had no true idea of the depth and pervasiveness of these biases until I saw the look on those girls faces when that book hit the floor. I don't think I understood the concept of self-esteem until I saw them planning their cards, watched the way their confidence increased, noticed how they carried themselves around the camp. I was so taken by this, that I went back to school and studied Multicultural Education, and worked on initiatives like Girl's Empowerment in Tanzania. To this day, I still work with at-risk and underrepresented students in many types of educational settings. All this because a book landed upside down on a straw mat.
