Dining on Compassion

A Slower Kind of Fast or Wake Up!—Slowly or Dining on Compassion

He is painstakingly divvying them up—the marshmallows—as if they are gold bounty and if the pirate gets the wrong portion he might make him walk the plank.

I can see his mind working. He’s sitting on my cement floor, looking up every once in a while and using his fingers to count everyone. Papa. Mama. Brothers 1 and 2. Sisters 1,2, and 3. Live-in cousin. Oh wait, is Mama’s sister in town? Better count her too, just in case. Best friend.

By the time he’s done, there are two for him.
And he loves marshmallows.

“Maaaashmellows,” he calls them. “Can you eat them with peanuts?,” he inquired the first time I offered him one, not wanting to get it wrong. “Is it chewing gum? It’s like chewing gum.”

His reporting must be accurate, for his first thought is not of the pile of marshmallows before him, but of how he’ll share them with his family, who will certainly have questions.
The marshmallows are part of one of my final care packages from the U.S., since I’ll be leaving Benin soon.

Emmanuel is at my house, as he often is, to look at my old Newsweeks and sit with me. Since he’s there, I offer him some of the maaaashmallows as I open them, explaining that they’re probably the last that will come.

Emmanuel is one of my favorites, so if he didn’t share, I wouldn’t mind, but I know this isn’t an option. Even though no one would ever be the wiser if he shoved them all into his mouth at that moment.

But the impulse to share is a reflexive one—just as was the impulse to hoard for the American Peace Corps Volunteers in training when we’d get care packages. We’d hug our Oreos and Twizzlers close, avoiding each other’s eyes, afraid that someone might expect us to share. And we would share (we didn’t want to appear selfish), but the sharing portion would be about one-fourth of the hoarded portion.

“Ha, got them,” we’d think, happily lying underneath our mosquito nets that night goarding ourselves on mashed Cheezit bits.

As I watch Emmanual prepare to take his pile of maaaashmellows across the yard to his family—or consider any of the other times I’ve tried to bestow a gift upon any child in Benin and seen the same result—I can’t help but remember my Cheezit binges with a tweak of shame. For I knew that at some point I’d be returning to the land of Safeway and endless Cheezits, while each time I shared a tasty snack here, it was likely they’d never again experience it.

And I was an adult, a twenty-two year old. While these were children who, in my culture, were expected and allowed to be indulgent and selfish.

And still, these kids shared.

It was almost like it wouldn’t taste as good if it weren’t experienced collectively.
--------------

Two years later, in the U.S. during the month of Ramadan—the lunar month during which Muslims fast from sunup to sundown, giving up food and water to focus their energies on matters of the spirit—I am reminded of Emmanuel and his compulsive dedication to enjoying treats together. As I sit for iftar—Arabic for the meal that breaks the fast—with friends one night at a restaurant serving a traditional Moroccan iftar, including fresh juice, milk, a hearty soup, dates and sweets, tea and a special, and delicious, warm honey-drizzled bread, that same sense of community flows through the meal and again I am somewhat outside.

My companions are a group of Muslims from Somalia and Palestine and they are nearly giddy with the joy of the food arriving at the table and the surrounding atmosphere, where waiters are running around constantly asking, “Is this fast enough? We can bring it faster. We know what you’re feeling.”

They huddle in, and ask one another between bites, “Isn’t it cool that we can break fast in a room full of people where everyone else has been fasting?” and I realize for the first time how hard it must be to do this in a culture that doesn’t support it—how much of it gains its meaning from the communal aspect, the shared deprivation extending among families, neighborhoods, towns, cities, countries.
------------------
Perhaps my sensitivity to the difficulty of maintaining cultural traditions emerges from experiences trying to create traditional American Thanksgivings or Christmas dinners in West Africa. The need for them becomes even stronger because of the separation from home, making attempts to get it right almost desperate and those engaged in the task willing to put up with greater challenges than would ever be deemed acceptable in their original context. If the store is out of pumpkin pie filling for Thanksgiving, one either drives easily and in comfort to another store or just goes with a chocolate pie.

But in a foreign land, where that pie is one’s only connection to home, childhood and in many ways, one’s identity, to be without pumpkin pie is synonymous to being without one’s memories and one’s connection to home.

So twenty-something Americans in the Peace Corps who have traditionally simply eaten Thanksgiving dinners, find themselves faced with the daunting task of not only making the pumpkin pie, but of doing so using a real pumpkin.

Turkies, or chickens, whichever is available, must be caught, killed, de-feathered and somehow cooked without a traditional oven—typically boiled in a huge cauldron.

Potatoes come at great expense and are mashed using hand chopped garlic and very expensive butter inside a huge mortar and pestle normally reserved for pounded yams. You will mash them yourselves or, if you’re lucky, the local maman will become startled by the sight of so many incompetent yovos—foreigners—trying to awkwardly manage the tall, heavy pilons that she will order her children to take over and do the mashing properly. She will never question . why on earth you’re mashing potatos instead of yams, but instead will focus her energy on helping the crazy white people achieve their ambitious, if not bizarre, goal.

Apple pies are made from scratch and baked in a dutch oven, at unknown temperatures and with a great deal of guesswork and luck. The crusts are made only after the weevils are picked out of the flour.

And each of these ingredients is acquired at the local market, in astounding heat, while engaging in long periods of bargaining with locals who cannot imagine what on earth the white people are doing with all of this food. The bundles are then carried on foot a fairly good distance, and then must be prepared rather quickly, for often there is no, or very precarious, refrigeration available.

While someone pounds the potatoes and someone else supervises the death of the turkey, the coffee—because real, good coffee was acquired through a carepackage—is made by pouring steaming hot water through a filter being held up by an American desperate for some authentic coffee grounds. Since there is no coffee maker.
This will take days of intensive labor, and even then, it won’t taste quite right, but it’ll be close enough to make those who have been enjoying diets of red sauce and rice for months very happy.

The primary difference they will note will be that unlike at home, there is not unending quantities of dinner and talk of leftovers. Instead, there is barely enough for everyone to feel satisfied and portions are doled out with exacting measurements to ensure fairness.

If these are “first-year volunteers,” none of these riches will be shared, even though on numerous occasions and Beninese holidays food has been delivered to the yovo’s house to ensure that they’re well fed and welcomed—whether delivered through pouring rain or despite a shortage of food for the family’s children. A sampling of this meal will not be offered to the neighbors or even the maman who dispatched her children to mash the potatoes. This is justified because it wouldn’t mean anything to them anyway.

But by the second year in country, the sharing concept has caught on, as local foods are enjoyed more and supplement the Americanized holiday table and the joy of sharing different types of food and traditions has been experienced as a welcome addition rather than a burdensome deviation from the pure American holiday once considered ideal. A taste for shared food will have been acquired.

Whereas the first Christmas away yielded stress because of the differences—like the fact that the warmth in the house comes not from a furnace but from exhorbitant, equatorial temperatures outside and that the carolers are all singing in a language they don’t understand and demanding coins instead of handing out cookies—the second produces preparations for and expectations of new traditions. Toys, pens and stickers from care packages are assembled for the impending young carolers while a pie is baked particularly to be distributed to various households in the neighborhood so that they can experience an American traditional cuisine.

Instead of the feeling of victory that emerged that first Christmas from having recreated in a strange land something so close to what is home the victory ensues from having produced a meal and a new tradition that incorporates the best of two worlds—and made everyone happy by bringing them together around new and bizarre tastes and activities.

The collision of the two worlds produces less homesickness and more amusement and joy. My students and family became obsessed with my Dolly Parton Christmas tape, and particularly her rendition of “Joy to the World.” Eventually this expanded to include Little Drummer Boy and my evenings in December were filled with song—sometimes Dolly, sometimes Christmas music translated into Nagot. My mother in the United States would send gifts for my family in Tchaourou and they would explain their traditions to me.

When I taught Christmas vocabulary in class (always with special sensitivity to my Muslim students and their traditions), I would always leave laughing about our different interpretations of events.

“Teacher, teacher, no!” my students would say when I taught them about Santa’s flying sleigh as the main mode of transport for delivery of presents for American kids.

“Well, then how does he get here?” I would inquire, honestly curious.

“By taxi!” they would yell out, and I had to admit, that in a society where the majority of all transport occurred in crowded, dilapidated bush taxis, their response was significantly more reasonable than mine, of a bearded many flying around on a sleigh.

I would leave the room laughing hysterically at this image, and often continue to laugh into the weekend, so glad that I’d bothered to ask about their traditions, instead of assuming arrogantly that mine were everyone’s.

Sharing in these different interpretations and realizing that there was nothing lost in having shared and subjected my traditions to a little adaptation perhaps prepared me to wonder why our traditions must be so separate and compartmentalized. Why we can’t all share and support each other’s traditions and the ideas and strength that they each possess, for common wisdom would assert that what is spiritually sound and personally inspiring to one would be the same for others, regardless of religion, country, color or culture.
--------------
“That first taste of water is fantastic,” says Nabila at iftar, as if she’d been served chocolate water straight from the tap of Willy Wonka’s factory.

I decide then that I will fast for at least one day this Ramadan. I am not religious, so it is difficult for me to consider participating in a religious practice that requires such commitment. The wisdom extends beyond the religious and even the spiritual; however, to include the pragmatic in the value of a period of time when something bigger than you takes precedence so that you can have an opportunity to reflect, be with family, consider what life is like for those who do not have what you do.
Considering this, I cannot help but wonder what America would look like if for one month, or even one week or one day, its people participated in a national fast.

“It gives you perspective,” says Jenin, munching
happily on a date.

And we could certainly use some of that.

A friend of mine once said she’d like to find a way to measure the psychic cost of the guilt that strikes people as they see and walk past a homeless person. I wonder how the cost might increase if the walk were slowed a bit by our own hunger.

At what point would it slow enough that we might begin to take the time to talk to and engage with those living on the streets. What would we learn?

We might learn, as we lingered with a homeless person outside of Starbucks, instead of going in, that she sleeps outside not because she doesn’t work, but because her minimum wage salary cannot cover the cost of an apartment.

This would be typical, since there is no place in America where there is a market-rate apartment affordable for those earning minimum wage. Approximately a quarter of all homeless people are employed, but cannot afford housing. That 46 percent of the jobs with the most growth between 1994 and 2005 pay less than $16,000 a year, meaning that economic growth has benefited those at the higher rungs of earnings, while excluding others.

We might find, as we turned to talk—too hungry and tired from our fast to read about today’s progress in the war with Iraq—with the homeless man near the newspaper machines, that he is a Vietnam veteran who wasn’t able to hold down a job down due persistent nightmares, irrational paranoia and overwhelming anxiety upon his return. He would be approximately one in four homeless males every night who is a veteran of U.S. military service, with a vast majority of those being veterans of Vietnam. Many do not work not because they do not want to, but because they suffer from untreated Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, other mental illness or substance abuse—and the Department of Veterans Affairs can reach only about 20 percent of the veterans in need at any given time.

“It gives you perspective,” we might say as we look differently at the woman selling us the French fries we’ll use to break our fast that day, or reconsider what it means to “support our troops.”

It’s only food, after all.

But somehow it’s also a new way of seeing ourselves. And others.

The U.S. Senate under President Lincoln in 1863 knew this, writing a proclamation, signed by the President, instating a National Day of Fasting of national “prayer, fasting and humiliation.”
The U.S. Senate and Lincoln felt that this step was important for 1863 America because of the national lack of perspective at the time of the Civil War. “We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven,” says the Proclamation:

We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!

One would not have to be a religious zealot to appreciate the parallel between these words and the realities of the present day, when we sit as the world’s most powerful nation, the beneficiaries of some of the world’s greatest technological, medical and intellectual advancements of our time and the fortunate beneficiaries of, for most, a lifetime of peace and tranquility.

While other countries have been decimated by war, and over 300,000 children have come of age not with teachers and parents as their moral guides but machine guns and drugs, our land has gone—with the exception of September 11—largely untouched by conflict. While a tragedy of terrible proportions, our grief and shock was also a signal of our fortune, since such occurrences are not regular here, and we are not numb to them as so many in the world are.
Sniper attacks in the northeastern part of our country held many of our citizens paralyzed with fear, and rightly so, for unlike so many other mothers in the world, they were not used to making their way through sniper fire, landmines and rapists to acquire their daily bread.

During October 2002, the same month that Washington, D.C. was under siege by snipers, Doctors Without Borders psychologists were counseling 22 patients and nearly 40 families in Palestine coping with the stress of life under military occupation, which includes living under the threat of having your home bulldozed or being fired at by snipers that shoot at the slightest movement, stationed all over your neighborhood. One of the men receiving counseling lost his mother, who was shot by Israeli solders while she was sleeping outside to escape the heat inside their home. Another family sleeps huddled together on their kitchen floor, and goes out to work or school only after their father has cleared it with the armed guards who watch over their neighborhood.
Perspective.

Perspective need not come only from believing, as Lincoln did, that God is the source of our fortunate place in this world. For Lincoln’s fast and steps towards humility would surely have worked for the non-believer as well as the believer, for the Muslim as well as the Christian, for the agnostic as well as the Jew.
The point is not which God, or that any god is big. The point is making ourselves a bit smaller. To shorten our stature by dropping to our knees in front of any God, be it Allah, the moving power of art or the stupidity-inducing inspiration of love. Or the good fortunate, whatever that is, that has rendered us educated and intelligent enough to read and consider these very words, and to do so in a country that permits their publication because no idea is taboo or dangerous or illegal. Because we are fortunate enough to have been born in a land of peace, choice and freedom.

Freedom which allows us to own our power over ourselves and the world—allowing us to move mountains, to defeat odds previously thought impossible to produce cures for polio and to imagine and execute trips to the moon. To dream up moving art work and at the same time, Fear Factor.

Ours is a lucky culture, for we are born of a mythology that teaches us that we have power over our lives and our destiny. In many of the world’s cultures, the predominant paradigm is one of fatalism and powerlessness, of believing that you have minimal control over things compared to the whims of the universe or your God.

“What time will we arrive?” the Westerner asks of a taxi driver in one of these lands.

“In good time, inch’allah,” comes the response.

“Inefficient. Inconvenient. Weak. Lazy,” we might say, hot, sweaty and wanting to know if we’re going to make our train.

Allowing for unknowns and new possibilities, for the fact that we might not be in control of everything, they might reply.

Perspective.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, these societies are more community-focused than our own. For humility, be it before God or before Grandma, implies consideration not only for yourself, but for others. Lives are lived not according to what would benefit the individual, but according to what would benefit the community.

Of course, many of these areas, with this perspective, are impoverished. A focus on the individual and its needs enables progress, the ability to move ahead to acquire the best things, the best house, the best country—which often requires sacrifices of family time, health, the environment or obligations other than those around you. Sometimes we work late to ensure the continuity of progress, even if Mom is home sick.

In other places, to work while mother was home sick with no one to care for her would be to mark oneself as heartless and irresponsible. Someone with their priorities way out of wack.

So if you’re the train conductor, the trains don’t always run on time.

But eventually everyone gets there anyway, inch’allah.

But if the train doesn’t run, income is lost. So indeed, there is a price to be paid for devotion to Mom. A mythology that breeds respect for the community yields strong community bonds and little material gain and status in the international realm.
But then again, if you fall ill or lose your job, it’s guaranteed that someone will care for you.

Because where you live, material good is sacrificed for a greater good—that of human relationships and community.

Like when one fasts and turns from a focus on material benefits such as food, water and sex to consider, for one month, greater truths and commitment. It is a different lens of vision, on that sees spirituality, family, others—while the self is a bit out of focus for a while.
Perspective.

If this vision means permanent poverty; however, one might rightly question its wisdom. When young men and women cannot save for their children’s health care or education because they are automatically expected to give anything they have to destitute brothers and sisters, ill parents, etc., this is not necessarily the most sound approach for anyone. The unemployed brother learns dependence while the employed son’s family suffers. The community in itself remains united, but poor. Eventually the family surplus doesn’t exist anymore.

The family is left still with the ability to see the pain around them, but are impotent to change it.

But to be unable to see these needs, as many would argue is what happens in the United States, where we are shielded from so much, is another type of weakness. The employed son’s heart breaks as he sees his parent’s health decline or the destitute brother rebels, eventually coming to take forcibly from his surplus. As his anger seethes, he may turn against the older brother.

The older brother has the ability to act, potentially to improve the circumstances of those around him, but is blind to their need.

The ability to see and to act would surely provide a more just scenario here.

And this is the principle involved in fasting. It is not detrimental to the person conducting it—she or he does not suffer negative long-term repercussions, since the fast is not absolute, and is temporary.

And because it is voluntarily, allows the participant to imagine, for the fasting period, the existence of those for whom a lack of food and clean water is not a choice, but a state of being.

Perspective.

Fasting is not then a religious plea, but rather a plea for a unified vision of a national sense of something that is greater than America, than who we are and what our needs are. And perhaps a little national hunger could help illuminate that vision for us, as per the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln.

It is said that to die of hunger is one of the most painful ways to die. While fasting is not hunger of this level by any means, it does enable one to feel enough pain to recognize it in others, particularly when one is within a community or nation of those experiencing the same thing. This knowledge then makes it easier to look on one another with compassion, rather than contempt, to treat human failings with gentleness, rather than irritation, to exercise a bit more patience than one might otherwise. For some reason, it seems to require a hunger within yourself to see it in others, and this transforms into an automatic sense of compassion and empathy that America could certainly afford.

Perhaps an internal national hunger would also translate into a clearer understanding of hunger and underdevelopment and lack of opportunity on the world stage. Development agencies, non-profit organizations and charitable organizations could certainly do a great deal more if America contributed 10 percent of its GDP to international aid, rather than the .11 percent it currently contributes (a decrease since the 1960s when we gave .65 percent). Fighting poverty, malnourishment, poor medical care, lack of access to education and growing HIV/AIDS rates would mean fighting, in many cases, the root conflicts of many of the conflicts America perceives as such a threat to its security.

Perhaps then we wouldn’t need as much of the $399 billion we spend for the Pentagon annually and we could give part of that to add to the $7 billion we spend on Head Start, the $10 billion we spend on humanitarian aid, the $34 billion we spend on K-12 education or the $41 billion we spend on children’s health.

Perspective.

Fasting is, in many respects, putting off short-term needs—hunger and thirst—due to more long-term thinking, in terms of spiritual health, family commitment and personal reflection and growth. Such thinking could perhaps enable American foreign policy to cease to view short-term solutions like war and sanctions as our only foreign policy options, and rather to consider longer term solutions like poverty reduction and education. Just as individuals reflect on all that they have during the month of Ramadan, so too should perhaps our nation, particularly considering that we remain the United Nation’s largest debtor while we account for 27 percent of the world’s economy. Meanwhile, less than 1 percent of our budget goes to foreign aid. While we give the most in terms of real dollors compared to other nations, in terms of foreign-aid budget as a percentage of GNP, America ranks last compared to other wealthy nations.

Perspective.

But fasting isn’t only about beating oneself up for what one has and what others do not. Rather, it gives one the opportunity to contribute to remedying, in their own small way, those vast differences. For according to Islam, the fast does not count before God if it is not paired with a donation of a percentage of one’s annual earnings to charity. Ideally, this contribution goes to one’s immediate community, with the idea being that a Muslim community would ideally have no one in need, because all Muslims have an obligation to care for their neighbors.

In this way, the spiritual learnings of the fasting period are automatically translated into action.

When I consider this practice, I am reminded of occasional walks past the traditional sleeping ground of the homeless people in my neighborhood, near my subway stop, where some kind soul has left a piece of fruit for all of them. With this image in mind, I imagine a country of fasters where for a month, everyone’s own hunger brought out enough empathy for that of others that they would awake to a buffet each morning. I imagine what our domestic organizations who care for the homeless, the impoverished or those who are ill could do with the funds they might receive if every American gave 10 percent of their income to charity. I imagine individuals taking a moment to speak to the churches or organizations who service the homeless in their area to find out if there is anyone who could use specific assistance such as clothes for a new job or some sort of training program and providing it.

I also wonder what this translation of conscious into action might look like in the political realm. Imagine if Americans suddenly turned 10 percent of the energy they put into watching television or shopping towards political activism. Considering that polls have revealed that 81 percent of Americans believe in increasing foreign aid to fight terrorism and that the typical American would prefer to spend $1 on foreign aid for every $3 spend on defense (rather than the true ratio in 2003 of $1 for every $19 spent on defense), certainly our way of engaging the world beyond our borders would shift. As more Americans put more effort into learning about their own politics and how it impacts their lives and the world, they might come to exhibit fewer tendencies to believe falsities, such as the majority of Fox viewers who believe, incorrectly, that U.S. troops have found evidence linking Saddam with Al-Quaeda, that the U.S. has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the international community supports U.S. war efforts in Iraq. Perhaps fewer Americans would incorrectly assume that America spends 24 percent of its annual budget on foreign aid, as opposed to the accurate 1 percent. Armed with these realities, what they demand from their politicians, the media and our government could shift dramatically.

Surely the same shifts might occur as Americans began to learn about domestic policies and spending that impact their medical care, the quality of education and violence on our streets.

In Benin, when walking through the streets of Parakou with those participating in Ramadan, I was surprised by how often we stopped to give change to beggars until someone explained it to me. “During Ramadan,” they said, “we do not turn down those who are in need.”

Perspective.

But a national fast wouldn’t only benefit others. It also changes one internally and has very personal benefits.

For while fasting, the option of food is always present. One finds oneself almost mechanically reaching for a glass of water or a piece of bread, before remembering the fast, which confirms how second nature, how taken for granted food is. You are separated from it, but by choice, which reinforces the difficulty of feeling how you feel throughout the day, without the option of cheating and reaching for a Frito.

But the significance of fasting is not only in the truth that you can eat whatever, whenever you want, while others cannot. This is a fact that is new to few.

The more striking reality is the conscious realization of what the sustenance you enjoy daily enables. Without food, by 3:00 one is hard pressed to think as clearly as one could had some protein been ingested at noon. Sports and other strenuous activity generally are discarded for that period. Time usually devoted to errands, gabbering, worrying, running back and forth from one task to another becomes time, by necessity, devoted to rest, relaxation and time with loved ones.

It’s a forced sabbatical from life, a license to lay around, relax and remember that you’re not just a woman in a cubicle, a guy in line at the checkout or a parent rushing to meetings—that you’re a human being, allowed to just sit and breathe, without justifying your place in the universe to those who calculate the nation’s GDP, your taxes or this year’s bonus.

When fasting, by the end the day one is basically useless, reduced to obsessively checking the time and looking for signs of darkness outside. Once fallen, the evening is often spent laughing and talking with friends over an extended dinner, when usually it would have been focused on rushing to or from work or the gym or the dry cleaners.

I can’t help but think that such a forced state of rest would be healthy for the average American who is—from the state of mental health exhibited by people willing to throw life and limb away by jumping through already closing subway doors to make it to work on time—always tired yet hurried, always busy yet never just done.

A universal state of rest would do us all good, and since we’re not giving ourselves permission otherwise, perhaps we need a little drop in collective blood sugar to bring us there. To parents and kids who have looked forward to dinner all day so much that they’ll linger over it, talking and getting reacquainted, without the hustle of soccer practice, ballet class and late nights at the office. To evenings spent with friends and family drawn together at a unanimous, unflinching time—sunset—to enjoy a meal and one another’s company. To a recognition as we look upon one another while hurrying through the subway and traffic that we are all hungry, that we all want to get home, that we are all human and perhaps can now find the time, since we are too tired to fight the traffic or lean on the horn, to just smile and wave instead of push and shove.

When tired and hungry, one learns to conserve energy, to do only what is important. It takes far less energy to step aside and let someone pass than to rush in front of them, and less energy, as we know, to smile than frown. A nation brought to a state of less energy usage rather than more for a certain period of time would certainly be a different one to behold.

Perhaps it is too that Ramadan is about physically acknowledging one’s spiritual acceptance of something bigger than yourself governing your life, your office, your boss, your city, your world, your planet. Whether religious or not, and one doesn’t have to be to get this, there is something to be said for what becomes important when you are not. One’s eyes are opened to the needs of others, to realities other than those with a direct impact on your world, and in turn, one’s action reflect a comprehension of those realities.

Perhaps it is because hunger produces slowness that it tends to quiet people who can no longer process a ton of information about financial records, carpools, ATM machines, appointments, etc. that those who are fasting seem to have less energy for abruptness and impatience, and more of a spirit of giving and gentleness. The taxi driver who was so thrilled to hear of my interest in Islam offered me the dates he would use to break his fast, and tried to refuse the tip I offered, saying he’d rather I had it. He reassured me over and over that “God will help you” when I tried fasting and expressed such a sincere joy in his religion, kissing his Qu’ran—which sat on his dashboard wrapped lovingly in what looked like a handsewn, pink and green cloth case—as I do not recall ever seeing before from anyone of any faith.

I am not naïve. I would not expect one month to transform America.

But it might transform Americans.

For the giving to one another that emerges from Ramadan, as I have witnessed it, translates not only into charity giving to the homeless, but into a gentleness in all human interaction. Perhaps because where one is full, one has little room to take in the needs of others, whereas when you are empty you have the room to consider others, to approach them with a gentler manner when in line to board a train or when there has been a glitch at the check out register.

Perspective.
------------
Perspective can often be a wake-up call.

Much of what the non-Muslim finds odd about Ramadan is the sacrifice not only of food and drink, but sleep. For those fasting wake up in the middle of the night to prepare “breakfast” before sunrise, in order to get in one last meal before beginning the long day of fasting.

“I think I’d rather sleep later and take my chances,” I say to my friend Jenin.

“Oh no,” she says, speaking of her days growing up in Palestine. “It’s really fun when you’re with your family and everyone gets up to eat and it’s all dark.”

I can see it—the safe, warm feeling I always got from evening meals around the fire with my family in Benin made even more intense by the common feeling of waking up together in a conspiracy of spirituality to sneak in a meal before the official start time of the fast.
Not every country or culture recognizes this in the same way. When Ramadan would set in Benin, the only indication I had was of the early pounding sounds I’d hear at 4 a.m. as the yams were pounded for the morning meal. In America, it makes no noise at all in my life where each family unit is shut inside itself and cooking is a quiet enterprise without need for pounding in the front yard. Jenin’s sister, spending a year in Bangladesh, wrote of the differences between a Bangladeshi and Palestinian suhour—Arabic for the early morning breakfast meal:

Ramadan has a different feel in every country….On the other hand, they can be very enthusiastic about waking people up for suhour. I was in Khulna for three days and didn't sleep at all. Each night, starting from 3am and lasting until about 4am, there were people going around either singing or chanting or banging on drums to wake people up to eat something before sunrise and pray. It reminded me that when we were kids we would get up and bang on pots to wake people up for suhour, but at least
we didn't use sound systems! Seriously, this one guy had a loudspeaker system on a rickshaw, and him and the rickshaw driver bicycled around town with him singing some religious songs through the loudspeaker for over and hour. If he was any good, I might not have minded as much.

While amusing, and perhaps annoying, the idea of a man on a bicycle circling neighborhoods everywhere in an attempt to engage them in a collective wake-up call—for a period of spiritual meditation, consideration of something bigger than themselves and a period of willed self-deprivation in order that they could be more open to compassion and their fortunate place in the world—is a welcome one. But its meaning comes largely from the communal aspect, from the notion that his voice and his bicycle bell are so loud that no household can escape it and that the experience of the fast and of their lives, for one month, are truly communal and turned away from the self and towards one another.