What is a Promised Land? Who promises what to whom? Does luck have a place in a promise? Or is it just like beauty that resides only in the eyes of the beholder? When and how does one get to know for sure that something he/she has is a promise? How does one handle a promise once it has been identified as such?
What makes a piece of land, or vast stretches of it, worthy to be considered a promise? Is it the quality of the land that makes the owners think that they have been blessed? Can one get something out of nothing? Or, get nothing out of something? The land of Israel is unlike ours – dry and stony, yet it is considered a treasure. These thoughts flooded my mind while I gazed at the land from an Air Nigeria (formerly Virgin Nigeria) flight from Kotoka to Liberia’s Robertsville International Airport.
Flying over Accra on a cloudless day is too revealing. It becomes obvious beyond all reasonable doubt that our capital city has over-grown and does not make sense. Something is happening to Accra. A nameless, formless, shapeless, unrecognizable and cacophonous something is happening to the town of my birth!
Accra spills over from east to west; from north to south. It is bursting at the seams. It is as if most of the villages and towns of Ghana have packed baggage and garbage, re-located to, and congregated in Accra for a big conference that has no end date. It’s an open-to-all sort of conference so all are welcome. Accra seems to be saying to Ghana – ‘Bring me all your mansions, your shacks, your hamlets, your poor, your funk, and I’ll give thee rest.’
Apart from some pockets of well-laid out areas, the aerial view of Accra, what you see from above the ground while airborne -- is as chaotic as what you see when on land. The nature of growth of this city is crying for structure, for order, and definitely for a whole lot of planning. Where are the elders of the town of my birth?
As the Air Nigeria flight, which is fast losing its virginity, continued the journey westward over Cote d’Ivoire, the beauty of the land became striking. Vast stretches of green upon green land hit me. It spelt agriculture. It gave the impression of a ‘food basket.’ The masculinity of the lush green forest, entangled with the femininity of its softness, took my breath away and made me feel that God’s glorious hands are in this.
The knowledge that the land is not only fertile but also endowed with varied mineral resources made me smile. Large meandering rivers, brown in colour, dirtied from misuse and abuse, gorgeously snake through the land on their uneventful journey to pour it all out into the mighty Atlantic Ocean. It’s the same ocean that ferried millions of unwilling children of West Africa into dehumanizing slavery to toil to advance other people’s civilization whilst ours remains stuck in underdevelopment funk.
But then quickly, the sense of recent history dawns and the reality struck -- this is no food basket at all. This is a jungle; a jungle in which poverty hugs with thorns. A jungle in which atrocities occur! A jungle in which some of the inhabitants are stuck in hopelessness! A jungle that is gifted with so much that is yet to be explored for the benefit of the majority of its people. Still, a jungle! The regional land of my birth.
Soon, the flight began the descent into Liberia – more land with lush green forest; a country in which it rains ‘by heart’. It is as if one can plant the eye of a fish and it would germinate! But the reality hovers below the clouds -- that this country is bruised; it went through two senseless, destructive civil wars that lasted fourteen years.
Throughout the less than two hour flight, thoughts of hutzpah flooded my mind. If only hutzpah could be sprinkled from an airplane over coastal West Africa! If only everyone would swallow a little bit of hutzpah! If only I could find my own hutzpah! The thoughts of hutzpah gave me flashbacks.
About fifteen years ago during life’s journey, my deputy at work was an American woman of Jewish descent named Stephanie. One day, she said something to me that was at once disturbing, yet thought-provoking. She remarked, ‘Doris, you have everything you need to achieve greatness, with the exception of one key ingredient.’ The remark startled me. In my taken-aback mode, I asked her, ‘What do you mean?’ Her response was prompt and matter-of-factly; in just one word – ‘Hutzpah!’ I retorted, ‘W-H-A-T?
I swallowed my pride and hurt to engage in a deep but confusing conversation about ‘hutzpah’ (also spelt chutzpah or huspa). Stephanie’s grandmother was a Jewish girl who survived Hitler’s Holocaust in Poland and migrated to the USA. Over six million Jews perished at the mercilessly cruel hands of Hitler and his Nazi associates in a grand effort to wipe them out of the face of the earth. Yet, they continue to endure – and to thrive.
The story of the success of the Jews is not talked about much. Some explain it away from only a Biblical point of view – that God blessed them. But there is something I wish I could put hands on about why the Jews have been successful throughout history whilst Africa fails? Dear reader, if you have this knowledge, please share it with us. ‘Hutzpah’?
So it was that a granddaughter of a holocaust survivor (1938-1945), my assistant at work, had observed me for a little over a year and her bold verdict was that I needed hutzpah to crank up my life! She explained that there is no English word that can fully define this thing called hutzpah, a Yiddish word, and a vernacular of the Hebrew language. The closest English words are guts, courage, bravery and audacity. But the unique characteristic of hutzpah is that it is not given. It can only come from the depths of one’s own insides.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe the importance of marshalling ‘hutzpah’ to pull off challenging tasks. There are certain tasks that can be accomplished in a casual mode by putting in average effort. But it requires a lot of hutzpah to solve really challenging, stubborn and difficult tasks, and hard-crusted problems – like ours.
Hutzpah does not come easily. It can only be marshalled with resilience and a determination to think and believe ‘Yes, I can’ even when you know that you can’t. When all the evidence suggests that you can’t accomplish a certain feat, when all odds seem to go against you, that is when a still small voice lying dormant from the depth of your being, should whisper to you, ‘Yes, you can!’
As hutzpah thoughts enveloped me, I wondered when West Africa would marshal its hutzpah and yank itself out of under-development funk. But selfishly, I wondered when I would finally find my own hutzpah. Perhaps, I would find it in Liberia. And with those thoughts, I got off the plane to head toward rainy Monrovia.
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