Thanksgiving

Religion is omnipresent here. It’s on every street, at every meeting, in every utterance.

Meetings and workshops have not officially started until someone has said an opening prayer, not concluded until someone else – usually of a different religious persuasion – has spoken the closing prayer. When working on how to prepare a training session plan with a group of Nigerians, one group stated that the ‘objective’ of their first activity – an opening prayer – was ‘to commit the session to God’; quite a culture shock for a Brit.

Religion, or maybe faith, is such a part of everyday speech, that for a non-believer, it actually presents something of a language barrier. Nigerians don’t say ‘hopefully’, they say ‘Gods willing’ or ‘Insha’Allah’. The answer to ‘How is work?’ or ‘How was your holiday’ is often not the almost ubiquitous reply of ‘Fine’, but ‘We thank God’. No-one says ‘Keep your fingers crossed’ – they say ‘Let’s pray’.

I can’t say whether it’s being immersed in language peppered with constant reminders of a supreme being*, or whether it’s the fact that over the past 7 months I’ve been exposed to far greater risks than in the 28 years preceding them, but sometimes I find myself wanting to ask Someone, for example, to make my journey a safe one, and to thank Them when I arrive somewhere in one piece.

It happened after we had been snowed-in at Brussels airport for 2 nights while flying back to the UK last month. We were on the last plane to leave Abuja for London and we were one of the last planes to leave Brussels airport before they ran out of de-icer, so I considered us very lucky, all things considered. I was very thankful that we had not missed Christmas with our families, that the timing had worked out in our favour. But whom to thank? I was struck, too, when talking about our ordeal to people of faith at home, that they too rejected the word ‘lucky’ and instead used phrases like ‘we were praying for you’ or ‘God’s hand was with you’.

Learning to live here in Nigeria, without the home comforts of the UK, I find myself frequently grateful for the things I own, the relationships I have, the opportunities I’ve been given – but with nowhere to direct my gratitude. I think of the Americans, with their Thanksgiving holiday, and how cathartic that must feel – to be able to express that gratitude. I think of their own language and culture, also much richer with religion than mine: you can’t imagine Oprah or Obama saying they felt ‘lucky’ – they would use the word ‘blessed’.

Now, I don’t believe that there is someone responsible for the chance timing of our Christmas flight, someone who deserves gratitude for the opportunities and – well, here secular words fail me – blessings in my life, or a supreme being who is able to control whether my journey is safe or not. But I have to say that, at times, I find myself all full of gratitude and nowhere to go with it.

* In Linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis – largely dismissed by most linguists – posits that our language informs and limits our thoughts: if we can’t express it, we can’t think it. Of course, it’s a crazy idea (otherwise, for example, new vocabulary would never be invented), but it interests me that, when immersed in a different English from my own, my very thoughts and feelings seem to be taken in a different direction.