A Model of Hospitality and Story Sharing in Zambia
Martha J. Ritter, Cabrini University
At an assembly at St. Lawrence School in Lusaka, Zambia, a choir of 7th- and 8th-year students sang, “You’re in the right place, at the right time, with the right people and you won’t go back the same as you came.” The assembly was to welcome our group visiting the school from Northern Ireland and the United States. I know that I did not come back the same. I learned many things from the teachers and students, as well as from the Head of School, Sister Angela, but what I think of most often is the warm hospitality freely offered.
Hospitality should be at the heart of what children, families, and educators experience in schools. Further, I believe it is vital to include hospitality as a part of conversations and study in schools to support inclusive classroom communities. In this article, I share creative responses supporting 4th-year students’ understanding of Thank You, Omu! by Oge Mora, a book that exemplifies a deep sense of hospitality, and conclude by considering how a focus on hospitality contributes to global citizenship education. Often, we think of hospitality as something we expect in places of business, such as hotels and restaurants. We also might consider it as a right due to us because we are a citizen. Though important, this does not describe the hospitality I experienced at St. Lawrence School. Philosopher Jacques Derrida 1 distinguishes between conditional hospitality, as regulated by the rights, duties, and obligations of a citizen, and unconditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality goes beyond duty and obligations. Derrida characterizes it as an ethical response to others, particularly across differences, that focuses on listening and learning, valuing and honoring. Unconditional hospitality has common elements to the African philosophy of Ubuntu, a relational ethic centered on human interconnectedness. Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa writes:
Ubuntu speaks to the very essence of being human. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, “Yu, u Nobuntu”: he or she has Ubuntu. This means that they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring, and compassionate. They share what they have. It also means that my humanity is caught up, inextricably bound up, in theirs. 2
The hospitality Tutu describes as a part of Ubuntu describes my experience at the school in Lusaka. This hospitality is also exemplified in the book Thank You, Omu! The author, Oge Mora, tells a story of Omu, a grandmother living by herself on the tenth floor of an apartment building in New York City. She makes a pot of thick red stew for dinner and settles in to read a book while the stew simmers on the stove. The scrumptious scent of the thick red stew wafts out of the city window and people start arriving at her door drawn by the delicious smell of the stew. First, a little boy with a bright red car knocks at Omu’s door, then a police officer, then a hot dog vendor, followed by many others.
Mora writes: “And each time they knocked, Omu shared.” She shared all of her stew, and was sad to find an empty pot when it was time for her dinner. But right then, she hears another knock at her door. Omu opens the door to find everyone she had shared with that day. Omu said, “I’m sorry everyone! . . . My thick red stew is all gone. I have nothing left to share.” But they were not there for more stew. Instead, everyone had brought a dish to share and the little boy had brought a shiny red envelope with a note inside that read, “Thank you, Omu!” Mora writes: “While Omu’s big fat pot of thick red stew was empty, her heart was full of happiness and love.”
Sharing a book such as Thank you, Omu! is one example of how an unconditional sense of hospitality can become the focus of a school’s curriculum, in this case by integrating it into a reading lesson. With the group of 4th-year students and their teacher at St. Lawrence, I began the lesson with an activity called “Read the Picture.” Focusing on two of the illustrations in the book, we “read” the picture through a series of guiding questions:
• What do you see?
• What do you smell?
• What do you hear?
• How do you think Omu is feeling?
• How do you feel looking at the illustration?
Notice the focus on our senses and emotions. I then read the book aloud.
To deepen the children’s engagement in the theme and comprehension of the book after my reading, I asked the children to act out the story using their own words and movements, “retelling” what had happened in the book. One student played Omu and other students played the various visitors who came by and stayed to have a bowl of thick red stew.
When everyone had visited and the big pot was empty, we all knocked on the imaginary door and brought something to share with one another. The last activity is called an “Open Mind Portrait,” selected to support students’ further exploration of Omu’s thoughts and emotions. For this activity, students were asked to fold a piece of paper in half as if making a book or card for someone. They then drew a picture of Omu on the cover and represented what Omu was thinking and feeling inside the folded paper.
Reading a picture, retelling a story through drama, and creating an open mind portrait are examples of creative responses to literature that deepen understanding of the book through transmediation. Transmediation is a process that involves taking something you know in language and moving that knowledge into another sign system, like music, art, dance, or drama. The children used their bodies and symbols to convey central ideas from the text. These kinds of activities have been shown to support reading comprehension that moves beyond a literal understanding of the text to symbolic thought and an understanding of theme. They are tools for learning—for considering what a story means. In engaging with the book Thank You, Omu!, students explored the theme of hospitality in the deep sense of sharing what you have with others.
One important goal for education is to prepare future citizens; in our interdependent world, I believe we must prepare students to be global citizens. Education can and should help us to live with respect for one another and our environment in our shared world. One way to think of global citizenship is as belonging to communities of shared fate, where we are responsible to one another. Educational philosopher Melissa Williams3 believes citizenship education for communities of shared fate would stress development of human agency in three dimensions that tend not to be stressed in other approaches to civic education:
(1) The capacity of enlarged thought
(2) The imaginative capacity to see oneself as bound up with others through relations of interdependence as well as through shared history and institutions
(3) The capacity to reshape the shared practices and institutions that shape one’s environment through direct participation.
The lesson shared here is one example of how responses to literature can help children develop the capacity of enlarged thought. Considering a deep sense of hospitality, or Ubuntu, helps educators and students develop the imaginative capacity to see ourselves as bound up with others. Together, we can reshape our practices in schools and our schools themselves to be welcoming places for all of us—places where we all feel that we are in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.
Notes:
1 Derrida, J. (2000). On hospitality. (R. Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
2 Tutu, D. (1999). No future without forgiveness. Image Publishers. p. 34
3 Williams, M. (2003). Citizenship as identity, citizenship as shared fate, and the functions of multicultural education. In K. McDonough & W. Feinberg (Eds.), Citizenship and education in liberal-democratic societies. Oxford University Press. (pp. 238-239)
