We came upon these two travellers in St. Augustine, Florida, in January. They came from a Southwestern province of China. He carefully took pictures of everything, and she serenely posed for him in the sunlight, looking down at her flowing white skirt. Since we were both walking on a sea wall in the same direction, we kept passing them. Then we would stop to gaze at the sea, and they would pass us. This continued until finally we both stopped in the same place, and Zellyn offered to take a picture of them together. Returning the favor, they took a picture of us together. The whole exchange was very quiet and subdued. We chatted calmly and stiltedly, since they spoke good but limited English, and we spoke NO Chinese. We stood together smiling calmly while the wind gusted up from the sea past us into the tops of the palm trees. Eventually we bowed our heads and said goodbye. We reached the end of the sea wall and stepped off onto grassy land again.
Two other times have I quietly met travellers from distant lands with whom I felt a weird instant connection. With these people I felt I could spend time quietly with them for hours or could have really great conversations with them for days.
The first was when I was in Ethiopia in 1997 and met a British guy, who was hitchhiking from Uganda back home to England. He was very quiet. We were both staying in a missionary guesthouse. All the many guests and tenants ate meals together. There hadn't been much interesting conversation at meals for a couple of days since lots of the people staying there had just flown the horrendous flight from the States and were zonked out. But one day at lunch, I happened to sit at just the right lunch table. Everyone exchanged the typical surface info about themselves. Somehow in all of this, as always happened, it came out that I'd been homeschooled. As was often the case, this sparked a huge debate on the education of the young. I was tired of these debates as I'd heard them ever since the age of six. There were usually only two results. People either told you that the way you were being educated would ruin you, or that you would be better than the rest of your peers once you grew up. Since neither of these were true, and there seemed to be no calm discussions of this issue, I did not relish the topic. In the midst of the stormy conversation, people asked me questions about my experience and tore apart my answers. Somehow very quietly the hitchhiker interjected two different experiences he'd had. One would support educating kids at home; the other supported public education. At this everyone was stumped and laughed at themselves. They, then, started remembering their own childhood experiences with education. This quiet, listening traveller turned a debate of issues into an exchange of memories at the end of which I'd grown to love each of those irate combatants.
