I recently made a trip to Tabora, Tanzania, a place most people I know have probably never heard of let alone visited. Certainly, I would not have heard of it but for a connection with the Anglican bishop there, who had repeatedly invited me to visit his diocese. The trip itself was a couple of years in the making and getting there was not easy or fun. I spent about three full days in transit, one way or the other, not including a brief break in Europe to reset my body clock and just stop moving for a while. Nonetheless, Tanzania is beautiful, and the people are warm and hospitable. I wouldn’t make my vacation there (though the Serengeti is quite the international attraction and lives up to the generations of safari hype), but my time with the Tanzanian people, off the tourist grid, was worth every bit of travel discomfort.

This was not so much a mission trip as the fruition of a partnership. I was there to get to know the clergy of the diocese, speak a word of encouragement, and celebrate their ministries and milestones with them. The last thing I would have expected at a clergy conference was the attention of a little guy who had yet to reach his first birthday. However, Tanzania is a family-oriented country, and this was obvious everywhere—in visits to churches, at the clergy retreat to which the priests brought their spouses and young children, and all over the marketplaces and ministries we toured.

When Americans consider African children, we are likely tainted by images of 1980’s celebrities singing “We are the world.” Not all African babies are skinny with bloated bellies and covered with sores. One in particular, my little buddy for most of my trip, had chubby cheeks and a lively personality that would make him a made-for-television star in the United States. He was a curious little guy, a textbook 11-month-old, not quite walking but ready to get into everything. He especially loved my hat and my glasses. The hat immediately became his favorite toy. He wore it, dropped it, picked it up, fanned it around, put it back on my head, then took it back, over and over again. His smudgy fingerprints covered my glasses, even as I tried to keep them in place. In other words, he was the same as any other baby you would expect anywhere in the world.

After our first meeting, every time I saw my new little pal he would raise his hands in the universal language of toddlers, “Hey, lady, pick me up!” Throughout the week I was there, he found ways to attach himself to my hip whenever he could. I held his hand while he practiced a few steps and scooped him up when he was bored with life on the ground. I held him while his mother dashed to the restroom. We sang little songs in a language he does not understand, and we looked for animals in his language since we were about on the same level when it comes to Swahili.

Toddlers seem to speak a universal language. Blink and you’d miss the difference between this little guy and one in the States. Keep your eyes open, though, and you’d notice all sorts of details. My new pal was used to playing on the ground. He did not ride around in a stroller, and his mother carried only him on her back, no accompanying bag of toys and supplies. Babies, in this culture, do not need their own luggage. Look again while walking across the conference site, and you’d find moms just like his washing diapers and their family’s clothing in a bucket, taking advantage of the source of water in the restroom. Even his fascination with my hat and glasses takes on new meaning when you realize that my American friend and I were the only women wearing hats to shield the sun, and only a handful of the male leaders had the luxury of glasses.

Everywhere we went, children were always present but never made a sound. Truly seen but not heard. They were wide-eyed to the world around them, and every moment was ripe for play, but I never heard a single child’s voice. Whether a child’s family was well off by Tanzanian standards, or desperately poor, the children were eager, sweet, respectful of their elders—and silent. Despite all the time we ended up spending together, I cannot remember my little pal ever making so much as a chirp. Children older than him were shy, but once they saw we knew the language of a wave (with both hands in Tanzania) and the universal language of a goofy smile, they were eager to visit with us strangers.  A few even learned to give a “high five,” which they seemed to find funny.

Of course, we would say that all of these children were desperately poor. What is remarkable is that the children themselves were not aware of that. These children—quiet to the point of shy, wide-eyed and eager, part of a community that loved them and left them feeling so secure that even strangers from halfway around the world could be accommodated in their world within a few minutes—were being raised to be valued by the people who surrounded them. Their shy silence was in contrast to the self-assurance by which my new buddy became what we used to call my PHA (Permanent Hip Attachment) when my own children were young. He was indeed a confident little fellow, with no “stranger anxiety” at all.  Other children, equally shy and quiet, were just as curious about the new people and confident in their parents’ presence to share a smile or a little game.

Poverty and shyness are one thing, but these children also possessed the quiet confidence of knowing who their people are. They were surrounded by loving adults—mom, dad, auntie, neighbor, friend. They ventured out, step by step, from the comfort of their community into a new relationship with strangers, always knowing where their home base was. While some have more resources than others—my little pal will likely go to a good parochial school and have more opportunities in his country than will the little ones we met in the markets and churches—each has the gift of knowing that he is not his own, he belongs to a people and a community, he is raised up by someone and for something.

We should all be so blessed.