Meet Cutes

I've been thinking a lot about all the unobtrusive ways important people enter our lives. It just really tickles me to think about how you hardly ever know in the moment that a significant event has occurred.

Case in point, I met a Dane in front of a bank one afternoon in Ghana. We got to chatting because yevus always like to know what other yevus are doing in Africa. Little did I know that this chance encounter brought me one of my closest friends and the person who was to become my NGO co-founder three years later.

Less than a year after that, I heard someone talking about Ann Arbor while I struggled to lock my dorm during orientation weekend at NMU. I went to investigate and met Rachel, who graduated from the same high school a year after me. I never talked to Rachel again after that weekend - but her orientation roommate Hillary and I got along so well we decided to try rooming together. We lived no more than 20 feet apart until the day we walked to commencement together, and met our best friends and roommates in similarly mundane circumstances.

I forced myself to go out one Friday night, feeling lonely and discouraged after my first full week in Spain. It honestly took a lot just to force myself to walk into a place. Even more to walk up to the bar. The moment I did, however, a kind man offered to buy me a drink. As soon as he discovered that I was new to the city/country/continent, he started doing his best to help me meet people. To my horror, this involved grabbing some poor girl, pushing her in front of me, and saying, "Hey, give her your number; she needs friends" while I apologized profusely.

Not exactly mundane, I suppose, but neither was it an incident I expected to have lasting importance.

A month later, Mica and I have seen each other at least once every week. She has introduced me to her friends, invites me whenever she goes out on weekends, and asks me to meet up for coffee or cider. We took the 30-ish minute bus ride to Gijón yesterday, a larger city on the coast, just to explore and spend some down time walking by the ocean.

It's obviously too soon to know if this friendship will have the same long-lasting impact that my introductions to Karina and Hillary have. What I do know is that Mica has given me the one thing that guarantees my survival in a place that doesn't yet feel like home: a real friend.
I really believe the only reason I can cope with living in new places - new countries - is my eternal hope that every time I walk out the door I might meet a new important person.

All it takes is a lack of ATM in Dzodze... or the inability to lock a door...
or a random guy in a random bar to grab a random girl and demand that you be friends.
You just never know.