How The Whole Town Threw Us A Wedding

Editor’s Note: We typically run a classic post from Michael Spencer at this time on Saturday afternoon. But this essay from Damaris Zehner is just too good to postpone.  We will have a classic post from Michael again next Saturday. For now, enjoy one of the best feel-good stories I have read in a long time.

Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary was just a few weeks ago.

Andy and I met as Peace Corps volunteers in Liberia in 1985.  We had six weeks together in training, with 90 other Americans and some wonderful Liberian trainers.  We knew we liked each other right away, but we hardly had time to get to know each other in the midst of the mob.  There’s a photograph of us taken by a friend of ours – at least he was until that point – up in a tree, illuminated by a glaring flash.  We had thought it was one place we could have a little privacy.

Then we were assigned to different towns, he to Zwedru, I to Gbanga.  They were no more than 150 miles apart, but the one road that connected them was the consistency of oatmeal in the rainy season.  It could take a week to travel the distance, and sometimes the road was impassable.  There were no phones, of course, and no internet.  We wrote letters to each other, adding on to them day by day until we heard of someone who was traveling to the other town and could take them.  At least one of my letters was over forty pages long.

After six months we had had enough of this.  We decided to get married, and the Peace Corps office, like a kindly Victorian father, approved our plans.  I would move to his town, where we would also have the wedding. Andy made the arrangements for church, pastor, food, etc.  Salwa Rizk, the wife of a Lebanese merchant in town, would make the cake – provided she could find eggs, sugar, kerosene, and other essentials.  We got gold rings made for us in the capital city.  I made a skirt and commissioned a tailor to sew an embroidered blouse for a wedding outfit.  I invited volunteers and friends from around the country.  We were ready.

A few days before the wedding, I traveled to Andy’s town with the most precious of my belongings in a backpack.  I left my wedding outfit, camera, prayer book, and the rings at Andy’s while he accompanied me back to Gbanga to help move my furniture.  The travel at the height of rainy season was grueling, but we finally got back to Zwedru, covered with mud and dust, sweaty and exhausted.

Andy’s house had been broken in to.  Everything was gone.  He owned nothing but the filthy jeans and the shirt he was wearing.  My outfit and the rings were gone, too.  Fortunately my furniture and dishes would help us make a new start, but what about the wedding?

A week before, we had had clothes, a church, arrangements for a wedding cake, rings, a guest list – everything we needed.  Now we had nothing.  The church Andy had booked even cancelled, because of a spat between local pastors.  The small truck we had commissioned had with difficulty made it to Zwedru, but the heavy transports couldn’t. So there was no gasoline in town. Guests couldn’t arrive, and there was neither sugar, eggs, flour, nor kerosene in the market for making a cake.

Our Liberian friends assumed we would put off the ceremony.  No, we said, we’ll get married in jeans if necessary.

But it wasn’t necessary.  In one of the greatest demonstrations of grace we’ve experienced, everything was provided.

A Liberian silversmith hammered out silver rings on a log for us and charged us five dollars each.  Two people donated goats for the feast. Madame Comfort Modjaka, the Ghanaian cook, came to the house as soon as she heard the story and asked what she could do to help us.  She promised to cook the food for the reception; we later named our first daughter “Comfort” after her.  The stores were empty, but Salwa had squirreled away the last ingredients in town and used a wood-fired clay oven instead of her kerosene one.  The cake was a bit short, and a bit crooked, and it said “Happy Mariage” on top in red icing; it was the most beautiful wedding cake I’ve ever seen.

A Bengali engineer working in town gave Andy an embroidered Indian kurta (shirt) to wear, while a local tailor put aside his other orders and made a pair of pants.  A Peace Corps volunteer lent me a white dress, which, because she happened to be wealthy back in the States, was a Laura Ashley creation. The Iranian wife of a Japanese UN worker lent me white shoes.  The Baptist church said we could use their building for the wedding.  Our Liberian friend Sam and our Peace Corps colleague Jamie – both of whom met tragedy a few months later –  decorated the church with palm leaves and jungle flowers.

This was wonderful, but we were still isolated from the outside world and knew the guests we had invited wouldn’t come.  We were wrong.  Many people did everything they could to get there.  One volunteer forded a chest-high river with her wedding outfit on her head to get to us.  The Liberian Peace Corps education director pulled strings and forced her way onto a tiny plane from the capital just in time to get to the church.

It looked as if we were going to make it.  Andy and I had been riding a roller coaster of stress and crazy laughter during the preparations.  As we headed to the church, we told another volunteer, “Look, Richard, if anything else goes wrong, just do something about it, okay?”

And there we were, under an arch of palm fronds and flowers, backed up by friends of eight nationalities, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, and animist.  I looked at the Liberian Pastor and almost burst out laughing.  One lens of his glasses had cracked, and he was seeing the world through a kaleidoscope starburst pattern.  It seemed appropriate.  He did a good job, considering, although there were a few surreal moments.

For one thing, he forgot that we had asked him to leave out the part about giving the bride, since my father was 4,000 miles away.  There was an awkward pause after, “Who gives this woman?”  Then Richard, mindful of our desperate plea, leaped up and shouted, “I give this woman!” to roars of laughter.  The wedding picked up speed at that point, and by the time we got to the vows we were galloping.  We went so fast that I forgot to promise for better, only for worse.  Andy mentioned that as we went down the aisle.  “Take what you can get!”  I said.

“That was the funniest wedding I’ve ever been to!” exclaimed the girl whose dress I was wearing.  That’s a good thing, right?  Yes, I think it was a good thing.

We signed the palm-oil-stained marriage certificate; the illiterate registrar scrawled what might have been a signature in the corner.  We were officially married.  Then we were driven to the reception by the Indian doctor using his last ounce of gasoline, escorted by Andy’s Liberian co-workers on motorbikes, also burning the gas they had horded.  We ate rice and goat with hot pepper and sat warmed by the affection shining from faces of every color.   Someone hushed the room after we had eaten and made a speech and gave us a collection of over a hundred dollars, to get us started as a married couple.  There were other wedding presents:  a live chicken, a wicker fish trap, some carved wooden wedding chains, a tie-dyed tablecloth with matching napkins, and a washboard.

We had planned everything for the wedding, but our plans came to nothing.  We lost control entirely of the situation.  Through the gap created by our loss of control, a flood of kindness swept in.

It’s much better to have people who love you throw you a wedding than to do it all yourself.

It’s much better to have someone who loves you throw you a life than to do it all yourself.