Silent bidding
In Popoli e Missione, an article on the silent gesture of offering, which the Ticuna Indians in the Amazon repeat every day
We are often accustomed to redundant gestures and blatant acts; they have entered so much into our imagination that when we are faced with a silent offering, here as in the rest of the world, there seems to be little material to write about.
In contrast, there is so much human material.
Deep in the Brazilian Amazon, a common way of doing things among the Ticuna Indians is through offering. They are so discreet in this that, in the first months of their mission, even Frei Paolo Maria Braghini, of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, did not notice.
Despite being a missionary, he was initially “disappointed that I never heard a ‘thank you,’ moreover coming from an Italian family where I was taught to say it always and from the heart.”
In Belém do Solimões since 2006, he later came to understand. To “open his eyes,” the gentleness of the Indios women: “there is no need to say ‘Moẽῧtchi’; the smile, the look, the raising of the eyebrows and, above all, the outstretched hands are enough.”
These hands always turned to the other, never empty, ready to share the little, their all. Sometimes, they were fruits (bananas, açaí, abacaxi, coconut, maracuja), sometimes, manioc flour and already cooked food, very often, fish.
There were nights when the friars returned from the villages, tired after hours of canoeing and wet from the rain. “A little later, a faint knock on the door of the house and, in the darkness (because electricity is a rarity), there is that light of the eyes” that brightens. Friar Paul’s accounts describe the miracle of “those hands, with a half-broken pot lifted by a nearby Ticuna child or mother, with a ‘caldo de peixe’ (fish broth).”
It’s about deciphering a silent language, as Andrea Lombardi (Ra.Mi – Ragazzi Missionari Onlus), for a year a lay missionary in Santo Antonio do Içá, explains from the province of Assisi.
To the groups of young people, whom he has been accompanying in those places since 2003, he in fact reminds them “to lower their tone of voice, to adjust rhythms and volumes” because “the remodulation of self is equivalent to the Franciscan action of ‘making oneself small.’”
The Ticuna, in this, are masters: “for tacit gifts, accompanied by a gasp, for the cleanliness of gesture, which is essential and aligned with the flows of Nature, without exaggeration, without abundance.”
“Of superfluous there is little: this is true both in what they offer you and in the way. Hands directed toward the needs of the other.”
(Loredana Brigante – Popoli e Missione, July-August 2020, p. 21 )
Source
- Popoli e Missione