Br. Sixtus Roslevich in Zimbabwe
In September 2016, the United States was in the final months of the Clinton-Trump presidential election campaigns, just as we are now nearing completion of the presidential election cycle. But at that point in time, I was 7,705 miles from Portsmouth, working my second mission stint at the Monastery of Christ the Word in Macheke, Zimbabwe, in southern Africa. When there was a wi-fi connection, indeed when there was electricity, we would occasionally tune in to the BBC for the latest updates from the campaign trail. In that month, as one of my assignments, I was preparing to lead a “Retreat for Couples: Choosing Our Role Models Wisely (Remembering, Acknowledging, Identifying and Discovering).” I told the participants from the outset: “We won’t be talking much about politics this weekend, but I will tell you that Hillary Clinton wrote a book twenty years ago, in 1996, when she was the First Lady in the White House, titled It Takes a Village. She borrowed the title from a Nigerian proverb (Igbo and Yoruba). …I often hear it used to this day, twenty years later, by exasperated parents and teachers of the boys in our [Saint Louis Priory] high school back home, when they throw up their hands and say, “It takes a village!” Little do they realize, perhaps, that they are quoting a Nigerian proverb.”