Aurera.

” Aurera.”

Was he referring to me? I suppose he was, because, in their land of black people, I was different, deemed exotic and hence, beautiful.

Aurera. It means Beautiful in Portugese. It doesn’t just mean pretty, but beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking. Or so i understand.

Sometimes, when walking along the beach by myself, random men, obviously intrigued by my descent and who were trying to be funny would say that to each other as they passed me, thinking that I did not understand. Or village women at the ministry whom I greeted would sometimes complement me.

Aurera. It means Beautiful.

I found it amusing, how Beauty can be so different in different cultures.

Back home, my hair is too big, too dry. It is neither rebounded straight nor permed, but just naturally wavy, a frustrating in-between. Back home, my thighs are too large, my frame, a little too big for a supposedly little Asian girl. Back home, my teeth aren’t straight enough and I ‘ought’ to get braces.

At Mozambique, my hair is considered straight and beautiful, in comparison to the wiry hair of the African people, even though I think their hair stands out beautiful against their gorgeous ebony skin. There, I was petite compared to many of them. There, I was exotic, “Aurera”, Beautiful.

In the quiet of the early mornings there by the beach, God spoke much to me about Beauty.

I noticed, just how much time the missionaries spent simply hugging, holding and loving the children, telling them how beautiful they were. It was Papa Don, an elderly man from Canada, who, together with his wife, served as houseparents for the children who impacted me much.

” These children need to know they are beautiful,” he would say, before going on to kiss and hug a child. “No one tells them, and they grow up feeling unloved and insecure.”

Later, I saw for myself how true it was. These ebony children and women, with their pure eyes and white teeth and chocolate skin glowing in the sun were simply beautiful.

As I saw Papa Don hug those ragmuffin children in torn and tattered clothes, holding their hands and constantly telling them how lovely and Beautiful they were, something in me shifted, and heaved and
turned.

I never heard that as a child. It was completely foreign to me, to be called Aurera.

Mind you, Pretty is a completely different word. Pretty is what you use to describe a vase, or a chandelier or something at the shop which catches your passing fancy. No girl really wants to be pretty as much as she wants to know she is Beautiful. No girl wants to be a passing vase, good to look at for a while. They want to know, that deep inside, something eternal about them has permeated their skin and overflowed out of their skin to be called Beautiful and worthy to be loved.

But our society is a conservative one, we come from families and communities where we receive compliments with defense and embarassment.

During the three weeks, God did a real and deep work for my inner healing.

Not only did I finally receive a profound and tangible idea of His love, I also, for once, received and understood and claimed being a Beauty of His eye because I am His creation. I have to claim it every day.

The day Pastor Patra left Mozambique, I cried much. Pastor Patra was a woman whom I’d made friends with during my stay there. From Holland, she and her husband had come to visit too. Her husband, a pastor too, had a severely debilitating chronic illness which left him paralyzed on a wheelchair and only barely communicable. Yet, they had come all the way from a developed country to Africa to be with the children, pray with the prisoners, to find God in a little forgotten dirt place. Her strength, beauty and love for her husband impacted me deeply.

The day she left, she came up to me and said to me, in all seriousness and gravity, ” I want you to know and always remember, Wai Jia, always remember, that you have the most beautiful eyes in the world. They are so pure. You will be a wonderful wife. You are such a beautiful girl and you don’t even know it.”

As those words left her mouth just before she left for home, tears just streamed down my face unexpectedly. I had never heard or dared to believe those words before. And here she was, saying it with so much conviction and purpose. I realized, that a child or a girl or a woman can never be told enough times how beautiful she is.

Yet, even though I was shocked to hear her words, deep down inside, I knew that she was right. After all, I am God’s child, made beautifully in His image.

I just, never really knew it for myself.

But now I knew, I knew not just because she told me so ( people had told me before but I’d never truly believed them), or because I was in Africa and deemed “Aurera”, but because, as I told the children they were beautiful and felt God’s heart for them, felt His desperation as I desperately wanted each child to know how incredibly beautiful he or she was, I felt His love for me too, and His affirmation for me.

For me to tell the children they were beautiful, I had to believe and claim that for myself too.

Through the orphans, my orphaned spirit started to heal. And through them, Beauty started to fill my heart.

Aurera.

You are beautiful.

You are beautiful.

Child, you are infinitely and gloriously beautiful.