MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Fall 2024

Mike Lattanzi and Susan Silveus, Tanzania

During 2023 and early 2024, Mike Lattanzi and his wife, fellow missioner Susan Silveus, served with Maryknoll Lay Missioners in Gros Morne, Haiti. This year, they joined the Maryknoll Lay Missioner team in Tanzania.

MUSOMA, TANZANIA—One of the benefits of living in the places where Maryknoll lay missioners work is that we have a modest opportunity to experience exclusion.

No matter how long we live in our adopted countries, we will always be looking in from the outside. As a straight, white male, virtually always included in North American society, my outsider status is a small taste of what it is like when the shoe is on the other foot.

For us, this is just a superficial experience of exclusion, of course. After all, we have material resources that our neighbors don’t, we can leave if the going gets tough (as my wife Susan and I left Haiti, where we previously served, last January), and we reap the privileges often afforded to guests. Nonetheless, I am left with the question: how do I belong here?

In Haiti, our identity as outsiders was always obvious, mostly because of our skin color. Susan and I were among only a half dozen white people in our town (and in the surrounding area for miles in any direction), and I was the only white male. I was always aware that I was different—especially because Haitians often called me blan (“white”).

On the street: “Hello blan, how are you?” “Blan, I am hungry. Can you help?” In the market: “Hey, blan, I have those peppers you like.” “Get a load of the blan trying to haggle.” “Hey look, the blan just bought some buckets.” From children passing by: “Blan, blan, blan, blan”— as they took a simple pleasure in being able to name something altogether too strange.

“Susan and I now live in Tanzania. Here too there is a word used to designate us as whites and foreigners: mzungu,” says Mike.

The word is almost never used in anger or with animosity. People who do not know your name are simply using your most obvious physical trait to identify you.

Haitians will sometimes tell you that the word means “foreigner” more than “white.” While this might seem like a kind of face-saving politeness, there is some support for it in Haitian history. The 1805 constitution declared that from that point forward, all Haitians would be known as “black.” So: Haitian = black; non-Haitian = blan.

Still, for those of us schooled in the history of North American racism, it is hard not to recoil at the idea of someone being designated solely by their skin color. But how can we blan chafe at being labeled in this way when non-whites have had to suffer this indignity for centuries and under conditions in which so much was at stake?

In some ways, it is easier to accept being called blan since the word is in a language other than English and it does not have the same impact as the word white would. But even this last barrier was broken for me one day when a man walked past me and said in American-accented English (something never heard in our town): “How’s it going, white man?”

In what way could I belong as a blan in Haiti? I was often greeted in the street: “Bonjou, mon blan.” (A Frenchified Creole way of saying: “Hello, my white.”) “My white.” I felt it meant, or I wanted it to mean: You belong to me, you belong to us, to our town, as our white, as our foreigner. You belong as our outsider. You belong as the one who does not belong, who is here from the outside. 

I hope that it mattered that I belonged in this way—as an outsider among an increasingly isolated people.

Susan and I now live in Tanzania. Here too there is a word used to designate us as whites and foreigners: mzungu. Although this word does not have the color white as part of its meaning, it seems to be used in much the same way as blan in Haiti—without animosity—to greet you or call out to you. It is sometimes shouted joyfully to us by children.

We are very new here, and I wonder whether I will eventually be seen as belonging to our town as the one who does not belong—as mzungu wangu—”my white.”

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