Episode 41 :: Faith Adiele :: Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun

By Ted Meissner | December 3, 2010

Faith Adiele

Faith Adiele joins us to speak about her experiences as your average Nigerian Nordic farm girl Buddhist nun in Thailand.

Picture this: you’re a complete outsider. You don’t fit in because of your ethnicity, your background, your religion, your gender, everything. And you take that a giant step further by going to another country, where you’re even more alien and don’t even speak the same language.

Many of us have been or felt at some point in our lives that we were isolated in the crowd. Perhaps only a few of us have taken that situation, and used it to deepen our meditation practice. Today’s guest is one of those unique individuals. Faith Adiele is the co-editor of Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology, which contains 24 international stories ideal for college and high school classrooms. Her travel memoir, Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun (W.W. Norton), won the 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir (of 2004). The PBS documentary “My Journey Home” is based on her life growing up in a Nordic-American family and then traveling to Nigeria to meet her father and siblings. Other projects include The Student Body: A Novel, a trashy thriller co-written with three Harvard pals, and two children’s readers on urban Africa.

A popular speaker and contributor to O and Essence magazines, Faith has appeared on NPR, in a television ad for TIAA-CREF, on the Tavis Smiley show, and at universities around the world. She currently serves as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California and is at work on a social/cultural memoir about her Nigerian Nordic American heritage. Recently she was chosen as one of Marie Claire magazine’s “5 Women to Learn From.”

So, sit back, relax, and have a nice Cha Dum Yen. The recipe for this Thai drink is on the episode page.