Becky Kiel

On Wednesday, we took Reginald back to the airport in Kansas City. Reginald Thompson plays alto saxophone professionally in Freetown, Sierra Leone in West Africa. My husband, Dyke Kiel, is a professor of music, retired from Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri in the USA. They had met online through a mutual friend, and Reginald, wanting to learn more, had spent a year taking lessons from Dyke – over Zoom.

As he and his wife made plans to visit her family in Virginia, it became clear to them: Reginald should hop over to Missouri for some in-person study. There in Virginia, her family explained that it was a long way to Missouri. It is. And the 962 miles (1,548 km) doesn’t account for the differences in the landscape.

Reginald lives in a tropical city, has performed in London, UK, and was visiting in Virginia. Two days before he arrived in Kansas City, I sent a photo of our dog ignoring two deer grazing on the other side of our back fence. He replied: “What a beautiful landscape.” I think he saw it as a large estate instead of a middle-class house in our town. The day he arrived, when we drove south of Harrisonville, which is south of Kansas City, I pointed out a corn field. He said that it was so big it must be a plantation. I told him it was a normal corn field. We drove another 60 miles (96.5 km) past trees bordering pastures of grazing cows and fields of corn and soybeans.

Skip this paragraph to avoid data. According to Wikipedia, Nevada, MO has a population of 8,212 in an area of 9.06 square miles (23.47 km²), resulting in a density of 913.97 34 / sq mi (352.88 / km²). Reginald is used to life in Freetown where the metropolitan area population is 1,500,234 in an area of 31.46 square miles (81.48 km²) for a density of 34,000 persons per square mile (13,000 / km²).

As for the saxophone, he and Dyke practiced all day except when they took up melodic dictation or jazz harmony. Reginald tapped out the rhythm of Afrobeat for us. He loved the sound when he tried out the Selmer Mark VI saxophone. Meanwhile, I relaxed in the next room, soaking up the combined sounds of Dyke’s Yamaha and Reginald’s Yanagisawa. After supper, we listened to jazz, and they discussed the performers’ styles.

Both Dyke and I were eager to introduce Reginald to sights in the Midwest. We spent an afternoon at the American Jazz Museum and a morning discussing instrument maintenance at Heritage Music Repair in Kansas City. We stopped at the reconstructed frontier fort in Fort Scott, Kansas, heard the Cherry and Jerry duo play ragtime at the playhouse in Nevada, and on July 4^th saw the fireworks in Rich Hill, Missouri. Before he left “fly-over country,” we rode around town in our neighbor’s new red, electric Hyundai. 

Reginald helped Dyke pick up and deliver boxes of donated food to our Community Outreach. One Sunday, he helped me distribute lunches to the needy. He asked, “How can there be Americans with nothing to eat?” In our Lutheran adult Sunday school, he talked about some of the problems during Sierra Leone’s civil war. He was a child then, and his grandmother succeeded in protecting him from rebels who had come to kidnap him, intending to turn him into a child soldier.

Reginald learned to ask for hot sauce to put on the bland food of the Midwest. He ate ribs for the first time at Buzz’s BBQ, had a breakfast mess at 54 Café and biscuits and sausage gravy another morning (also firsts), fried rice at Quick Dine, enchiladas with a marguerita at Iguana Azul, a burrito at I Don’t Care, and a Blizzard at Dairy Queen. He and I ordered salmon at Gobbler’s Roost; the menu that night included cucumber dip appetizer, corn chowder made from fresh corn, salad, and lemon cream cake. We watched Dyke tackle at least 24 ounces of beef filet and a friend’s “pork chop” that looked like a rib roast on his plate. And on a Monday evening when I brought Julie’s cream puffs back from a meeting, Reginald’s eyes lit up with his first bite.

Dyke and I have visited Sierra Leone twice. We worshipped in Anglican and Methodist churches in Freetown and in Kissy, the only white people present. We tried speaking a few words in Krio. On the streets we passed UN and International Rescue Committee vehicles. We coped with intermittent electrical power availability. At Joy’s hillside restaurant, I told her I could eat her fresh tropical fruit every day. One Sunday afternoon, a friend drove us in his Land Rover to a beach resort where we ate fresh crab and watched the Atlantic waves roll in.

By now, Reginald has returned to his wife in Virginia where they are preparing to return home to Freetown soon.

Ahead of his visit, none of the three of us knew exactly what to expect. Now, Reginald has left, and our lives have been mutually enriched in ways none of us could have guessed.