Village Experience

We had a nice visit to our language teacher’s village this Sunday that gave us a little taste of village life.  We got to experience the partly eroded sandy roads to get there, winding through several other villages on the way.  We got to see the dust rising up over the fields to make it a beautifully hazy late afternoon.  We saw everyone bringing their millet to pound together in community next to the village soccer fields.  We got to see inside the walls of the household where our language teacher grew up, and sit on a mat in the yard with goats, boarding students, and his father’s two wives. 

One wife is on the left, the other is just out of the picture

The story of how his father, who was a notable pastor, married two wives was perhaps the most interesting part of the trip for me.  In brief, his father married his mother but soon afterward her parents made such an objection to her being married to a Christian pastor that they forced her to leave him and return home.  So his father remarried, but not too long afterwards his first wife’s parents died and she converted to Christianity.  In the words of our teacher, he had to take her back of course.  While we tend to be incredulous at the difficulty of trust/intimacy in polygamous marriages, here it is clearly viewed as an important way of protecting and providing for women.  We learned earlier that our partner church’s by-laws forbid Christians to enter into polygamous marriage, but allows people married previous to their conversion to remain married.  It sounds like there isn’t a lot of conflict about this in the church, but it’s very interesting to get a look in at the life issues that other Christians have to reconcile with their theology.