Navigating Values and Beliefs

It has been a big adjustment to change many of the ways that we operate to live here. We cook differently. We dress differently. We clean differently. We learn differently. We are willing to adjust to unpredictable water and electricity. Almost all areas of our lives have been affected, even as small as brushing teeth. I think our family takes pride in the fact that we can make behavioral adjustments. We feel like this is a strength that God has given to us to be able to make these changes.

Now we are starting to run into places that are a lot harder to be willing to change, our values and beliefs. Our family has a different set of values – ideas of what is good or best and beliefs of what is true than the average family in the Sahel. Many of the ways that people treat each other feel so strange or even very wrong all the way down to the core of me. Daily I remind myself that many of these are just different, not fundamentally wrong. And we pray that through our quality relationships they too will overlook our actions that seem so wrong down to the core of them. (This is even trickier with children. For example the other day we went to visit and A Delight wanted to bring along our new puppy, Barka. It wasn't a big deal to me, so I let her. Everyone we saw was astonished and even broke out laughing that someone would cuddle and carry a puppy. I saw shock and fear spread over one girl's face that we crossed paths with on our walk. The girl literally ran away from us because she was so afraid of this small puppy.)

Barka (right) which means "blessing" sleeps outside on a rice bag
with the guard's slightly older puppy, Hakuri (left), which means "patience"

A more regular example is that we’ve embraced greetings and are working to mold ourselves into more community oriented people. At this point in our lives a day that has three people stop by to visit seems to be the average. For more private and task oriented people, that is a lot of visiting!

Yet this is a crossroads that we come to. We have to figure out how deeply we are willing to dig. If we dig so deep, the host culture may not even realize how much we have changed our identity and definition of ourselves to be a part of the culture. Then we may lose the chance to offer what we believe is the Gospel’s critique of every culture. But navigating these cultural values is a sometimes painful process and we sadly realize that when we eventually return to the States we will go through another painful process of figuring out how our new identity now fits in our former home culture.