Difficulties Mixing Families

Our guard with Smile On outside our compound
Pictured below: Our guard's wife helping to feed
a sick chicken, not a skill we ever learned!

Control is a major theme for our reflections on most of our difficulties while living here. We’re still having friction from time to time with the most intense part of our cross-cultural experience, which is living in close quarters with a local family. In close quarters is not under the same roof, but it is in the same 20 x 30 walled in yard area. While we have lived in other countries before, I think this difficulty has been more intense than expected, partly because it is a very different situation than when La Maestra lived with a family in Guatemala. There she was a single person who came to live in someone else’s house for a time and had a relatively easy time adapting to being part of the family.

I think one of the key differences of our current situation is that we’re not clearly on someone else’s turf like she was, with someone else having the responsibility of helping us live in their space. But it’s more like we’re on our own turf, however we’re operating in someone else’s country/culture. So in living in close quarters with another family we find ourselves torn between trying to adapt to this culture to the extent necessary, but trying to keep the coherency of maintaining a household and family the way we know how to. The fact that we’re the employer also means we’re tasked with supervising what is good for both our guard’s family and ours, navigating between our expectations and the cultural sensitivities we are trying to cultivate. All while trying to do so with grace in order to be appropriate with our living out of the gospel here.

This is complex, but the rubber has hit the road at times like when we spend a chunk of our free time for an evening running water into different containers for tomorrow’s cooking, bathing, and laundry needs. We’re planning ahead because we know we won’t have water during daylight hours the next day, and we know that we’d better save the water in our big storage tank for the possibility that we won’t have any water access for several days in a row, which can happen without warning. Unfortunately this goes against the way our guard’s family expects to operate in their culture. For them it makes sense that since we have a large storage tank, we don’t have to worry about tomorrow. When there’s no water tomorrow, then it makes sense to use the water just sitting in the storage tank. If we drain that and then have several days without water, then they are then relying on the fact they’ll be able to carry water from somewhere no matter the difficulty in that hypothetical. Or we also get the sinking feeling they expect that their rich foreign employers will be able to buy or pump water and so it will turn out all right. We’ve found this is a long process of us trying to communicate our expectations and desire for them to do our type of forward planning, and also trying not to be overboard in our expectations for another culture or our ingrained stinginess. In navigating this we’ve sometimes felt like failures to adjust to another culture, and other times we feel like failures to be direct enough in our requests for things that are necessary from a Western point of view.