Cultural Vision and Blinders

This past week I attended a conference with over 300 women from our partner church. It was a wonderful 5 days of intensive 'Casa' language. I have been working on how to get intensive language like this since moving here. But with our family and the intensity of living, it hasn't been possible until now.

The weekend was so full of observations, emotions and new understandings that I feel like I could write a book. But I will try to spare you and just quickly set the stage. We stayed on the grounds of an elementary school. There were 4 pit toilets and many 'temporary' toilets as they were called :) Tents were set up for placing belongings and one large meeting tent was set up too. Along with many other women, I chose to sleep outside and on the hot, hot nights and I loved it! Of course typical to here the kitchen was outside.

The schedule consisted of waking up for devotions at 6am, teaching at 9ish, 3ish and 8ish. The meetings often went very late though and thus many started very late too. The evening meeting went well into the night - midnight or later.

This woman is from another ethnic group,
usually nomadic herders. Her features and
hairstyle with bun on the front are
dramatically different from the 'Casa.'

The main speaker was a pastor from the capital. He spoke 4 times and talked to this group of women about raising children with an emphasis on monitoring children's tv and technology. One of these sessions he brought up many things about the US. I thought, 'wow, you know more about the US than I do', as I had never heard of the things I understood him talking about. It took a good amount of convincing myself and walking through my emotions to keep my tongue in check. Learning from what my husband does so well, I tried to look at it from the pastor's point of view. This got me thinking about us talking about the Sahel in the US. Do we always tell the things people from the Sahel would want us to tell? Sometimes we do. Sometimes we don't. Then what is the point of telling the not so good part of a culture? Hopefully these negatives are only said as an illustration that will enable the listeners to walk more closely with Jesus. Accurate or not, hopefully the goal is to encourage these women to carefully watch over their children's technology and grow children with Christian values. These women have a difficult task in a majority Muslim country. It reminds me of something said in our cultural trainings. As foreigners, we need to pick up the positive aspects of the new culture we are interacting with and drop the negative.

The second speaker was impressively a woman, although a woman from a neighboring country, so she honestly is not thought of in the same way as local women. She spoke on selfishness. It amazed me that her teaching, although well received by the women, didn't seem to make it past some cultural habits. I observed three clear levels of women in the women's fellowship I was traveling with. The 'highest' group sat there and ordered people around to do everything. The second group generally sat around, but occasionally were asked to do something if no one else was available. The final group consisted of only two women and they served everyone in addition to taking care of their young children who had to come along. When we got on the bus, everyone was a little selfish with the seats they chose. When we laid down our mats for chatting or sleeping, everyone acted a little bit selfishly. "Who ever will be great among you must be your servant" was going through my head over and over this weekend. Every time these women asked one of the "third level" women to get her a drink or bring her something I wondered why they couldn't see this as the selfishness being talked about in the meetings. I finally decided it probably comes down to cultural blindness created from cultural expectations. Just the same way that our culture can blind us to seeing and weeding out the ways we are not acting as Jesus asks us to. As with any good cross cultural experience, this has to lead us to ask, where has my culture blinded me? What is it that I am not able to see in my actions that I tolerate even though they're opposite Jesus' teachings?

-- La Maestra