Better Boundaries

How do you say "no" to a friend or colleague?  As people serving with the church it can be difficult to find where the giving and bending to cultural expectations goes too far for being genuinely helpful and healthy.  The Sahel culture we are living in has such different expectations than ours, which can make boundaries even more difficult to define. On top of that, we are terrible at laying down boundaries. 

Let me give an example. There is a pastor that El Padre has been working with whom we have hosted at our house while he was traveling for church business. We don’t have a guest room, but I lay a mattress in the family room, put clean sheets on with a pillow. It is a fairly simple set up. But still it is often inconvenient. He will say, “I will call you by 9:30pm to let you know if I am coming or not." or “My bus will arrive at 10:30pm, could you pick me up?” And often in these cases his time estimate is way too early. It cuts into our sleep regularly. In addition I never know if he is going to show up having eaten dinner or not until those times. 

Church also has many different cultural expectation,
especially around offerings.  Pictured above are
people going up to present their offerings.

At first it was just his church related trips, but then it was for other trips. Before we left for the US, I am sure we were opening up our house 1 in every 3 nights. In fact, he asked when we would be leaving for the capital. “On Tuesday morning” El Padre replied. “Great I will be here to see you off!” Good thing we caught that warning signal ahead of time. El Padre had to let him know he couldn’t sleep in our home the night before we left, we had too many things to do that night and morning. So he slept at our house on Saturday and Sunday nights!

El Padre and I talked, we are going to have to set boundaries about how often he is sleeping at our home. If it is to visit his village or oversee the building of his home, he will have to sleep somewhere else. But with Sahel cultural expectations this is going to be a hard boundary to put into place. We still have a lot of learning to do... Pray for us! :)

-- La Maestra