Culture Shock: Why I haven't Experienced too Much of it.

During my stay back here in Kenya, countless people have asked me if I have experienced culture shock or any kind of adjustments in being back. They ask me if I miss home. My honest answer has always been, "not really." I have lived in four countries and travelled to fifteen during my 25 years of life. I've 'been around' more than the average person. Coming back to Kenya in September was for me more of a coming home. During my four years of boarding school here I grew to love Kenya. I must admit however, that this time I have taken a much deeper plunge into Kenya than I ever had in those four years. I live closer to the average Nairobian than I ever have before; yet at the same time, I am different. For reasons due solely to the womb I came out of and the mother and father who forced me to come out of that womb, I am who I am. Two of the most significant aspects of Roland that are different to the average Kenyan are my skin color and my access to money. By American standards I am no where near to wealthy, or by no means did I grow up in a wealthy home. In fact, I would say I'm actually relatively close to the lower class economic group. Yet, by Kenyan standards, that makes me seemingly wealthy. Those are just a few of the differences between myself and most Kenyans.

As far as culture shock goes, there are three things which have really helped me to grapple with it quite well. Firstly, as previously stated, I've been here before. Secondly, my education has caused me to view cultures from more of an insider perspective. Particularly during my education at my current school, Nazarene Theological Seminary, this idea has been ingrained into how I reflect on other cultures. I've read probably around 10 textbooks that deal specifically with this aspect of cultural respect. Cultural respect views others as equals yet as unique. The way they think is very unique to who they are. Lastly, my faith has caused me to view others differently. As a follower of Christ, I try to consider others as equals in light of their creation in the image of God. God showed no favoritism in his creation, and neither should we. The ministry of Christ and his death on the cross ensured that others have just as much value in God's eyes as I do.

Lately I have been rather disgusted (yes, a strong word, but truthfully I have) by individuals who somehow think that they are greater than others for a variety of reasons; whether that be skin color, education, age, etc. In my view educational discrimination is just as horrible as racial discrimination. Just because you have a few letters after your name does not mean that somehow God created you with a little more of his image engrained into the fabric of your makeup. It is therefore my desire to treat others as equals, to love others as equals, and to live as if this is true. I know I fail at times, but I think it is through the understanding of failure that we can become stronger. We have to make the choice to do so however.

There have been times when I have realized over the last few months just how different my mutt of a culture is to the Kenyan culture. Just this week I have realized this, especially in relation to hospitality and to issues of time. However, it is in these instances of realization of cultural differences that those from the outside can shine in their interaction with those on the inside. There is a choice to be made. Do you view these differences through the lens of your own culture, or do you view these differences through the lens of the kingdom of God?

Great thoughts on Jeremiah 29:11 from a good friend

One of my good friends from seminary recently commented on a comment thread about Jeremiah 29:11. Often times this is a passage which is quoted from an individualistic stance. I love what he had to say:

Very humble suggestion: Remember as we read these words that the English 'you' that we read today is translated from the Hebrew ' אַתֶּם ' from the Old Testament. It is a plural 'you' referring to the entire people of Israel. I only present this because this passage is often presented and read in a very exclusive manner with 'plan' and 'prosperity' interpreted in a very individualistic and financial/economic approach. However, our modern understanding of 'economy' and society not to mention the 'individual' would be quite foreign to the context in which this passage was written. As we are encouraged by this passage, let us remember: that God established Israel to be a light to all the world and desired for them to prosper in that plan and for that plan to be the future they hoped for as this passage maintains. Because God desires that all, that ' אַתֶּם ' would prosper in the plans that God knows for us. For God's love is for all the world (John 3:16) and this 'plan' and 'prosperity' are intrinsically communal. So, let us 'individually' seek to prosper in servitude and death to Christ (Philippians 1: 21-30; Philippians 2: 1-11) Constantly putting the 'prosperity' of God and neighbor first before ourselves. We are who we are because of God, and God created and shapes us within community and God will redeem us in community (Every knee, every tongue) so let us read this passage and interpret our very lives through a communal lens.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, Indian nor Coloured, White nor Black.

South Africa: it's my home country. I was born there 24 years and 4 months ago. I haven't spent massive amounts of time there (only a total of 2 years and 10 months of living and around 4 months of vacation time there), yet I feel a deep sense that South Africa is my home. To a large extent that is because SA is where my roots are. As I said above, I was born there. It's also because I just flat out love it! South Africa has so much good going for it. Firstly, it's a beautiful place! South Africa's natural environment is so diverse, filled with a wide variety of landscapes. There are vast amounts of coastline both on the east and west sides of the country. There are huge mountains that dot the landscape inland from the ocean. There's a large desert in northwest South Africa. There are numerous game parks spread throughout the country with countless varieties and species of Africa's great animals. Secondly, South Africa has very diverse people groups. There are 11 official languages in the country and four distinct races in South Africa: black, white, indian, and colored (not a racist term, it's an actual race there). Thirdly, South Africa is a sports crazy nation. My favorite sport there is rugby, and man do we breed rugby players well! We've won two rugby world cups, and more will surely follow. Other key sports in the country are football, cricket, field hockey, surfing, golf, etc. In school, students are almost required to play a sport, and each grade level has on average five teams for the main sports. Lastly, I love South Africa because of the food! South Africa is home to as much diverse food as it has people groups and more! When I was there I surely gained at least five pounds feasting on all the good things South African cuisine has to offer. I ate massive amounts of meat at braais (Afrikaans for grill, thus BBQs) for three consecutive days and at least another two days non-consecutively. Are you starting to get the picture? Wanna visit sometime? You should!

Yet with all that there is to love about South Africa, one massive, dark cloud still hangs over the landscape of a country supposedly 17+ years on from Apartheid. I saw it vividly during my two and a half weeks there on vacation recently. The racism of South Africa is the key element to that dark cloud. Within the first 24 hours of my time in South Africa I saw its affects and heard its brutality. People asked me numerous times, "How are the blacks in Kenya, they aren't like our's are they?" "Surely they're better," they were thinking. It was during these moments that my heart broke. Driving through South Africa I'd go from affluence to incredible poverty in a flash. Most of the racial dividing lines set up by the Apartheid government during their oppressive reign at the helm of South Africa still stand today. Not because the people don't want to move out of their ghettos, but because there is no way to be able to do so. They simply cannot afford it. I realize that some have moved out, and some are doing quite well for themselves. But the vast majority of people have not left the now invisible barricades once enforced through papers and police people who kept them inside of particular sections of metropolitan areas.

It's at times like the moments I spent back in South Africa that I had to ask how does God view this place? What difference should his kingdom make in this landscape? This is where the road must feel the rubber running all over the top of it. This collision of rubber meeting the road has to happen every day. It's when words are turned into action. When the followers of Christ stand up and speak up for the oppressed of South Africa.

South Africa sort of has a minimum wage. But, millions work for less than that because there simply are not enough jobs at minimum wage to discover. And it's true. These jobs bellow minimum wage are needed, and people are thankful to at least be making something. It is this something that will provide food and some kind of sustenance to survive. But I have to ask, would I ever work for that? Would people of my skin color ever work for that? Most certainly not. I would never in my life work for less than $1.50 a day. Never would I work for less than 20 U.S. cents an hour. Yet, this is what is happening. Could it be that the people deemed lazy simply don't have the energy and motivation to work for piddle sticks? $10.50 a week. Would you work hard for that when you're used to a minimum wage of many times that a week? The honest answer is of course I would not, and definitely most of you wealthily enough to be reading this on a computer would not. Why? Because there is a heavenly kingdom that has come to earth that says this inequality has got to stop.

Please don't think I'm only bashing the fair skinned people here. I'm not. I know there is a government of empty promises in power. This is a government that promised the impoverished of South Africa hope. They promised a better future. They promised jobs that not only allowed people to live, but allowed them to enjoy life. Sadly, it's not happening. At least not on the grander scale. Many of those promise givers are living the glorious life, but at the expense of the people they made promises to. I'm not necessarily agreeing with suspended ANC party member Julius Malema who says that he wants to see white domestic workers in South Africa in 10 years. What I am saying is there needs to be true equality. Not only on paper but in reality.

So what is the solution? That's tough to answer. But I think it starts when people truly begin to think about the fact that there is now neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. In other words there is now neither white nor black, indian nor colored, Sandtonian nor Sowetoan. There are no longer dividing lines, we are ONE in Christ. This week I read Ephesians 2:11-22 with new eyes. I hope you can too:

Don’t take post Apartheid South Africa with a grain of salt. It seems like only yesterday that blacks, indians, coloureds, etc., had no idea what it was like to live like the whites. You hadn’t the faintest idea. You knew nothing of what it meant to be the chosen ones. Had no idea what it meant to go to a nice school, or drive a nice car, or work a decent job. But now, because of Mandela and the struggle of some fine men, some of which died for your freedom, you who were once out of it have now been given a chance.

Things have been made better between us, and apparently there is supposed to be equality. Both whites and darker skinned people are now one. The walls of hostility and segregation have now been demolished and we are supposed to be living in the same neighborhoods. The constitution has been rewritten, so that those laws which hurt us more than helped us have been erased. And we have now started over. We live in a democracy. Instead of continuing to live in our own places, separated by hundreds of years of aggression and hate, there is now a new creation, a new nation, a rainbow nation.

Democracy was supposed to bring us together. We were supposed to shake hands and hug our neighbors. The hostility was supposed to be over. There was supposed to be peace and equality. Through peace we are supposed to have equal access to quality education and well paying jobs.

That’s pretty simple right? We’re no longer supposed to be separated, looking for a better future. The bright future is now here. We’re no longer enemies, people living in different suburbs, neighborhoods, shanty towns, slums, villages, etc. We have a new country, and we all have access to it, irrespective of skin color. Let’s build a new nation, where everyone has a place, and an equal place at that. There is one thing that holds us together, and that is that we’re all created in the same image of God.

_________________

I realize that I'm asking for something that is way beyond reality. But, you have to remember, the kingdom of God is something which is way beyond reality as well.

Airports bring out the worst in me...

I wrote this blog on the plane to South Africa on December 12:

Yesterday I preached on the lectionary passage for the day. The passage of scripture which I was preaching from was John 1:6-8, 19-28. The main question that I asked in the sermon was, “What kind of a savior are you witnessing to?” Little did I know yesterday that today I would utterly fail at witnessing to a savior. In fact, there was probably little to no resemblance of the savior that John witnessed to, the savior seen in Isaiah 61:1-2 and following. Today I am flying down to South Africa to spend a couple of weeks with family. I’ve been looking forward to this day for quite sometime. In a sense, there’s a real advent them to that.

I arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya at around 1:30 today. It’s not a foreign place to me. I flew out of that airport on my way home to Malawi upwards of 12 times during my stay at boarding school in Kenya for my high school years. If there is any place where western culture and Kenyan culture clash, it’s at that airport. In the west, we want things done right away. Time is key not the event at hand. Kenya’s a culture where time is not considered higher than the event going on. This was extremely evident the first night I arrived back in Kenya back on September 6. The visa counter workers were having fat chats, texting and calling friends, all whilst hundreds of passengers queued in their lines waiting to get their passports stamped so they could get into Kenya.

Once again, things were taking a good amount of time today at the airport. I approached the ticket counter and turned over my passport. The desk attendant asked if she could see my health card. I passed it to her. She told me, “Isn’t there a way you can fabricate the date for your yellow fever vaccine?” On my health card, next to the vaccination I had 10 years ago for combating yellow fever, stood the date December 5, 2001. I’d noticed this long before arriving at the airport today. However, I’d seen in the fine print below this yellow fever vaccination that the ten years start ten days after you receive the vaccination.

After saying I’d rather not fabricate the date of my vaccination she called over her supervisor. This supervisor then began to tell me that they look at the date of the vaccination, and that this is the date that matters, not the ten days afterwards like my health card officially stated. I tried to comprehend why, but when I was given the notorious, “that’s just the way it is” statement, I felt the animosity growing within me towards this lady. My voice got a little louder, my face most likely a little more crimson, and my body language a little more stiff. Finally she did let me go through. It was in those moments that I was failing to witness to the Jesus that John was witnessing to. John was witnessing to a Messiah who would handle situations with love, albeit with righteous love at times. In those moments this afternoon, I was not pointing to any kind of love! Sometimes you have to practice what you preach eh?

I'm groaning...

Lately I’ve started to come to understand Romans 8:18-30, and particularly Romans 8:23 more than I ever have before. The biggest theme of the Advent season is one of waiting with expectation for the day when we celebrate the coming of our Savior into the world in the form of a baby. I’ve definitely been focusing much more on such a theme of expectation during this season of Advent than I have ever done before. That entrance of Christ into the world was revolutionary.

There are those events that take place in our lives that we look to as category shifters. We look at them by saying something like: “there was life before 9/11 and life after,” or “life before colonization and life after,” or “life before the day I met you and after,” etc. The birth of Jesus took that to an extreme. No other single event in history has caused us to completely change our calendar to express life before and after an event. Isn’t that incredible? And so it is now that we eagerly await the day when we celebrate his birth; the day history changed forever. But, for those who are followers of that very Jesus, we eagerly await something else as well.

As followers we eagerly await the time when he will come again, when the kingdom of God is brought to complete fruition. This too has become all the more evident this Advent season for me. So many places in scripture we see prophecies pointing to this baby, even referring to the very way that he would come, as a child. For hundreds of years they had been expecting this Savior! And now it is the same with Christians. For hundreds of years we have been expecting our savior to return to us. Paul tells us in the aforementioned passage that creation itself is groaning out for the future hope. Think about that for just a second. Creation is making a deep, inarticulate sound, in response to the pain and despair it is going through as it eagerly awaits the finality of the kingdom of God.

So it is during this season that I pray that as an individual who has experienced the moving of the Holy Spirit, that I can groan inwardly because of the pain of all of creation, longing to be restored to it’s rightful purpose. Not only do I long to groan, but I long to respond the way that Jesus did. If my faith is not revolutionary, something is deeply wrong. Faith in Christ is something that should be a category shifter. Our faith as believers in the savior that came into the world as a baby should cause us to create those same events that we look to as life changers. People should be saying, “there was life before Roland and life after Roland.”

You see, Christ never separated the spiritual from the social. Yes, his salvation is personal in the sense that we must believe in him and allow him to change our beings. But there is something else that happens with belief. Belief leads us to social action. In all of Jesus’ miracles, the miracle itself either freed the miraclee (ya, I just made up that word) to live in society in ways that they couldn’t have before, or Jesus miracles directly impacted a social situation or social thought process. Salvation meant a complete shift in some sort of social understanding. This Advent, I’m groaning. That groaning isn’t a selfish groaning, it’s a groaning for change in this world we live in; a groaning for the moment when the kingdom has completely come.

I'm Anxious...

I only feel this way once in a blue moon. Actually, it's rarer than that; for blue moons come relatively often compared to how often I feel this way. I shall describe it like this:

Imagine you have been friends with someone for a decent amount of time. Then, some significant moment in your life comes, and you wonder, will they remember?

It's like that, but not like that at all. It's anxiousness of a different sort.

It's like waiting for the first snow fall. It's supposed to come at some point in winter, but you have no idea what it will look like. Okay, it's actually not like that at all. It's anxiousness of a different sort.

It's like devoting yourself to a cause, with only your best given, and wondering if that cause will lead to something greater. That's exactly what it's like. I'm anxious.

Behold, I send my parcel before your face...

For my high school years, I attended a boarding school here in Kenya. At that school I became friends with a quality chap named Robert whose parents were serving in Zambia. They moved up to the town where our boarding school was. Many times in the two years they were in Kijabe I'd go down and experience their generous hospitality. I'm so thankful for people like that, who come into our lives and make it better! It's been six years since graduation from our boarding school. I'm still friends with Robert, and his family has still shown that same generous hospitality to me in various ways over the years. One of Robert's many brothers was flying back to the States a few weeks ago to share the Christmas break with his family. Robert's mom asked if I would like to send any Christmas presents to my family in the States. Naturally, you can't pass up on such a speedy courier service from here in Kenya when the normal postal service can take on average anywhere from 3-6 months to get your parcels to the States.

My family had no idea what was coming. Yesterday a parcel arrived at their post office in Utah with no name in the sender box, just an address from somewhere in Roseburg, Oregon. That box of presents would be heralding Christmas from a son thousands of miles away in Kenya. My mom is going to place the presents underneath their Christmas tree, signaling the coming of Christmas day when they can open their presents.

Two thousand years ago someone else was signaling the coming of a parcel the size of a baby from a far away place as well. "John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.... 'After me comes one who is mightier than I.'" Whilst that parcel which I sent to my parents heralds the coming of a certain day where they can open gifts, John's ministry in the wilderness was heralding something so much more significant.

We as humans can often get caught up heralding the coming of things that pale in comparison to the very thing that John was heralding. During this Advent season, I pause to think about the things that I point to in my life. Do I point to/speak of things that have such little significance to the kingdom of God, or do I point to the One who ushered in that very kingdom? John had a very important ministry; he prepared the way for the One who was to change history forever. We too are called to be messengers. We are called to prepare the way for the coming of our Lord for the second time. What are you pointing to today?