Turning our American mindset upside down

 

Our three-month orientation course, called Kenya Safari, helped us make sense of our new settings, to adjust and flourish.

 

It equipped us and our fellow new missionaries to transition into the work we came to do.

 

And—this is crucial—our orientation taught us expatriates to respect and value the culture new to us—to learn Africans’ world views and social norms and values and expectations.

 

But we needed to go beyond just appreciating their ways of doing things: We needed to understand the importance of not offending the host country’s people—our new coworkers and neighbors. Our job was to respectfully model our behavior after theirs. We needed to fit in.

 

That required us to turn our American mindset upside down.

It required us to humble ourselves.

 

“Cultural humility gives up the role of expert,” writes Marilyn R. Gardner, “instead seeing ourselves as students of our host culture. It puts us on our knees, the best posture possible for learning. . . .

 

“Cultural humility demands self-evaluation and critique,” Marilyn continues, “constant effort to understand the view of another before we react. It requires that we recognize our own tendency toward cultural superiority” (Between Worlds, Marilyn R. Gardner; also posted on Facebook February 5, 2021).

 

We discovered that what is polite (or at least acceptable) in one culture could be rude in another. For example, Africans are people-oriented and Americans are not, and, in Kenya, everyone shakes hands when they say hello and goodbye. If we fail to do so, we insult them. Learning to always shake hands was important—and yet it was not easy for us Americans to remember. We had to be very intentional in order to not upset anyone.

 

Here’s another example of the difference between the way Americans and Africans think. You might have heard it—it’s making the rounds on Facebook. It’s a story illustrating “ubuntu,” the concept that “an authentic human being is part of a larger and more important relational, communal, societal, environmental and spiritual world” (African Journal of Social Work).

 

The story, which might or might not have come from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, goes something like this:

 

A non-African anthropologist gathered a group of children around him after placing a basket of fruit at the base of a tree some distance away. He told them that when he gave the signal, they were to run to the tree, and he promised that the first to get there would win the fruit.

The anthropologist probably said something like, “On your mark. Get set. GO!”

But to his surprise, the children grasped hands, ran together to the tree, and sat down and shared the fruit.

The anthropologist questioned them: “Why didn’t one of you run ahead? You could have had all the fruit for yourself.”

“Ubuntu,” they replied. “How can one of us be happy if the others are sad?”

 

Sometimes ubuntu is translated “I am because we are,” or “is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean ‘the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.’” (Wikipedia)

 

The story was an eye-opener for the anthropologist. Similar stories from African cultures continue to baffle us Americans, too—although if we understood and applied the Bible’s teachings, I have a hunch we’d be more inclined to do what those African kids did.

 

Throughout our orientation course, we learned to:

listen,

observe,

stretch our thinking,

and, perhaps most important: scrutinize our assumptions.

 

We had frequent opportunities to stand back and examine our American ways, including our American Christian ways.

 

And many times the African way seemed better than ours.

We had much to learn from Africans.