Archive for category: Lighter Side

Every culture has its norms. I daresay every culture in the world thinks that its culture is the best, superior to all others. I remember standing in Somalia one day in a bombed out section of the city of Mogadishu with 3 or 4 guards. There was no government, no schools, running water, or government-supplied electricity. One of my guards asked me where my family was living and I informed him they were in Nairobi, Kenya. He looked at me and said, “Thank God I live in Somalia and not in a horrible place like Kenya!”

I could only stare at him with total incomprehension.

This cultural superiority expresses itself in many ways. Some of them demean others. Some are hateful. And some are downright funny – unless you are the victim.

I went with some of our African leadership to visit a remote village, not knowing I was the first person of my flavor, my color, to visit this village. As usual when I showed up for the first time it caused a big stir and was taken as an opportunity for feast or party. When my wife and boys often went with me to such remote locations it was as if the village would cease working for a week just to be around our children, stare at them, play with them, pinch their white skin, and pull their blonde hair.

But this time I went alone.

We spent the usual number of hours greeting everyone, being introduced for the first time, sharing the best of food, while sitting in the most honored of places at the evening meal. Often it was 11 to midnight before I could go in exhaustion to my sleeping bag. But even then the children were not satisfied. Apparently after their parents had gone to sleep they had snuck out of their beds, surrounded the rondoval in which we were sleeping, and proceeded to whisper and laugh. Now I have always been a light sleeper and having a dozen or so African children whispering and laughing outside of my hut is a sure nemesis for my being able to sleep. Finally in exasperation I asked one of the men in the hut with me, “What do these children want? Why won’t they let me go to sleep?”

With a great deal of chagrin one of the pastors visiting with me said, “They want to know if you are white all over? All they can see is your face and hands while you are dressed and they are wondering if only your face and hands are colored white?” Knowing I would not get any sleep until I “addressed” their concerns, I went outside of the hut, during the full moon of the East African coast, dressed only in my University of Kentucky basketball shorts – which I used as pajamas.

The children gasped in horror. I heard them say, “Isn’t it terrible to be white like this all over your body?” Another said, “He looks like a grub which you sometimes find under a rock.” Another commented, “Maybe when he gets older this horrible white skin comes off and God gives him a black skin?”

With what little dignity I could salvage from the moment, I held my head high, adjusted the waistband of my University of Kentucky basketball shorts, and then crawled back into the sleeping bag never to appear again unless fully clothed.

I could write a book about the beds we have slept in in rural African villages. Let me rush to say, these are some of the most hospitable people on the face of the earth. They would literally borrow money in order to keep us in their homes, feeding, and entertaining us.  One village heard that we were accustomed to sleeping in a Western style bed, so they carried a bed over two mountains, rebuilding it for us to sleep in. If ever we write such a book it would also have to include our numerous encounters with mosquitoes, critters which inhabited beds and mats before we arrived.

It was also about this time that I was introduced to the mosquito coil.

This was a simple chemical device which you lit the end of with a match.  It burned down to increasingly small coils, emitting a noxious smoke inside of your sleeping space, with the intent to kill any mosquitoes in the nearby vicinity. It was deadly for mosquitoes, but no one ever mentioned to us about its effect on wasps.

Climbing into my sleeping bag one night I did not notice a huge wasp nest in the grass ceiling of the hut in which I was sleeping with 3 other men. Just before I lay back on my sleeping bag in the warm summer night air, I lit my mosquito coil and watched its vapors disappear into the thatch roof of the hut. While mosquito coils are effective in killing mosquitoes they only serve to make wasps groggy, and after they wake up, they are very angry. By lighting the mosquito coil near my sleeping bag these noxious fumes arose and drugged many wasps in the ceiling. They began to fall from the ceiling into my sleeping bag. For many minutes they lay dormant inside of my sleeping bag until the anesthetic of the mosquito coil began to wear off.

Then they started getting mad.

And as they came out from under the anesthetic they began to take out their anger on the country boy from Kentucky. I don’t know how many times I was stung but I do remember, with extreme embarrassment, my ejection from the sleeping bag yelling at the top of my voice as these wasps stung me all over the lower part of my body. I woke up my sleeping mates and the entire village.  Many people came running worried their visitor was being attacked by thieves…or perhaps having a psychotic episode. All the while I was dancing out of the hut, beating myself, trying to lead the wasps in my sleeping shorts to an early death.

It was not long until I accomplished this urgent task of eradicating all of the wasps upon my person. Once this task was successfully done, I looked around, and found most of the village staring at me with various looks of concern and growing amusement. Here I was, half dressed, with my friends from my hut beginning to explain to the broader village what indeed had happened; I was not suffering from dementia, but had lit my mosquito coil and had been sharing my sleeping bag with a nest of wasps. Some kids began to giggle until the whole village had a good laugh at my expense. Kids began an attempt to imitate the dance of the white man in their village that night. The village found this hilarious. I found it less so.

For the next 3 days we ministered in this village. Whenever we would walk past a group of children, they would look at me and begin the wasp dance, until they fell laughing on the ground.

I don’t think I ever returned to that village.

Almost anyone who has lived overseas in the two-thirds world will have stories on at least three subjects. These will include misadventures in regard to airplanes flown, toilets used (more later about this one), and food eaten. There is an old overseas worker’s rhyme which goes something like, “Where He leads me I will follow. What He feeds me I will swallow.”

Our boys have been good troopers as they have seldom complained, while growing up in Africa, of the long distances traveled over rocky terrain, mats on the floor’s on which they slept, or food eaten by hand which you will never find even in fast food restaurants. Actually we are all hopelessly warped a little bit as our family reminisces about the foods we miss in sub-Saharan Africa.

But our youngest will never attempt to drink Maasai milk again.

Now this is perfectly understandable once you learn the ingredients of such a well-loved drink by these wonderful people. The Maasai love their soured cow’s milk. This drink is a blend of sour milk, a little cow urine as a preservative, along with some blood from the cow. This concoction is contained in a long red gourd from which one drinks. Predictably , the first time we went to visit the Maasai they kindly offered us their favorite drink, allowing us Westerners to drink their delicacy from a glass rather than a gourd.

Now here is my secret to drinking unpalatable drinks. Do not take tiny sips! If what you are given to drink is counter to your taste buds, don’t sip, but down the whole thing in one huge swallow.

Our youngest son was five years old and he felt left out from drinking the Maasai milk. I said to him, “You don’t want to drink this.” He said, “I want to drink this.” “You don’t want to drink this.” “I want to drink this!” This litany went on for about ten times back and forth, until his mother, my wife, said, “Let him drink the milk.” I gave her my special look which communicates, “This is not going to work out well” while we passed the Maasai milk to our youngest son. He took one sip of this special milk and, as it hit his taste buds, he spewed the milk out hitting us and the Maasai elders standing nearby!

Twenty years later we have still not been invited back to that village.

We had planned to go and check on the opening of a hand-dug water well.  We had not planned on one of our team members buying a young girl as a wife along the way.

During the famine and civil war in Somalia one of our most appreciated projects was assisting in the digging of water wells in remote villages.  During the dry season the few rivers in the area would dry up with the result that young girls and women would have to trek many miles to get a dirty bucket of water.

Once we had addressed the severe situation of starvation in many villages we began a program of food for work.  We would provide a village with food if they would provide labor for various projects.  Often freshwater was the commodity most needed.  We would provide the tools and villagers would dig, by hand, water wells that sometimes went down 300 feet!  Once the wells were dug we would also provide concrete rings for lining the well to keep it from becoming contaminated or collapsing.  These projects were very popular.

It was April 21st, supposedly the hottest day in Somalia annually.  It was a scorcher and I was in a terrible mood.  We had worked very hard in this village to provide a deep, freshwater well for a place that often had people dying from a lack of water.  This area was not secure and we often had problems coming and going into this embattled environment.  But finally the well was completed and we were ready to pull up the first bucket of the freshwater.  But before we could draw the water, religious leaders from a nearby mosque showed up for the first time.  They surrounded this freshwater well, quoting from the Qur’an, and adding their editorial remarks.  On this scorching day of the year, one in which we felt that we deserved to celebrate the opening of this well and our partnership with this Muslim village, these religious leaders from the mosque sucked all of the joy out of the moment.

They said something like this. “We thank you Allah for sending these Christian slaves from America to serve your Muslim people.  We now dedicate this water to Islam and we thank you for the way you make Christians serve Muslims.”

I was ticked off.  I was quite angry that these religious leaders thought that they could steal my free will.  I was angry these leaders attempted to enslave our team also; especially these particular religious leaders who had not shoveled one spade of dirt nor placed themselves in danger during the weeks the well was dug.  Now I had to spend additional hot and dusty hours refuting the claims of these religious leaders while assuring the Somali people of this village that we had chosen to come to their village, chosen to love them in Jesus’ name, and we had chosen to be obedient to God by coming to their village.

Finally we began the long journey back to Mogadishu with my Chief of Staff and a retired bi-vocational pastor who had graciously come to Somalia with his wife, giving of their time sacrificially.  This pastor was very gifted in getting his hands dirty while retaining people skills of such a level that he seldom met a stranger.  It was at his suggestion that we stopped along the main road at what appeared to be Somalia’s version of a 7-Eleven store, just in hope that they might have a chilled Pepsi or Coke.  While Hassan and I sat in the truck our older colleague went in search of a cold drink.  I was beginning to worry that he had been gone way too long when he suddenly came at a trot from inside the tiny store.

Noticing his pale and scared face I asked him what was wrong.  He blurted out, “I think I just bought a girl and I might have just gotten married!”  I said, “Hassan please go into the store and find out how much trouble we are in.”  Hassan was gone for about 45 minutes before returning and informing us, “Yes, we now have a new wife for our brother here.”  Apparently this elderly man, forgetting all of his cultural orientation and training, had entered this small store that held three men and a beautiful young girl around 12 or 14 years of age.  Though he knew better, he patted this small, Muslim girl on the shoulder and said with country charm, “You are so cute that for $50 I will just take you home with me.”

Very quickly the girl’s father recited some words from the Qur’an and the other two men agreed with the verses read and the shop owner pronounced to the bi-vocational pastor that his daughter was now the American’s wife!

I was sweaty, tired of the 120° heat, frustrated by the battle with the religious leaders, and now this.  I asked Hassan what was the cultural thing that needed doing to get us out of this current mess and he went back into the store and was gone for about 45 minutes.  He returned to where I was sitting in the truck, and where my colleague was hiding, and informed us what it would take for us to culturally extract ourselves from this “wedding”.  The little girl was excited about being able to leave Somalia and her parents were thrilled with the thought of the resources which could come from such a ceremony. 

Hours later we were finally on the road to Mogadishu having culturally dealt with, and extracting ourselves from, the marriage issue.

As we drove the two hours to Mogadishu we began to decompress and our older colleague was able to joke about his near-wife experience.  Soon we were all laughing at how we had found ourselves in such a ridiculous situation and had finally extracted ourselves.  Laughing, we finally arrived at our team house in Mogadishu.  While Hassan and I thanked the guards and unloaded the tools and boxes from the back of the truck, our oldest colleague went into the team house and told his wife of many years of the “funny thing” that happened on the way home that day.

That was his second mistake.