Final Thoughts - Culture

Well, my twelfth trip is in the books.  I arrived with the medical team and stayed on an additional three weeks.  I managed to see all but three of our orphanages, several feeding stations, and visited a site of a future potential feeding site.  We announced the site for our fourteenth orphanage, at Kinyach in the Pokot region, worked with the secondary school under construction at Kapsabet and held meetings for our orphanage workers.  We established a couple of new income generating projects, and I drove over 1,500 km.  Quite a month.

On every trip I try to focus on one aspect of my job that I need improvement on.  This time, I did not plan what to focus on until I got here and discovered it for myself.  Early in the trip when communications problems between my directors and myself caused some conflict, I knew that I was experiencing a culture problem.  I decided to slow down and pay more attention to the culture of the people that I deal with so much, and try to learn something. 

Our culture is something that we do not think about very often, (unless we travel a lot), except when we Christians complain about the ‘decline’ of our culture.  I’ll define culture here as all the things you have learned about life that you don’t realize you know.  For example, you just know that we use a fork to eat with some things, a spoon for others, and our hands for other things.  You may think that someone who eats with their hands for most things is “barbaric” or “rude” but in reality they have just learned a different cultural way of eating than you.  Calling someone “uncivilized” based on their cultural education is snobbery, IMHO.

Culture affects communication in ways you wouldn’t expect.  For example when you say, “I will not give you any more money.”  You probably mean “no more money at all.”  To someone of another culture, it may be understood that you are saying, “no more money today”.  When you object to that understanding, they may think YOU are the barbaric one.  Culture is also your language and surprisingly also your accent.  How many times have you judged someone because of that?  I have made a conscious effort to change my accent while I am here to sound more "Kenyan", so much so that Americans comment on it, but Kenyans really seem to appreciate that I am trying to adapt.

So as the trip went on, I tried to dig deeper into the meanings of differences in culture that I saw.  I asked a lot of questions, and my new assistant in Kenya, Stephen Owino proved to be a valuable resource.  He is trying to teach my withered old brain some Swahili, and I did pick up some, BTW.  It’s going to be a long journey for me to undo some of the cultural baggage that I carry in order to understand these people better and improve our teamwork.

In the end, it’s just part of the amazing journey that God has set me on.  I could never have imagined that I would be here, doing this.  But it seems as though he has been preparing me for this work for all of my life.  I only pray that He keeps making me learn His lessons as I do my best to serve Him in Kenya and in the U.S.  Thanks for reading my ramblings on this long journey. Writing it certainly helps me process everything that I have seen.  I pray it helps you understand a little better what God is doing here. It is truly amazing!