Wait— Should I eat the banana now?

Yesterday I stopped by my neighbor B.'s house to drop of some decongestant.  She has been having terrible sinus headaches, and was unaware of the miraculous existence of pseudoephedrine.

I was distracted and in "America mode" when I went over there, and—without thinking—expected to stand on the stoop, hand her the box, explain the dosage, and leave.  Not so.  I was immediately ushered inside by B. and her daughter and son-in-law.  They sat me down, handed me a Coke, and we visited.  B. and her daughter don't really speak any English, so that mostly meant I talked with her son-in-law, who I could understand about 80% of the time.  He interpreted some so I could talk with B., but we also did a lot of sitting and smiling in silence.  (B. smiles all the time, even with terrible sinus headaches—an amazing lady.)

After a while, B. started talking animatedly to her son-in-law in Jarai, and stood up to go get something upstairs.  He explained that she wanted to show me something—I caught the words "movie," "Vietnam," and "Jarai history."  They stopped the old Jackie Chan movie they had been watching and put in the DVD B. brought.  It was a home video of a Jarai holiday held in Greensboro a couple months ago.  Hundreds of Jarai people had gathered there to celebrate their culture with dance and music and speaking.  They are an often-oppressed minority in Vietnam, and I love to see how they proudly show their culture here.  It was a privilege to see something clearly so important to B.  It was a privilege to be invited into her home, period.

The situation also had its beautifully awkward culture gaps to navigate.  I wouldn't let B. pay me for the medicine, even though she offered.  As I declined, though, questions were running through my mind: Is this the right call here?  Am I insulting her?  Does her culture have a strong reciprocity code, where she's now indebted to me in a way that stresses her out?  I know the Jarai I've met take family responsibility very seriously—am I insulting her husband or son-in-law by "providing" for her in a way they think they should?

A few minutes after I told her the decongestant was "no problem, I don't need money," she handed me a bunch of bananas.  I took them, and thanked her.  Maybe—I thought—this would take care of the reciprocity issue.  I gave her medicine, she gave me bananas.  An exchange of gifts.  We're good.

As I sat there with the bananas, though, she came over to me again—this time with a paper towel, which she carefully lay on the coffee table in front of me.  I'm stymied.   Is it for the bananas?  Is a place to set the bananas?  Am I supposed to eat a banana right now?  I'm holding several bananas.  Is she expecting me to eat one, or all of them?  Is the paper towel totally independent of the bananas—a place to set my can of Coke, for example?  Or maybe it's not for me at all.  It's right in front of me,  but that might be coincidence.  Now I see she set one in front of her son-in-law, too—wait, am I supposed to give a banana to each of us, so we can all eat?  Does it look like I'm hoarding them?

In the end, I just continued to hold the bananas and chat normally and smile.  It was a pretty low-risk decision—they had been clear enough about where I should sit and whatnot that I knew they could communicate with me if the paper towel or banana-eating was extremely important somehow.   And, as far as I know, our  friendship survived my confusion unscathed.  It's very possible, though—I'd venture to say likely—that they were laughing at me as I left.

Every time that happens—every time I'm sitting somewhere, trying to be friendly and wondering whether I'm showing friendliness in an understandable way—when I'm trying to show goodwill or gratitude and hoping not to insult anyone instead—when I hear everyone else in the room speaking Jarai or Nepali and know I can't be a part of what they're saying—when they gesture towards me while they're talking and I wonder what they're saying about me, or they laugh and I don't understand the joke—when I have no real way to gauge how well the situation is going socially or whether I'm breaking all sorts of norms and I know I probably look a little silly, sitting there in (to them) strange clothes, clutching a bunch of bananas and sipping Coke while conspicuously ignoring a paper towel—every time that happens, there's this moment when I remember that for my neighbors, life here is like that almost all the time. 

I mean, I'm able to laugh at myself for my ignorance at B.'s, but that slight tension of cultural confusion ended for me with my visit—it lasted for all of forty-five minutes.   I imagine it being there every day, often involving people who aren't nearly as gracious as B. and her family were to me.

How tiring that must be.

And as I remember that, I feel even more privileged when my neighbors allow me into their homes.  B. invited me into her one space where she and her family get to relax and set the social rules themselves and not be expected to know English or crazy American customs.  It's a humbling thing, you know?

(Then again, maybe it's just therapeutic for them to get to be the ones laughing at the American for a while…)

A strange trend continues...

I have been summoned for jury duty in every single county in which I have resided--four counties between turning eighteen and moving here, which makes my fifth--but I have never had to report.  They always summon me either the week before or within the couple months after moving out of that county.  This morning, Marion County, Oregon summoned me to appear next week.  This morning, for the fourth time, I was excused by reason of "not a resident."

I just think it's kind of weird.

The Truth

I often had to recognize that the need to 'do something special' was born of a restless spirit.  Such  persons wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those that lay nearest did not satisfy them.

- Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

One can never see, or not till long afterwards, why anyone was selected for any job.  And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity.

- C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

I came here without knowing what "being here" would look like.  I knew some things—I would live in a place where they resettle refugees, I would volunteer in the nearby refugee-ESL classes—but overall it was sort of vague.

Yes, when people asked "What will you be doing?" I could rattle off a list: "Well, I'll be living in the refugee community and loving on my neighbors.  I can do practical things like give people rides to appointments and help navigate social-services bureaucracy and make sure they have enough food and teach them things like how to use drugstores and buses.  I have training in language and culture acquisition and cross-cultural communication and adult literacy—I can help people learn English and understand our weird customs and explain words and situations they don't understand.  I can be a friend to people thrown into an inherently bewildering and intensely lonely life situation.  I can advocate on their behalf when people are taking advantage of them." 

Those are good things.  

The truth, though?  The reality I desperately try to disguise and am secretly terrified that you and my church here and people I meet will find out?

I really don't do any of those things very often.

The truth is, my life here is—at its core—exactly like my life was in Portland, and Baltimore, and Salem.  Yes, some of the superficial details are different—the sights, the smells, the languages—but overall it's the same: I work, I eat, I try to have a social life, I pay bills, I try to love God and people better.

And the truth is, I often fail at loving God and people better.

And the truth is—the big glaring truth is, to my shame—that I have made "being here" all about me.  Whatever I may have told myself and others, at the end of the day I expected to come here and get to be this amazingly useful person.  A hero of benevolence and self-sacrifice and evangelism.   A spiritual and cultural adventurer and guide.

And the truth is, I'm not.

… I'm here because God invited me.  I still don't really know why.  I mean, yes, many of the skills and experiences and desires he has given me fit well with being here, from a practical perspective.   I'm also introverted and non-confrontational  and have to work really, really hard to pretend I'm comfortable meeting new people—those things don't fit quite as well.   Maybe God will use all of that here in a way that makes sense to me.  I don't know.

The thing that I do know, though, is that he did not invite me here so that I could be, or claim to be, extraordinary.

I so distinctly remember coming back from visiting my brother in Haiti, and reflecting on how beautiful and powerful God was in the "ordinary" lives of him and his fellow missionaries.  I remember recognizing how often my own desires to go overseas or do "missionary work" were rooted more in a desire for the exotic—in a desire to look different and special—than in a desire for God and his glory.  I thought at the time that I had learned that lesson. 

Ha. 

… Truth be told, I am often discouraged by and ashamed of how useless I feel here.  I have my three or four solid "I did something helpful!" stories, and cling to them and tell them and hope that other people will assume the rest of my days are filled with equally "good-thing-Marybeth-is-there" usefulness that I simply don't have time or inclination to share.  I hope that they—you—won't know how the majority of my days are spent doing nothing that looks special, and how often I see my weaknesses and fears and feel at a complete loss even how to begin "helping" here.

I am discovering, though, that the shame is not so much the shame of actual failure or sin.  It's just the soul-squirm of pride being mortified.  It's embarrassment that I'm not in fact the amazingly-awesome hero of service I want you all to think I am.

And—despite all that I have just written of my "uselessness" and fear—I am also discovering that this lack of clarity about my role here and "what I can do" is not in itself failure.  It's even, in a hard-to-grasp way, freeing.  The pressure is not on me.  God is here.  God is not useless.  God invited me here.  Apparently, though, God is needing to break or heal or change some things in me before he can use me in any way I can recognize.  Or maybe I won't ever recognize it.  Maybe that's the point.  I don't know.

I still want to be useful here, and I think that's okay.  But I am having to address the underlying question of what I mean by that.  Useful, like "people will love me and be so glad I'm here and be aware of how wonderful I am"?  Or useful like "holding my time and skills with open hands for God to do his work through them, however the heck he sees fit and however big or small my role looks in that work"?

I want to say it's the second, but so often find myself stuck in the first. 

I think I'm going to be learning this lesson for the rest of my life.

O for a thousand tongues to thank God for his patience with me. 

My grace is sufficient for you, 

for my power is made perfect in weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:9

Cats. Everywhere, cats.

These fluffy guys are all over the place right now:

I've counted at least eight.  They live under my neighbor's apartment. People here have been feeding them, but not adopting them—and they are multiplying.  This is the third litter since I've lived here.  Cats are great for keeping rodents at bay (a very helpful thing here), but this is getting a little excessive.

They're super cute and fluffy though, hey?