Learning to live here

"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting our time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

Aboriginal Activists group, Queensland, 1972

 

            I stumbled on this quote on a global health forum this week and it resonated deeply within me. I (naturally) spend a lot of time thinking about cross-cultural interactions and what it looks like to live well in a culture I was not born into. When I look at Haiti, I see a lot of damage done by well-meaning foreigners. We look at this country and decide it is broken, and since our way of living in our country works for us, we decide that this country needs to live like us. Consciously or subconsciously we assume that our way is the only right way to live. We miss (or misunderstand) the complex and wildly different history of this country, and more importantly we don’t see the beauty in how this culture functions. We don’t speak the language, or we don’t speak it well. We misinterpret interactions and we don’t listen or learn much. Instead, we impose.

                        I think there are two main ways of interacting with a foreign culture. One is the way mentioned above, bringing in the things that work in our culture and assuming if those things were just done here, this culture would be “fixed.” Few of us would phrase it so baldly, but our actions betray our underlying assumptions. This is the way of belittling our brothers and sisters in words and in actions, in snide jokes and muttered asides. We see the material comfort of our country and assume that our way is the only way. We see different as wrong, and in our attitudes and words belittle differences in others’ ways of doing things. This does so much damage to both sides. So much damage. It harms the people we are supposed to be working with, telling them in so many words, that they are less, and it harms us as pride and superiority, attitudes completely contrary to the Gospel, root themselves even more deeply in our lives.

            There is a second way. This way involves humility and listening and learning to see the value in the way another culture operates. One of the things I love about working with MOHI is talking to Renee. Renee has an incredible capacity to see the richness in Haitian culture.She sees beauty and strength rather than only weakness, and she celebrates what she sees. Moreover, she celebrates with me as I learn to see these things too. So many times I have come into her office to talk about something I witnessed, trying to process my thoughts. Over and over she has helped me see how the people of Haiti bring something unique and valuable and necessary to the kingdom of God. I believe that this is the way of peacemaking, the way that brings the healing that all of us, American and Haitian desperately need.

            Writing this post has been a bit of a “get the plank out of your own eye first” experience for me. I am leagues from getting this right. I spent the last week beyond frustrated with the way some systems work in this country, and to my shame mouthed off to my Haitian friends about it more than once. By the grace of God, I am learning to see. Grace opens my eyes to my complicity in the brokenness around me, and grace opens my eyes to the kingdom of God- a bigger, richer, more beautiful thing than I could have imagined on my own.