Reservations

Last days of vacation on different African island

“We had a reservation.” We told the sleepy hotel clerk.  In Western minds this is like a promise. It should provide security and assurance. We don’t have to worry, “We have a reservation.” But “reservations” can have a different meaning. If someone “has reservations,” it is the opposite of security and assurance. It is a feeling of misgiving and apprehension.

We had tried to make reservations at two different island hotels for that night. We were arriving after midnight from an international flight and leaving the next morning for our domestic flight back to Clove Island. We didn’t want to bother our friends, nor go all the way into the capital. It was the precise situation where having the assurance of a reservation was needed. But the first hotel refused to make a reservation two weeks ahead of time and insisted that we call back only a day or two in advance. When we contacted them a day or two ahead of time—they had no available rooms. The second hotel was contacted just over a day ahead of time.  They too disliked agreeing to a reservation, but finally they said they would reserve a room for us. Yet there we were in the parking lot at 3am with the hotel clerk telling us that all the rooms were full.

Hike with family

Our kids were beyond tired and pathetically lied down on the ground with tired, tearful eyes, using their backpacks as pillows. By the time we had called and awoken our friend, our kids were asleep. As our family of five squished back into the too-small-taxi with all our bags, we sighed. The three children instantly fell asleep, giving us a moment to reflect on the situation and the cultural conundrum it presented. Our conclusion: Islanders have reservations about reservations.

Islanders are not comfortable in speaking in a fixed way about the future. This is partially a religious conviction. They always mark a phrase talking about the future with the phrase “If God wills”. This gives any future statement a note of uncertainty because only God know for sure what will happen.

The other reason that islanders aren’t comfortable about fixing the future is that island life is very unpredictable and much of the infrastructure is unreliable.  Things like government issues shutting down an airline, social unrest closing roads, gas shortages, water shortages, electricity outages and more are all crises that seem to pop up with little warning. So from an island perspective, so many things can happen, you simply shouldn’t hold any plans too tightly.   For example, one of the inter-island airlines is completely locally run and it is very forgiving with changing your ticket. There are no fees or penalties to change the flight time or day! But that looseness goes both ways—you have to accept that they may change their plans too, even if that means canceling your flight or changing it from an afternoon flight to a morning flight with almost no notice.

A hilltop home

So back to our hotel reservations. The hotel worker said that he saw our reservation listed at the front desk earlier but that he didn’t remember there being any note about us arriving in the middle of the night. He guessed that whoever was working assumed we weren’t coming and gave our rooms away. From an island perspective, a living person in front of them with money for a room is a much better option than a name written on a paper. And in some ways we begrudgingly understand. The underdeveloped infrastructure of the islands means that it is still almost entirely cash-based. Without the use of credit cards, we are making reservations with no monetary assurance for the hotels. If we don’t show up, they have no way of charging us a fee. So we understand the allure of a sure customer versus a potential customer.

So while it wasn’t a huge comfort at 3am, we understand where islanders’ reservations about reservations come from. Maybe in the future we’ll try again and try new ways of reassuring them when we make a reservation, for now I think we’ll avoid those midnight flights!

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Despite a rough night, we have arrived safely home and we are very happy to be home.  It sounds like our various family members are safely making their way home.  We are extremely thankful for the good times we were able to have with family and for everyone’s safe journeys.  Tom had some tummy issues this week and he is very happy to be feeling better.  

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray for travelers and visitors.  Throughout the rest of the month we have both people traveling and visiting, including organization reps, a former worker here and our teammate coming back. Pray that travels would go smoothly and that visits would be blessed and that much light could shine even when the situations are complicated or difficult.  Please continue to lift up our island brothers and sisters, that they would gather together regularly, trust one another, honor each other and care for each other as a family should. Pray for us as we jump back into island life.  We’ve had lots of travel and Megan’s back has done well, but we know from experience that this type of travel can weaken her back and lead to pain, so pray that her back would strengthen back quickly and that she wouldn’t have any pain in coming weeks. The translation project is supposed to have a few days of check meetings soon with a consultant, pray that the logistics and checking time go smoothly.

Defining Family

Our nuclear family this week

How do you define family?  On the islands, families are big and complicated. Traditionally islanders grow up with their maternal extended family around them— mom, aunts, grandmother and lots of cousins.  Moreover, the word “mother” and “father” are loose terms and can refer to aunts/uncles or any other parental figure. When an islander calls a woman “my mother” it is common for there to be a longer explanation— “who raised me”, “who gave birth to me.”  Plus, polygamy, divorce and remarriage are common on the islands too, which further complicates family life. As Westerners, it can be very confusing to know “who is who” in island families. Islanders will often make an effort to explain who someone is… “Oh, that’s my cousin, her mother and my mother are siblings. They have the same mother but different fathers.” (Though sometimes their explanations only make things more confusing.)

Then what about us? In much of the Western world, the concept of “a family” is the nuclear family of parents plus kids. For extended family, we stay connected by phone calls and periodic visits, but our extended family often doesn’t know about our day-to-day life.  As overseas workers, we are far from our families.  True, whole nuclear families will go overseas together but they leave their extended family behind, while singles go completely alone! Sometimes islanders can’t understand why we would do that for more than a couple years at a time and for us it can be hard too. So we’ve learned to redefine family a bit. Our team becomes family for us. The singles become aunties and uncles.  Of course we stay in touch with our families back home but on a daily basis, it is our teammates who know the ins and outs of our lives and understand our struggles. 

Team family last month

Then what about God’s family? We use the language of “family” to talk about our faith communities. Does the family of God do a good job of being family to each other? Does it follow the Western model of nuclear families and isolated singles? Does it follow an island model of maternal connections?  God’s family is beyond blood and culture.  Sometimes we’ve struggled: how do we get involved with islanders like a “family” without creating dependency? How do we encourage islanders to integrate into the family of God? How do we encourage isolated islanders to become family to each other when they aren’t inclined to trust people that aren’t related to them? How do we model family well? Are we willing to let people into our families even if it makes our lives messier and more complicated?

We don’t have all the answers to these questions, but we have seen one thing that seems to go a long way toward this: prayer.  It may seem a simple thing, but regular and frequent prayer seem to bind us together in ways that other strategies simply haven’t achieved.  Something about prayer reveals hearts, breaks down barriers and brings people closer.  It’s not the only part of the solution but it seems to be an important part.

With some extended family this week

A few weeks ago, one of our island sisters was traveling and would be away for 4 months.  So as a group, we went to her house and prayed for her.  A week later, as our island siblings heard we were going away for a few weeks, they came to our house as a group and prayed for us.  It’s not a big thing.  But somehow, these moments serve to bring us closer and we feel the family of God being strengthened. 

PRAYERS ANSWERED
We were traveling a lot this past week, but our family and kids did well and Megan’s back seems to be doing okay so far. It has been great to reconnect and spend time with our extended family!We’ve heard that our island friend was not miscarrying (as feared). Thank God for this answer to prayer but continue to pray for a healthy pregnancy (she is still nervous). 

PRAYERS REQUESTED
One of our teammates is in the USA having just celebrated her brother’s wedding this weekend— pray for a good time with family and friends before she heads back to the islands. Our other teammate (still on Clove Island without her team family) is doing well. She is keeping busy. We left our short-termer on the islands with our colleagues. This is his last week on the islands. Pray for him as he processes his experience and transitions home. News from Clove Island is that people are upset about a number of arrests this week related to mysterious explosions that have been rumored to be happening around the island. The explosions are rumored to be connected to plans for future unrest. Not sure what to make of all the rumors, but continue to pray for peace, stability and justice on the islands.

A Significant Amount of Time

Tom, friend and short-termer

We saw the ex-pat workers bristle at our suggestion that they had not been here very long. We had said, “It’s been less than a year, right?” But they quickly corrected us by saying that it had been just about a year now. Unfortunately for them, that did not strengthen their argument for us that they had been on the islands a long time. We’ve seen lots of people come and go on the islands, but we find they still have a lot to learn after only one year here. What seemed to them a very significant amount of time, to us was not terribly significant considering the complicated situations they were in.

We remember planning to come back to the islands after our second son’s birth and pushing to get back as soon as possible. Ultimately we were back on the islands with a two week old, even though I had had a c-section and hadn’t fully healed yet. My body was rejecting the stitches and my incision became infected on the islands. Looking back our rushing back seems a little foolish, but at the time it seemed like we had already been gone for over 6 weeks and we wanted to get back as soon as possible.

Other teammates have also struggled with being gone from the islands for a such-in-such number of days. They work to shave a day or two off their time away, but then they talk to their island friends. These islanders don’t count their time away in days, they count time off-island in months. When we told our island neighbors that we were going to Madagascar soon, they guessed, “So will you be gone for a month or two months?” We assured them that we wouldn’t be gone THAT long, but it was obvious that (to them) being away for a month is pretty normal—not really significant.

A couple months ago we talked to some potential long-term workers, thinking of coming to Africa in 2020 and interested in our team. We had a good, long talk about our team and the work, but when we said that we were looking to welcome new workers in the fall 2020, they looked discouraged. They were really hoping to come to Africa in early 2020. It was obvious that the difference of 6 months was a closed door for them—they’d have to look for other opportunities. It reminded us of, well, us…

When we first came to the organization, we were hoping to go to the field in mid-2007.  At our orientation week in mid-2006 we learned about the opportunities: there was one team starting in 2006 (too soon, we thought). But the next team would not be starting until mid-2008. We were so disappointed. It felt like such a long time to wait—another year!

Tom with his good friend's kids

But then we met a veteran couple at orientation week. (They were there to share their experience and help give some perspective to Africa.)  Not knowing our situation, they shared how they had come back from Africa temporarily for their son’s education, probably for around 4 years. They talked about it like 4 years was nothing and we expressed our surprise. Four years was certainly a long, significant amount of time! But then the man said, “Well, what is 4 years when you think that we have 20-30 years of work ahead of us?” Suddenly our complaining about a one year delay seemed small and immature.

But even as we write this post, there is a part of us that cries out that even a single day can be significant! Didn’t we just write a few weeks ago about how our short-termer’s time here on the island, while short, was significant. People’s lives can be changed in a single summer, one month, a week or even a day. There are certainly times in my life that were short but very significant. We’ve even balked a few times when people have suggested delaying coming to Africa (even though they’ve felt called) to get more education or to get some work experience. We caution them about waiting too long and losing their vision. Some people delay and then get comfortable at home and never leave. “After all, a lot can happen in a couple years!” we’d say.  So are we just being hypocrites and calling an amount of time insignificant in one situation and in another considering it highly-significant?

As I’ve thought about it, it seems that we can only determine if a time period was significant after it has long passed. Who’s to say if this day or summer is significant until we give it a few years and we see if that time is still informing our thoughts, ideas or decisions?  Sometimes we think we know when something life-changing has happened, but the proof comes when our life is really changed and stays changed afterwards. If our life quickly goes back to normal, was it a truly a significant experience?

At our local airport, heading to big island

There is a time for everything under the sun.  A time to go quickly and a time to go slowly.  A time to wait and a time to move ahead.  The trick is knowing what time you are in and allowing times to be significant and life-changing when they are meant to be.  Thankfully, our Father is ready to guide us.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Various travels have gone well so far. Our pregnant island sister made it safely to mainland Africa. Our short-termer is now on the small island. We had a good and encouraging day on the big island with our country leader (and old teammate), as well as our old friend Ma Imani. Our other teammate is safely on her way home for her brother’s wedding! 


PRAYERS REQUESTED
There have been some divisions and disagreements in the body on the big island. Some of these are exposing some long-unhealthy areas in the group. One of the sisters from Clove Island went over to mediate this weekend. We haven’t hear how it went, but thank God that these things are coming to light and pray for good patterns of mediation and reconciliation to be established and for true forgiveness to happen. We made it safely to Madagascar, pray for Megan’s family as they travel to join us. Pray that Megan’s back would stay strong as we travel around a lot in the coming days. Pray for our teammate who is staying on Clove Island alone for the next two weeks, that it would be a good chance to lean on her island friends and neighbors and deepen relationships. Pray for a good friend of our team. She has been trying and praying for a baby for several years and is pregnant. She just made it out of her first trimester but we’ve heard that she might be miscarrying. Pray for her, the baby and her husband.

What Do You Worship?

A recent Men's event: rich, important men up-front

I’ve been reading a good book recently by Tim Keller.  In it, Keller says, “Everyone has to live for something, and if that something is not God, then we are driven by that thing we live for...”   Shortly after, Keller quotes the author David Foster Wallace who famously said in a commencement speech, “Everybody worships.  The only choice we get is what to worship.” Keller goes on to use this insight to think about his own context in New York City and how important it is to understand what exactly people around us are worshiping  So it got me to thinking, “What do islanders worship?”  After a moment of reflection I concluded, they divide their worship between God and The Rich Man and these in equal proportion.  In many ways, the island way is to offer God His due, through prayers and certain sacrifices and then the rest of life is yours to do as you please.  As long as God is given the proper amount of respect, you may run after the big house, the luxury car, the beautiful wife and the status that comes with it.

How do I know this? After living here almost ten years, there are many examples to pull from but some of the most striking evidence for this have come through our regular administering of English exams.  Just yesterday we were giving exams and the final question on those exams is the simple question, “What are your dreams?”  Now, I realize this is not a fair spectrum of the population as most of our students are young, college-aged, and inexperienced, but the responses are still revealing.  There will be the odd student who will tell us of their dreams to be a doctor and help their country, but by and large the most common response we hear to this question is, “I want to have much money [sic], a big house, big car, and be famous.”  Yet, in an earlier question when we asked, “What is a good thing to use your money for?” Often students will reply, “To help others, because this is what God wants.”  One of my students threaded the needle perfectly yesterday when she replied, “In my opinion it is good to use your money for buying anything you want and helping the ones who don’t have anything.”  I didn’t push her on it, but in my experience, there is not usually much money left for the poor once you’ve bought everything you want.

Tom & short-termer about to give exams

But I had another realization as I considered this question of worship.  Do island women worship the same things as men?  The culture and answers I just described are most often heard and seen among men.  In reality, island women are very different.  Island women hardly worship God at all, at least in formal practices.  In talking to my female teammates, it’s clear that women’s lives revolve more around marriage and motherhood.  Their worth, status, and joy seem to be wrapped up in these things.  Can one worship motherhood? Could a wedding ceremony become a form of idol worship?  What happens to the childless woman?  What hope is there for the poor, plain girl?  Of what importance is a good versus a bad husband when marriage and children alone are the goal?

It is not hard to see that the things islanders choose to worship are no less empty than the things Keller talks about us giving our worship to in the West: fame, career, family, money, beauty, art, comfort, the American Dream.

 In his speech Wallace went on to say,  “The compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship...is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Keller saw this in New York City.  We see this on the islands: People being eaten alive by their idols.  The same questions that challenged Keller challenges us. There is something better, more fulfilling, more eternal, than the idols we have chosen to worship. How do we get people to stop chasing them? How do we talk about the one worthy of our worship in ways that can be relevant, appreciated, understood, and felt?  This is the challenge.  This is the goal.

Kids on island Independence Day

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Our colleague (and former short-termer) on the small island was able to get her year-long visa without problem! Elewa’s pain has decreased and there might be a good opportunity to travel to mainland Africa in the coming months for her to get better medical advice and treatment. Megan’s phone hasn’t been recovered but we were able to order a replacement phone that her parents will bring out to us. Our teammates are all feeling better now. We had a meeting trying to act as mediators. It went okay, we hope that the openness to forgive that was expressed was genuine (we will see!).

PRAYERS REQUESTED
One of the strongest groups on the islands (who meets multiple times each week to study together and encourage one another) was just warned via a neighbor that the police said they have to stop meeting. They aren’t sure if this threat/warning is real or just a neighbor causing trouble, but either way, help them to have guidance about how to proceed. That they would not be governed by fear but would still be wise. It is going to be a busy week for us- pray that we can keep good priorities and do what we need to do. One of our island sisters is traveling today on her way to mainland Africa (where her husband is from) alone with their two young kids. She is pregnant and hopes to give birth there, but her husband won’t be with her so she will have to navigate the rest of her pregnancy and two kids without knowing the language or without many contacts. Pray that she would see God providing for her and that all the logistics would go smoothly. May she be encouraged. At the end of the week we will head to the big island for a day and then onward for some vacation. One of our teammates will travel at that time back home for her brother’s wedding and our short-termer will move to the small island. Pray for all the preparations, goodbyes and travels. We hope to have our boys meet with our friend the speech therapist while we are on the big island (who has been helping us remotely), pray that we could find a good time to meet and that the boys’ speech would continue to improve.

Quick Decisions. Longer Consequences.

On the way to retreat on islet

Over the weekend we went on a retreat with our team.  We went camping.  We prepared well and had everything we needed: food, water, firewood, etc.  We remembered these things because of the last time we had gone camping.  That time instead of bringing our own firewood, we had thought we would find it on site.  We found plenty on site, but it was all soaking wet.  This made cooking a real bear. Thankfully we only had one cooked meal planned, but we had to content ourselves with slightly warm hot dogs. The quick decision to not bring firewood, led to much longer consequences (hours of struggling over pitiful flames). This time we planned much better around meals (and were much more ambitious), and the cooking and eating went great! 

Something we like to do on a campout is go for a hike.  So on the second day, we went off on a hike around the island.  It was rather spontaneous. We tossed out the idea and said, “Let’s leave in a couple minutes!” We left mid-morning, walking along the coast.  The plan was to follow the coast and eventually turn inland and walk back over the hills and to our campsite, making a loop.  Nothing overly complicated.  We had hiked the area once before and knew there were the trails the farmers used and we were pretty sure they connected to the coast on the other side.  So even though we did not know exactly the trails we would take, we didn’t think it would be too hard to find our way.  Quick decision.  Longer consequences. Now, we never got lost, but that didn’t mean our hike was easy.

On hike: Following the coast

The first quick decision was to walk along the coast and leave at midmorning.  The tide was still low, but it had already turned and was coming in. As we went along, the tide continued to come in.  There were no trails for us to follow inland. So we had to keep to the coast.  We kept walking, but more often than not the rocky coast was met with a cliff with no way up. There may have been places where we could have stopped or scrambled up, if we needed to be safe from the tide, but none of us were interested in being stranded on a beach or cliff for hours waiting for the tide to go out.  So we kept going.  Finally we rounded a corner and found a break in the cliffs.  A valley that led inland.  Thankful to finally have a way to leave the coast, we turned inland up the valley.  Quick decision.

The valley

We followed the valley inland but soon found ourselves climbing again.  Soon it became clear that to get out of this valley, we were going to need to scramble up a steep hill and that the hill was more of a rockslide. So, in flimsy footwear and with our three kids, we found ourselves scrambling up loose rocks and holding onto roots and branches as we tried to get out of the valley.  Our teammate stepped up and led the charge. Eventually a farmer friend spotted us and started giving his advice. Finally with plenty of scratches to our arms and legs and a much wilted-in-spirit hiking party, we made it to the plateau.  The rest of the trail was uneventful—trails we had traveled before and knew well, but the joy of the hike had been greatly diminished.

It seems there is a lesson for us to learn in all this.  There was nothing wrong with our plan, per se, but at the same time, we might have done things better.  If we had left at low tide, we could have been much more leisurely in our search for a trail inland.  If we had considered the fact that we didn’t really know the trail we would take, we might have prepared with better footwear.  If we had simply done our hike in the opposite order, i.e. climbing over the hills and then coming back via the coast, we could have avoided all our problems all together.  If we had remembered that hiking in the islands is NEVER as simple as you might think, we might not have been so nonchalant in our planning.  But those are the surface lessons.  Perhaps there are bigger lessons to be learned. 

We are constantly making quick decisions. Sometimes, those quick decisions have big, long-lasting consequences.  We don’t realize it because the decision itself seems so small.  Maybe the negative examples stand out more— the flippant comment that ruins a political career. The hasty email that damages a relationship. But it can happen the other way too:  a simple, quick decision that leads to a meaningful conversation that changes someone’s life. Sometimes we can learn from bad experiences and make better decisions next time, but in lots of situations we don’t know what will come of all our quick decisions. We’re thankful that we have Someone who does know. May He guide all our quick decisions more and more.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
We had a nice team retreat on a little islet of the tip of Clove Island. We were thankful for the beautiful location, for good weather and for God keeping us safe. Our kids finished local school and have started the new homeschool year! Our family is feeling better! (But our teammates are sick now. Pray for their quick healing!)

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Unfortunately Megan’s phone was stolen while we were on our retreat. The number of people on the islet is limited and our boat-driver friend who helped us get to the islet seemed to have an idea of who took it. Not sure if we’ll get it back, but pray for islanders and this increasing attitude that it is okay to do bad things if one can get away with it. Our colleagues on the small island still haven’t recovered their lost items. Our short-termer has just two more weeks on our island, continue to pray for his impact with the family he is living with. One of our colleagues on the small island is back for a few weeks to pack up and say goodbye. We are sad to see him go! Pray that his final interactions with his team and his island friends and neighbors could be a blessing to all! Continue to pray for our teammate and the woman who has recently accepted the things they have been studying— pray for growth and good understanding for her and her family members. Our island sister, Elewa, has had a sudden return to the debilitating abdominal pain. Island doctors are giving her various theories of the cause but with no way of confirming the problem. Pray for relief from her pain and guidance as she looks at traveling to get better care and advice.