No Island is an Island?

Our island home

To be an island is to be isolated, cut-off. The well-known quote “no man is an island” is used as a warning against isolating yourself.

Now Donne wasn’t talking about physical islands, but we live on a real, live isolated tropical island. On a clear day we might be able to see another island in the distance but generally all you see around us is water.

Sometimes we feel the isolation. We feel it when someone comes to visit (or wants to visit) and we have to explain how expensive and time-consuming it is to get to us. We feel it when rough seas and delayed boats mean that there are shortages on the island. (We just had a flour-shortage that temporarily closed down the bakeries and eliminated bread and baked goods from our diet.) We feel our isolation when we ask our classes how many people have ever been on a plane or traveled beyond the islands and most don’t raise their hands. We feel it in the mono-cultural milieu of the islands- almost everyone on the island has the same language, culture and beliefs.

Tom & Megan after friend's "secret" wedding

All these help drive home the fact that we are easily cut off from the bigger world, but that doesn’t mean the islands or islanders survive in isolation. They couldn’t survive that way in fact! We had a new visitor this past week and they marveled that although the islands are ranked as one of the poorest countries in the world, it doesn’t usually feel as poor as all that. Granted there is almost no economy and almost no GDP. But it survives with the aid and help of others. The most valuable export from the islands is its people. They go out from the islands, get educated and find jobs and then they send money back. There are so many islanders living abroad that send money back that almost every family’s income is bolstered by money from afar.

Families are not isolated nuclear families either, island families are big and extended. Resources are supposed to be shared, so money given to one person in the extended family helps support everyone. This past few weeks there have been a number of examples of how we have been drawn into these extended families.

One friend asked for a loan of a considerable amount of money so she could send it to her son for his overseas tuition. Others come to our house regularly for help with food— enough that we keep a whole supply of canned foods just to give-away. We were called upon to contribute to help friends travel or get medicine. 

But the interconnectedness isn’t only financial. This week our downstairs neighbor asked me to be her official spokesperson (giving a speech and officially receiving charity money on her behalf so she can get medical treatment for her daughter). This would normally an extended family member. Our old neighbor Ma Riziki came and asked me to be part of the family delegation to go and negotiate the terms for her son’s wedding with the future-in-laws. Another island friend confided a big life-change that I know only a small handful of people know about. Yesterday I left in the evening for a date with our older son, knowing the downstairs neighbors would help the kids left behind if anything happened.

Another lost tooth for our youngest!

It took time and we aren’t naturally the most outgoing, but we’ve found ourselves in the midst of a web of island connections. And that isn’t including all the interconnectedness we naturally find with our team! A

So all that’s to say that our island may be an island, but we aren’t!

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Tom made it safely to Kenya and has been enjoying connecting with some old friends and leaders there. Our newest teammate arrived and she has been transitioning well so far, jumping into relationships and community events. We successfully renewed our visas for another year! Our visitor from the US office had a nice visit and we enjoyed sharing our vision and values for our work here (which should help her get others excited about joining us!).

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray for our interconnectedness with islanders that it would grow and give us opportunities to be lights into families and community. Fevers have been plaguing the islands! They tend to knock people out for days and our youngest is the most recent victim. Pray for his recovery, he has had a hard time keeping anything down. Pray that no one else gets sick (we just got a text that a teammate is spiking a fever too). Pray for our week without Tom on the islands, that Megan and kids would survive and thrive and lean on islanders and teammates and that Tom would make lots of good connections and be inspired at the leadership meetings. Our downstairs neighbors are doing the paperwork to travel (legally!) to the French island for medical treatment for their daughter. Pray for them as they wade through the bureaucracy.