How to Respond to an Invitation

 Here’s how it all went down:   

Groom's party at wedding

Ma Riziki had been telling us for weeks that her son’s wedding was coming up, but she’s not the best with dates.  Anything more than a few weeks away is all the same to her.  Something next month versus three months away are kind of vague concepts for her.  A couple weeks before the wedding she finally told us the date and location—and it was a problem.  English teaching takes planning.  Tom was already committed to a teacher training course in a far village that day. It had been arranged for months, he was the primary teacher and that was the final evaluation day.  He had already arranged for colleagues to go with him for this important event.

When we told Ma Riziki about Tom’s prior commitment, she was not impressed. Ma Riziki expected Tom to spend the whole day preparing with the groom and then to travel with the groom to the bride’s village—a village 40 minutes away— for the afternoon wedding.   For Tom, keeping his commitment to his teachers was the priority, but in Ma Riziki’s opinion (an opinion shared by most islanders) a wedding trumps all.

How do we honor Ma Riziki & honor our commitments to being responsible, reliable teachers?  What would you have done?

As you ponder that, let us give you some more background information: We are invited to lots of events. Ceremonies, celebrations, prayers, birthday parties, weddings, funerals. The manner of invitation is important. It is major factor in helping us to know how important our attendance of the event is to the host. In order of importance it goes something like:  The lowest level importance is a quick word of invitation on the street as we pass someone.  The next level would be a printed invitation handed to us.  Above that might be a phone call or a personal visit.  Above that would be a delegation of people coming to our house in a formal fashion.  (Yes, this has happened on more than one occasion!)  Added to these factors are how far in advance we are told and if we are invited and then reminded multiple times. If our attendance is really important then people will often want to confirm and reconfirm that we are coming.

Ma Riziki dressed for wedding

The deliverer of the invitation can vary too, and also holds weight.  These are harder to order.  An invitation from a good friend or neighbor we have known for years is certainly important. But sometimes a new acquaintance is hoping to deepen our relationship with an invitation, and so that is not to be slighted either. Sometimes it is less about a specific person and more about a group.  It doesn’t matter who, but having a representative from our group is what is expected. Sometimes, someone who doesn’t know us in the slightest will invite us on the hopes of getting a foreigner to attend their event and add to their honor.  These rarely hold much weight unless the person asking is of great influence (and if they’re of great influence, they probably don’t need to ask us!).

Some of you might be thinking that attending a large event will have little impact—they won’t even notice if you are there or not.  You need to know that the photos and videos from these events are often treasured souvenirs that will be looked at and shared by many. Our attendance will be noted, remembered and commented on. People who weren’t even there will comment on us having been there. Our noted presence has the potential to bring honor to the person who invited us and also often leads to even more people inviting us to more events. We can’t go to everything to which we are invited and still maintain our energy and sanity.

Another thing we have to weigh is how important the event is. Birthday parties are lower importance. Weddings and funerals are highly important and carry much weight. The importance also depends on our relationship to the people most involved in the event.  A birthday party for a cousin that we don’t know—low priority.  A wedding where we know the bride, groom, mother or father—high priority.  And then there are degrees in between.  For example, most weddings are actually a series of events.  Depending on our closeness to the wedding party, we may attend one or two of the bigger events.

So this brings us back to our situation with Ma Riziki.  How do you navigate the tricky situations?  Is it possible to say “no” sometimes?  It is possible, but it must be done tactfully.  This is an honor-shame culture so we have to be careful not to dismiss an invitation too flippantly if we don’t have a reason that islanders will understand and appreciate.  Sometimes we have to consider whether we have an ‘island-valid’ reason for not going. If the reason we give isn’t valid in the eyes of the islander who invited us then we could cause offense. This is tricky because “island valid” often doesn’t match “American valid”.  American valid is often first come first served.  The earlier I get it into my calendar, the more right you have to demand of me to go.  This is why we send out “save the date” messages.  But that doesn’t work on the Islands.  On the Islands, that only works for competing work commitments.  But weddings and funerals trump work, good friends trump acquaintances, and family trumps all.  The exception to that being sick.  Sickness truly trumps all. We suspect that when islanders really want to skip out on someone’s important event they just lie afterwards and say they were sick.  Can’t argue with that excuse.  But we don’t want to lie.

Back to Ma Riziki.  Remember: Ma Riziki—close friend, almost family, is inviting us to the wedding of her son, she’s told us about it multiple times (but neglected to give us the date).  She expects us to be highly involved all day, including going to the big wedding event in the far off village.  Meanwhile, Tom had arranged the extra important, coordinated with colleagues to help, final evaluation day of a teacher training in a far off village weeks in advance.

Tom made it!

Armed with all this cultural knowledge, what would you do?

Here was our solution:  To honor our relationship with Ma Riziki, we negotiated a compromise. Tom pushed the teacher evaluations a little earlier, told the teachers that they couldn’t feed him a meal afterwards (which would have been expected) because he had to go to a wedding (something they understood because weddings trump all).  By getting started earlier and leaving as soon as possible, he would miss the morning activities, but he should be able to get to the other village in time for the afternoon wedding ceremony, where the rest of his family (including the kids) would be there waiting to add greater honor to Ma Riziki’s family. Tom arrived just in time.  Ma Riziki seemed pleased.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
The reconciliation meetings were a good first step to what will hopefully be meaningful change and healing between the involved parties. Pray that follow-up would happen for continuing healthy communication. Our old teammates welcomed their baby boy yesterday! Mom and son are doing well. (Now we’re just sad that we’re not there to hold him ourselves!) Our weekend leadership training kick-off went well. The meetings were intense and long, but good. We look forward to the coming year of training and the monthly Zoom check-in we will have with our fellow team leaders. Our kids and teammates left behind on Clove Island did great in spite of our last minute flight change, continuing electricity issues in one bedroom and a bad illness in one of our teammates (thankfully she is starting to feel better now). We’re proud of our kids and thankful for our team. Ma Nadjma (whom we mentioned in a blog a few weeks ago) had an ultrasound, she is pregnant with a boy and everything looks good so far.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Unfortunately one of the other women that we mentioned a few weeks ago (Amira), has had another miscarriage. Pray that she would be comforted in her loss and for her openness to talk to our teammate as she processes this most recent heartache. Pray that we would continue to learn how to navigate and prioritize well all the demands on our time. Pray that we’d be able to give this leadership training program the attention it deserves. We have been given different possibilities for how our roles could change or grow in coming years— pray for wisdom and unity for us and our leaders as we try to discern what is best. One of our teammates is on the big island hoping to travel to her home country for a month-long visit with lots of domestic travel— pray that all the logistics (including this first negative COVID test) would come together.