I am enjoying Minnesota now and have started a 10-day writing workshop through the Collegeville Institute. It is with 6 other fabulous writers, led by Lauren Winner (Girl Meets God, Wearing God, and more). Today we start and I am so excited. It was supposed to be last year but was cancelled. This year it is still just on Zoom but that’s better than nothing.
Chapter 22 Support
In this chapter I look at how some outsiders can’t see the ways Djiboutians take care of each other. How do you see this in your community? The big NGO works compared to the daily care of family and neighbor? What are some practical ways people support one another?
Chapter 23 Gratitude and Unbelief
Have you associated thankfulness with faith before? Have you ever thought about how funny it is at certain times to say “thank you?” Personally, today I went to get some bloodwork done to monitor my cancer. As I left the lab, where a woman had just taken $150 and jabbed with a needle, I said, “Thank you!” You have to admit, it is a little bit of a funny habit. I am thankful, but to whom? It is a good question to ask, as a way of examining our hearts.
Chapter 24 A Widow’s Coin
The experience I recount in this story shook me. It almost sounds like I made it up. I promise, I did not. In the moment, I didn’t think about the New Testament story, but later as I cried and told my husband about it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The Bible had come alive to me and I was the wealthy one, guarding my plenty while this woman gave everything she had to live on. How does one walk a life like this and not be transformed?
Have you ever had an experience that made your holy book come to life right before your eyes? How did that impact you?
What else struck you about these chapters?
All three of these chapters spurred me to do a lot of reflecting on differences and similarities between how these aspects of communication, relationships, and faith play out in Djiboutian and North American culture, respectively. In the context of caring for others I've been really impressed and humbled by how generously and readily many of my Djiboutian friends and contacts support their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues in the context of daily life, from caring for each other's children to cooking and sharing food to spending significant amounts of time and energy meeting each other's needs when someone in a household is sick, and many more examples. I think it is really easy to overlook and dismiss these forms of care when we think of support primarily in terms of more formalized or organization-based actions. I realize that this is not exclusive to Djibouti either, and that in the States and many other countries caregiving is often vastly underappreciated and taken for granted. Also, I love your suggestion to consider when, to whom, and why we say "thank you" to others not just in terms of cross-cultural communication differences, but as an opportunity to examine our hearts. I will be doing this going forward, especially as I'm now, like you, in the States and have been both hearing and saying many more "thank yous" than I had in Djibouti during the past few months :)