Minority Report

JANUARY 6 - I have lived in four different cultures during my life – my first five years were spent in England, but the majority of my life has been lived in Canada, with thirteen years at Whitefish Bay (Naotkamegwanning), an Ojibwe reserve in northwestern Ontario. And now this – two months in Africa. I was thinking about this during my five minute walk from my quaint little brick house, along a steep dirt path, to the Mozambique Synod’s offices, where I am conducting the QuickBooks training.

In addition to my own experiences, I am also responsible for raising Brandon as a cross-cultural child – a native Canadian by birthright, raised within the dominant white culture by a white woman. I happened to have a recent Facebook conversation with a man who now lives in Whitefish, but was, strangely enough, adopted by a non-native family and raised in Chatham. I was asking about the challenges he has faced due to his bi-culturalism. He agreed that there had been challenges, but that he had finally come to terms with it. “Just accept it”, was his advice. I think he means “accept that there is a difference, but don’t think of it as either positive or negative. It just is what it is.” In other words, the fact of biculturalism doesn’t have to be a controlling influence over your life.

Probably easier said than done.

I don’t claim to be an expert on living as a minority, although certainly that is how it felt when I was at Whitefish, and even more so here. I’m in a place where being white is unusual, and brings along with it the status of being, not just a foreigner, but based on my North American origin, richer. The fact is that in a land where so many are poor, my whiteness is a signal that I’m not. Thanks to the accident of birth, I have had opportunities to enrich myself and to enjoy comfort – and the majority of people in Africa don’t have those opportunities, and never will. For many, each day has a predictable sameness, as they lack the novelty that finances bring – the chance for travel, for new things, for enough comfort that you don’t have to spend time washing clothes by hand, or hauling buckets of water.

And they lack books – one doorway to escape. It has struck me that although I have seen many people who appear to be sitting around, never have I seen anyone reading. Guards, as an example, spend hours and hours watching over homes and compounds, and only occasionally do they even seem to have a radio. Books, even if you are poor, can expose you to faraway places and ideas which stir, and insights that reveal not just our differences, but the universality of the human experience.

I knew, before I came to Africa, that a culture of comfort and materialism was going to be glaringly lacking here – and I expected to carry with me, across the Atlantic, and down through Europe and Africa, the guilt of relative opulence. However, aside from a few distinct encounters, most of the time, I have been around expats, who enjoy a comfortable standard of western style living, or locals who are professional employees and relatively speaking, wealthier than the majority.

I’m sure it would have been different if I had been placed in a village, constructing a building or a well, living among and like the poor. But the nature of this mission is different – there are no computers in those villages and many don’t have electricity. I’ve heard that some organizations are beginning to put public computer centers in some remote and impoverished areas, and the government of Malawi is laying fiber optic cable to improve the infrastructure, so clearly change is afoot. But it will take time, and the challenges here include sporadic power outages, slow and inconsistent Internet access, aging hardware, non-standardized and occasionally piloted software, and a general lack of availability to trained computer professionals.

So I am blessed - by virtue of birth, education and opportunity.

In one of Larry’s books, I read about a missionary who wanted to become fully African. He decided to learn the language, thinking that language was the key to acceptance. But the people still called him “Mister”, setting him apart. So he moved from his compound to a village, and lived like an African for many years – adopting the African clothes, the African food, the African music – and still people called him “Mister.” Finally, in frustration, he asked the village elder why this was so. “It’s because you had a white mother,” he was told.

So by the whim of birth, we are trapped. Maybe that’s why, even though I have lived in Canada since I was five, my occasional visits to England always feels like a homecoming. It’s not just from the perspective of others that we are set apart, it’s biologically wired into us, to belong to the geography we first understood as home.

I suppose that is why my father had asked for his ashes to be returned to England.