Returning “Home”

Where is home?  I don’t know.  I feel at home enough here in India, I suppose.  I have no problem with the food, my surroundings, and inconveniences like carrying buckets of water or flushing a toilet with a bucket.  This is a place where I can perceive, but often cannot understand.  This is a place where I’ve discovered that I am quite a perfectionist and really not that flexible.  I guess I’ve dealt with it by anticipating patterns of behaviour.  When I do that, it’s easier for me to come to terms with reality when people’s behaviour is next to impossible for me to understand.

Here are some incomprehensible things I’ve experienced:

1. The contractor tells us his workers can’t come to work because they only found out that morning that we weren’t providing lunch, so they decided not to work that day.  (part of the reason is that he doesn’t want them to have a shortened day of work because he’d lose money that way)
2. The contractor says it’s Christmas & he has Christian workers on break.  The following week there are various reasons why they can’t come to work.  The following week is a Hindu holiday, so now his Hindu workers are on break.
3. The motor guy ( someone who can install the immersion motor for our well) says he’ll be there by 9am for installation.  He’s an hour late and we call to find out that he’s running late.  We call a few hours later and he says that he’s not coming that day anymore because by the time he comes, there’d be a 6h electricity cut & there’s no way to test the motor to see if it’s been properly installed.  He says that he’ll come the next morning.  He doesn’t show up again & Vimal decides to get another motor guy from Janga (the town 30km away from the school) and brings him on the bike.  Finally after 3 days of no water at the school and 3 days of trucking big tubs of water from the nearby village, we get water.  Hurray!
4. A teacher asks for leave (supposedly for only 2 days) to take care of her sick sister (who can be either her real sister or a cousin) and then extends it another 3 days and then calls in sick herself.
5. A teacher goes home in the afternoon because something came up with her family (they usually live on campus because they live a good 1-2h bus ride away from the school).  She states that she’ll be back the next morning for school.  After she’s late for an hour, we call her to find out that she was running late that morning, missed her bus, and has decided not to come to school since the next bus was several hours later.
6. A few of the teachers are seen reading the newspaper in class while their students do their class work.  Some have been seen to be talking on their cells or texting.
7. A part-time house parent (volunteer) tells me that he’ll be back in an hour when going out to run an errand & doesn’t return for 3 days.  He doesn’t call to communicate about anything, but I find out from Vimal that he had to go home to “take care of some family business.”

At the heart of the differences is the value conflicts between the West and East (I’m speaking in generalities here and I’m not claiming to represent everyone in the West or East).  Western culture values the individual, professionalism, and independence above everything else.  Most people won’t take a day off work to take their cousin to a hospital for an x-ray (like one of our teachers did).  Eastern culture values the family and the community.  It’s all about doing things for your family and fulfilling your obligations towards them.  Through my time here, I’ve discovered I’m WAY more Western than Chinese.  I guess my education won in the war with my mom—the war of cultivating values in me. 

I do hold some Chinese values, but not very strongly.  I would schedule my obligations to my immediate family around my work schedule and sometimes, I’d just say, “you’re an adult.  Do it yourself.”  So many times I advocate individuals being responsible and independent.  Here, everyone helps each other out.  Frankly, I don’t always like to be helped though. I like doing things by myself.  I like running my own errands.  I like having independence.  I like doing everything myself because I know exactly what I want and I know exactly how I want things done.  Lol…. is this my perfectionist side coming out again?

I truly need the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, and the wisdom to discern between the two.  I don’t want to be ethnocentric and have the “West  is best” attitude.  I know as a volunteer here, I need to adapt to fit into the culture, but sometimes I just want to stand against the grain. 

Going back to “home,” I don’t feel like Vancouver is my home either.  I have very different values from the average person in Vancouver.  Of course, I love my scrumptious meal and I enjoy driving a car, but material goods is not what I am pursuing.  When I’m with some people, all they talk about is shopping or some new electronic gadget or this awesome restaurant they’ve discovered.  Of course, there’s nothing wrong with all of that, but that’s just not where my interest lies.  I am just as content eating multigrain bread with a slice of cheese and a big juicy apple as eating from a new restaurant.  Sometimes I’m with people and the conversation swirls around me, and I nod politely, pretending to be interested, but I’m totally out of cahoots with what’s new.  Perhaps that’s why I avoid large group situations and just meet up with people individually so we can talk about our commonalities and catch up personally.

When I was in Vancouver last fall, I listened a lot to the IHOP worship archives (cuz I have my favourite artists!)  Misty Edwards was singing this spontaneous song that just pierced my heart & I knew it was for me from God.  Parts of the song are as follows:

“You’ve always been a free spirit.  People say “will you ever settle down?”  Your whole life, you’ve been a pilgrim, from one place to another…. You’ve always been a pilgrim, like a stranger in the land, always a pilgrim without a homeland…. You have been faithful, so faithful even when others cannot see, and though there have been trials, many, many trials, you’ve been faithful to me.  You didn’t let the opinion of man pull you to the right or the left.”

The whole concept about being a stranger in a foreign land is something God gave me repeatedly through Abraham’s story in Hebrews 11.  The interesting thing is that after I heard this song, in church they sang a song based on Hebrews 11 and then my personal devotions happened to be on Hebrews 11.  I was reading 6 chapters a day and I was on Hebrews at that time.  As one of my friends say, there are no coincidences with God, only God incidents.  So it all comes down on how to balance my own uniqueness, my cultural background, and my education with the social environment I’m in.  How do I be a stranger in a foreign land and respect the land’s cultures and traditions while at the same time standing up for what’s right?  And what does “right” mean?  According to whose standards?  I’m still in the process of figuring out answers and I may never arrive at the destination.