When the hysterical, bloodcurdling shrieks pierced the air and filled our home, we knew someone had died next door.
It was only a few nights ago when Cliff and I, spooked by the ebb and flow of loud, persistent groaning, got our torchlights out to survey the surroundings of our home. Over the past few months, we had had strangers walk past or linger around our front door, and had also suffered continuous eerie nightmares of zombies, bloodthirsty wolves, bears and evil impish spirits in the form of little children. While the two events had no correlation to each other, it cast a ghostly, macabre shadow on the ominous moans and made our hair stand. Was it a drunkard or an injured man? What would we do and who would we call? Were we hearing things?
Like little children exploring a haunted house, we carefully traipsed around our home. We discovered that a man, in pain, was checked in at the clinic near our home, atop the public health institute where we stay on. He was in a perilous condition.
That weekend, scores of people came by around our home. Frustrated by the many months of having strangers who walked by stare at us continuously or idle around our front yard, my first thought, unfortunately, was not sympathy for the anxious family, but “Oh no, not again”. Each time we had “visitors”, it unsettled us. We would not know how long they would stay or how loud they would be. While most of them eventually left, their presence always left us restless and alert, unable to enjoy the privacy or ease of being at home.
Part of the stresses of staying in a foreign land has been the unpredictability of events and feeling vulnerable from unexpected changes. While our first month was spent adapting to booming disco music being played 4 nights a week into the wee hours of the morning (it is still ongoing), the subsequent months were spent coping with various new challenges- new visitors who came to stare at us at length each morning at our front porch, people talking loudly or blasting reggae music outside the paper-thin walls where we slept, sudden water cuts, finding people milling around our front door suspiciously, people using the sink outside our front door at dawn, or awakening in the middle of the night to find our sleeping room and kitchen flooded in the rainstorm.
“This is your private residence which you have been paying rental for, and we assure you we will fix the issues. People should not be idling around your home or using your facility.”
While the public health institute security and housing manager had assured us repeatedly he would look into the issues, they persisted. We accepted the inconveniences as part of life here, and constantly reminded ourselves to be grateful.
As the hair-raising shrieks erupted into a cacophony of bawls, yowls and unrestrained screaming, we decided to leave home temporarily. When we returned, a crowd had gathered round the clinic nearby, and part of the family had also spilled into our front porch, sitting on our chairs at our front door.
Something in me broke, and it was not for compassionate, empathetic reasons.
“Those are our chairs, and this is a private residence,” I said, to my own shock, a little regretfully.
“Do you share chairs in your country?” A large, matronly lady shot us a bloody look. “This is Uganda. And in Uganda, we share chairs.”
I had many things I wanted to retort, but knowing it was the pride in my flesh that wanted the final say, I shut the door behind me before I said anything I would regret. They had lost somebody, and while I was fuming at her cockiness and self-entitlement to what was clearly ours, I knew it was wrong not to extend grace to them, given their circumstances, however self-righteous or frustrated I felt.
The lady gathered more family members to sit outside our home, to carry on their family conference.
“This is Uganda. And in Uganda, we share chairs.”
It reminded me of what a grey-haired, long-term missionary couple who had served in Tanzania as doctors had shared with us before we came to Uganda, “In Africa, you will have no privacy.” Where they stayed, neighbours frequently came by to sit at their home for hours uninvited, and each time they left, a piece of cutlery would be taken with them. “In Africa where we were, everything is for sharing. Spoons are their favorite.”
Suddenly, I was humbled. How quick we are so often to consider ourselves more superior. Being a medical doctor frequently exacerbates that falsely-inflated self-image. Since landing in Uganda, however, I found myself frequently offended- by people who demanded favors from us without gratitude; by bureaucratic visa laws that demanded more and more money from us for serving in their country on a voluntary, humanitarian basis; by people who made appointments but showed up late or not at all. I found myself affronted each time, almost humiliated. “After all I have given up, how can they treat me like this? Don’t they know what I am doing for them? How dare they!”
Such thoughts of indignation sparked off insult and offense in me, sometimes even wringing tears of resentment and bitterness, until I finally heard God tell me one day, that I had nothing to be angry about.
Serving others, was simply all about that- others. It was not about me, not about the house or career or academic pursuits I had left behind. Those were choices I made, in obedience to Him, and they did not count one bit as sacrifice. It was not about my rights, nor my entitlements, but how I could serve others better.
As soon as I had that mindset, I no longer became uptight and anxious about the slow progress the team was making with the healthcare training programme I was asked to lead at the public health institute. Instead, I asked myself how I could better partner them, at their pace and from their perspective. While on my part, I felt they were inefficient in replying to emails, I could also see how my preference for email over face-to-face conversation in an intensely relational African culture could also have portrayed me as being aloof. Once my mindset changed, my approach changed too, and God opened more doors for me in terms of partnership, landing me and my Ugandan team in the office of the Ministry of Health Uganda one day, to discuss future collaborations together. My team was ecstastic.
In the same way, I realized that from my perspective, while I was upset that our things were constantly being used and our privacy was constantly being invaded, was I truly entitled to what I think I was? Was the home atop a hill overlooking the sunrise and sunset what I deserved or God’s grace; was staying at a place with a front porch and chairs something I was entitled to or God’s generosity; was our precious opportunity to serve in Africa something I had earned or God’s lavish kindness?
When I started to see from His perspective, I realized that I had no ownership rights not just over those chairs at our front porch, but over my entire life.
“In Uganda, we share chairs.”
We foreign missionaries often think we have a lot to impart to the locals- in terms of knowledge, healthcare or vocational skills. Instead, I am learning, we have much to learn from them too. What comes across to us as their one-sided self-entitlement to things which do not belong to them, is actually their value of sharing and caring for others, in a heavily relational and communal culture; what comes across as ingratitude to us, is merely their concept of family- they would do the same for us without expecting thanks; what comes across to us as being rude or invasive, is just their way of showing affection or friendliness.
“In your country, do you share chairs?”
On the contrary, for all the merits we think we may have back home in our own fast-paced, organized, efficient culture, Cliff once pointed out to me that we are also more insular. What we perceive as independence in our self-made culture, is perceived as being selfish and self-seeking in another; what we herald as career drive in our culture, is perceived as neglect for relationships; what we prize as wealth in our culture, is perceived as selfish hoarding in another, at the expense of someone else’s unmet need.
Later that afternoon, I leaned that the person who died, was not the middle-aged groaning man, but a young child. It was an unexpected death. The doctors had tried their best, but the child had come in far too late.
I gave a sigh of relief, that I did not go crazy in fighting for those chairs of mine.
I am learning, that our values of right and wrong which are so easily circumscribed in a culture we are comfortable in, may be unceremoniously overturned in another. Self-entitlement loses its compass when we realize it has nothing to anchor itself in.
When Jesus came on earth for His earthly ministry, He came to serve, and not to be served. Though He, the son of God, had every right to exercise his heavenly rights for fame, honor, and worship, He used none of it, succumbing Himself even to spit, shame and dishonor, simply because He knew He was obeying His Father’s call.
Here in Africa, I am learning, that I too, need to learn how to share chairs.
“… just as the Son of Man did not come to be served,
but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
– Matthew 20:28