Nate and Joanna Michael

I have to say that the workers on our house have done an incredible job. In fact, most in the village are amazed at the speed with which our house has taken shape. But there are several things standing in between us and a smooth entry.

I have been up at the house the last few days helping with the installation of the doors (still pending) and painting the window frames so I can add screens (coming tomorrow). Currently my hands are blue and slightly blistered, but I am in high spirits at the progress and encouraged by the arrival of our teammates. We are sharing a house with them until we are ready to move and they couldn’t be more accommodating.

So we have wonderful teammates, a house on the horizon and more language learning ahead. Sounds pretty good to me.

Our time in Bamenda for Christmas/New Years was filled with friends, laughter and plenty of Christmas cookies and music. We hitched a ride with some friends yesterday on the first leg of our ‘return to the village’ journey. One rough part of the break was that we are leaving with several colds and a pulled neck muscle for yours truly. So for at least a day, we are trying to rest and get back to full strength.

When we get back, finishing up the house will be first priority. We are hoping to get it liveable within a week or so. That means screens on the windows, a concrete floor and a roof overhead. Please pray for all this because many things need to come together for all this to happen.

Hope everyone had a wonderful New Years.

For those who are wondering where we are spending Christmas, we have come out of the village for a couple weeks to share it with colleagues of ours. We are staying in Bamenda, a large city in the Northwest, and are consuming massive amounts of unhealthy, Christmas goodies. We arrived a couple days ago and were thrilled to see our friends. The other night, the kids saw a little advent lesson put together by our friends and it has been fun to celebrate in our own cultural way. Cookies, fudge, pancakes with syrup, peppermint, hot chocolate, Bing Crosby, Vince Guaraldi, Andrew Peterson, a Christmas tree and stockings hung on the bookshelf.

By living in a culture different than our own, we are beginning to see our own cultural habits and bent through our celebration of Christmas. So once again, it becomes clearer to us how ‘culture’ is something that is almost imperceptible unless put in stark contrast with another. Does everyone have to celebrate Christmas with stockings, music, cookies and multiple Christmas movies? Absolutely not. But the effect of cultural habits on our perception of events is a strong one. And, in my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong with doing some strictly ‘American’ activities to get in the holiday spirit.

We sleep in an essentially tranquil setting at night. There are no street lights coming in the windows and no cars driving by on busy streets, but there is the annoying sound of dancing over our heads…or maybe it is more like wrestling. Either way, we sporadically wake up in the night to hear the sounds of our unwanted guests overhead. It is not just rats, but bats and birds as well. Though their activities are kept secret by the thin layer of ceiling board, we are keenly aware of their existence.

So every other week or so, we have a local boy crawl up into the attic to track down as many of the critters as he can to ‘dispose’ of them. Upon his most recent expedition, I asked him what he found. He replied that he got one bat (4 got away) and 3 rats. Another Cameroonian standing by said, ‘Oh, so not many.’ I love the candor expressed in that statement. Three rats simply isn’t that much here. I guess we need to redefine our concept of what are ‘a lot’ of pests.

Alright, I am going to share something that I am neither proud of nor trying to justify. I don’t shower every day. There it is. Out in the open. It is not that I don’t enjoy being clean, it just takes more effort and energy to bathe here.

In the States, you may have to wait a few seconds before the water heats up. Well, the only way you are getting anything but cold is if you take time to heat some water over the stove top. Also, in the States, you typically have the shower head over you, spraying down over your head. Here, we splash ourselves out of a bucket. (Wayne, Carrie, you know what I’m talking about.)

The final roadblock to daily bathing (even as I write it I feel a bit shameful) is that I don’t get much free time during the day. The first visitors of the day usually show up right as I am about to take my first bite of breakfast and if I do get a pause during the day, my first thought is simply to sit down. Bathing usually slips my mind.

So there it is. Everyone now knows and is silently judging me, but I don’t care. You are free to feel how you want. I am fairly content to wallow in my own filth as you read this post.

For those who live in America, we don’t have a culture that really understands fearing an authority figure. We don’t have a king or chief and we are able to openly deride our President if we feel like it. Even our propensity towards nonchalant interactions leads to a lack of hierarchy. So when we come to passages in the Bible where it commands us to fear the Lord, we explain it away by saying stuff like, ‘It just means that we should show him respect or honor.’ Really? I don’t think that is it because if it meant respect or honor, it would have used those words.

We don’t realize how ingrained our culture is into our understanding of what is right and wrong. Often times it can blind us to insight into what the Bible means or even making it incomprehensible. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard someone pose the seemingly paradoxical question, ‘How can we fear God and love him at the same time?’ I don’t want to get into the answer of that right now, partially because I don’t have time and partially because I am working through it myself, but the point is we need to own up to the fact that often our reasoning and cultural understanding can be in stark contrast to what God may be deserving of, namely that we are to fear Him.

P.S. - This post was spurned on by reading Malachi 1:14 this morning with my wife and also the end of Ecclesiastes.

When I knew I was moving to a village in Africa several years ago, many images popped into my head about what lay ahead. One such image was a grass hut church. Well, for the first time since I have been on the continent, I attended one today. Dirt floor, palm branch roof, no walls, the whole nine yards. I mean I experienced what many people first think of when they imagine a village in Africa.  But why has it taken so long for me to sit in such a church? I mean, seriously, I have been in the country for over 1 year and attended at least 7 different churches. What happened to my stereotype image of what I was supposed to experience? Didn’t they know I was coming?

I think the simple answer, one that the title of my post testifies to, is that culture is not static. It is in constant flux and evolution. We have seen Western influences cropping up everywhere around Cameroon: the music and format at churches, the style of dress on the street and the technology in use. As globalization marches on, I believe there is going to be a melding of cultures around the world and much of the, ‘pure culture’ that one may have found before will now be a product of the old and the intruding.

But things have been changing for centuries. Someone was telling me how the local mindset towards white people has been developing for the last 6 generations. Whenever people groups and cultures intersect, there you will always find a shift on every side. I guess I should just be on the lookout for how my own culture may change from being here.

I caught wind of a comment that President Obama has taken flack for recently. Apparently he said something to the CEO of Boeing that America has been ‘lazy’ concerning promoting itself around the world. Afterwards, many conservative news outlets had latched onto the ‘lazy’ comment and, in my opinion, blew it out of proportion and misconstrued it. Now, I am not writing this post to argue politics, but rather America’s place in the world.

While I was in Europe doing language study, there was a student from Colombia studying French to become a French cook, an Italian girl who worked with importing French wines to Italy and a Chinese student who’s father works in Francophone Africa and, from what I understand, is wanting to go the path of international business himself. I mention all of this to highlight the motivation of others from a vast number of countries to prepare themselves for work in the international community.

So how does this all tie together with President Obama’s comments. Well, America has many advantages over other countries. I have seen enough of the world to knowledgeably declare that America has a surprisingly un-corrupt police force, a government who, if nothing else, holds elections on time and roads that don’t require 4-wheel drive in most places. That being said, I believe America has one large disadvantage: We are not forced to be multi-lingual. (At least the vast majority of Americans, I realize there are exceptions.) We have found a way to bring in people from many cultures and languages to our nation and yet still remain primarily mono-lingual.

Here is where I come full circle. This is playing out on the international stage. As globalization marches forward, there is going to be an increasing need for Americans to know other languages and cultures, something we have not done very well at. Let me simply point out some areas where this will play out and what languages may be most valuable:

International business: French (not just for France, but also Africa where large quantities of raw materials exist), Chinese, and Spanish

Government Intelligence: Spanish, Arabic, Chinese

Religious Studies: Hebrew, Arabic, German (where you can find many theological writings), many ancient languages (Greek, Aramaic, Latin, etc) and any number of eastern languages depending on what you are studying

Medicine: Spanish (if working in the States you will have a big chance of Spanish-speaking patients), and practically any other language if you want to serve internationally

Besides these areas, you can get a leg up in pretty much any arena by speaking another language. I know a guy who works with French, Spanish and English by helping translate documents for United Nations delegates (he is attending grad school in Geneva, Switzerland). The great news is that Americans are already ahead of many others simply by speaking English. This is not to be ethnocentric, but rather to state the obvious: Much of the world is learning and speaking English. Now we just need to add other languages to our repertoire.

I realize that times are tough and jobs might be difficult to come by, but for high-schoolers thinking about the future, learning a language may well be one of the most valuable skills you can acquire in the next few years to prepare yourself for the future reality of interconnectedness.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in any of the areas mentioned above. The language recommendations I made are not to be taken as gospel, but rather as a case in point that being multi-lingual is versatile, valuable and a worthwhile pursuit. Also, it is good to learn an instrument. It will help with your listening and Chinese (and many minority languages) is tonal.

In the past, I am sure people have held certain stereotypes about me, but have voiced very few of them. However, in Cameroon I hear people say stuff like, ‘We know the whites do this or believe this or don’t eat this.’ And depending on the day, I react in different ways. Most of the time, I laugh about it because their assumptions are so absurd. My favorite is that many people in the village believe I print money in my house. But every now and then, I take it upon myself to prove them wrong or point out their misdirected assumption.

Today I took on one of their preconceived notions by going out and doing some manual labor. You see, many people in the village do not believe that ‘the whites’ can do manual labor. And though we have not been raised on it like the villagers we live around, I feel like I have enough strength in me to move some dirt around or cut down a tree with a machete. Well today I decided I was going to go up and do about a half hour work at the site of our house that we are building. What started as just a short little exercise in manual labor, turned into several hours of digging. I started myself and, upon seeing my plight, others joined in. After a short time, it became a full-blown job site with 3 people on shovels and 1 on the wheelbarrow and I couldn’t just stop working. By the time I came in for lunch, I was happy to be done for the day. Lesson learned: Don’t start something around here that you can’t finish.

A couple weeks ago I took the GRE for entrance into graduate school. For those who don’t know, it is the exam that many master’s programs require before entering. I took it in Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, at the American Language Center and was very pleased with how it was run. The test consisted of 2 writing sections, 2 verbal reasoning sections and 2 analytical (math) sections. The only bummers of the whole day were right when they called time at the end of the 2 math sections. Immediately after time was up, I saw an answer, knew it was wrong, why it was wrong, and what the right answer was, but could do nothing about it. Has that ever happened to anyone else? But other than those 2 questions, I feel like I did fairly well and expect a letter from the testing agency stating that they have never seen such a superb test…or maybe they will just send me my scores. Either way, I am glad to be done with it.

The thing that surprised me most from that day were how many Cameroonians (and on Japanese guy) were taking the test. I say this because I can’t imagine taking the verbal reasoning sections, which are heavy on the vocabulary, without being a native English speaker. I mean seriously, how many people know the word ‘garrulous’ and can use it in a sentence? Now I am moving forward with applying to a couple of grad schools, which I will most definitely write about later.