8-29-12
We decided that talking about adolescent development and feelings didn’t really fly in a culture where there are few open conversations between parents and children. Swazi mom’s will wax eloquent on how to prepare the best floor polish, but are tight lipped with their children about sexuality or life choices. Regardless, in a society where you need to spend time collecting water, killing chickens and planting food for subsistence there is not a lot of time left over to think about self-actualization and your feelings. So after a week of lessons trying to drawing out responses from these girls about relationships and how they were feeling about the social and physical changes, we went back to basics.
Today we taught a lesson about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. This is actually something that many young girls have to do for their family members. So we thought the image of Jesus humbling himself to serve might resonate with these girls. Our goal of camp has been to connect with the girls and serve them and try not to have a” Poisonwood Bible moment”. For anyone who has read the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, it is basically a cautionary tale about missionaries going into a setting with limited cultural knowledge and making a mess of things.
Corine warned us that even foot washing was fraught. In Swaziland, some churches have had the congregation wash the pastor’s feet as a demonstration of humility. We heard a story of a church ministry that brought thousands of Nike shoes to share and before they put the shoes on they wanted to wash people’s first as an act of service. Some good ideas just don’t translate and most people will do whatever it takes to get a pair of Nike shoes.
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