Skip to main content

Age group association

I don’t quite know what to do when my assumptions about “Africa” are utterly disproven with nothing else to take their place. I know the culture and worldview here are different and that those factors account for differences in ways of doing things, particularly as regards work habits, saving and spending money, and the family unit. When the way they do things here grates on my nerves, I look to justify it with cultural necessity, historic precedent, or as a trade-off negative side effect of a generally positive principle. But at times I find it hard to see the positive side. What if I return home as or more ethnocentric than when I left? In that case, shouldn’t my term here be judged worse than a failure?

It was a meeting I observed in the village in December which started me on this path again. Not that there’s anything inherently bad about this, but as I strolled through the village at dusk the other night, I came upon the palm-leaf shelter, thumping music and throbbing generator of a big event with a poster: “2nd Anniversary, Age group association, 18-21.” I recalled Dan saying that age groups do a lot together here. Sigh. Another strike against my attempt to balance the frustrations of village life with the positive characteristics and ways of doing I should learn from Cameroonians.

Is intra-age group socialization any different from at home? No, of course not, but isn’t one of the noble characteristics we assume exist in non-industrialized cultures that all ages live together in harmony and the young learn wisdom from their elders? What about “it takes a village to raise a child”? With what do I balance some of the negative characteristics of village life when these ideals of “community” are destroyed?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Electioneering again

Climate anxiety has entered the lexicon. For the last few years, it’s been talked about more and more in news articles, science discussions and even in spiritual care contexts. I shrugged it off as overly sensitive people, but the shoe has dropped for me now too. Extreme weather or one sort another everywhere all at once for the past few years has brought home what I always acknowledged intellectually but didn’t really synthesized emotionally: climate change is actually coming and it will be bad. I feel so angry and impotent in the face of these massive systems working against my small efforts to reduce waste and burn less carbon. So I went to the climate forum for this provincial election. It felt really important just to be in the room to declare “this subject matters!” The room had a remarkable number of grey hairs in it. This brought up terribly mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, good of them to continue to care about these issues, even as they can anticipate it won’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stand up for Canadian Health Care (such as it is)

Canadian health care is far from perfect — it has never achieved all Tommy Douglas dreamed for it: from tip to toe (teeth are still missing, as are a lot of drugs) — but unleashing unfettered two-tier is the opposite of fixing it.  So I joined with the Canadian Medical Association in pleading for the Canadian government to grow a spine and stop unhinged Smith's attempt to violate our own rules within her province.  As someone on Bluesky observed, if Stephen Harper tried to do this, we'd be at the gate with pitchforks. Where is the outrage. Daddy Warbucks Carney’s latest just-barely satisfactory performance in trade negotiations should not blind us to his failure to prevent this from happening.  The letter to the health minister, CC my MP and the shadow ministers: The Canadian Medical Association says the Canadian government must stand up for Albertans and all Canadians to ensure Alberta's new legislation doesn’t create a new normal of health care haves and have-no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living stones in the holy land

I met Jesus in Israel-Palestine a few years ago. I found him not in the rocky, desert ground he trod, nor in the ancient stones of the towns and cities he visited; not in the subterranean grotto in the Church of the Nativity, nor in the mammoth Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encompassing the traditional site of his death and resurrection. No, I met him in the lives of Palestinians who incarnate his spirit, in humble, passionate people who are convinced that love is the only way. I met Jesus in people who spoke like this: “We need to be soaked in the love of Christ. Love is not a hug and a kiss. Love is to seek the life of the other that the cost of one’s own.” --Labib Madanat, coordinator of the Palestinian and Israeli Bible Societies “Love is not an opportunity to overlook justice. Love is an opportunity to pursue justice…. [But] we want to resist any form of evil with the heart and mind of Jesus Christ.… There is no love without justice. And there is no true justice without lov...
2 comments
Read more