This is the third in a series of four reflections on my time in Africa:

• Pineapples
• Vuvuzelas
• Laundry
• Trash Cans

"Joe, can you do some of the laundry, I really need to lie down for a while?" "Sure. Are you feeling okay?" "No, I've got a migraine coming on." "No problem." Anita's request struck me as very reasonable, and the idea of me doing laundry isn't anything new, after all, when I used to come home from college with bags full of dirty clothes, my mom was always quick to say, "Great, I'll make sure I get all our laundry downstairs so you can do ours while doing yours." So, at Anita's request I went outside and began pulling out the laundry buckets and filling each with water, just as I'd observed my friend Kwaku's domestic help do when she did laundry a few days earlier. In a way I was looking forward to the new experience of doing laundry by hand, if nothing else, for the novelty of it. But everything changed when Consua appeared in the backyard. Consua is a twenty-something girl from a local village that Kwaku had hired to manage the house. I'm not sure what prompted her to see what I was up to, but the site of me preparing to do laundry prompted a flurry of words in her native Ewe combined with series of hand gesture that I couldn't misinterpret. While she'd regularly laughed at me when I stepped into the kitchen to see how they were preparing dinner, the thought of me, a man, actually doing laundry was completely unacceptable. She was chasing me away. While I felt bad that she was taking over and doing the work Anita asked me to complete, I felt even worse when she drug Anita out of bed to help her with the task. As I look back on it, both of us experienced a bit of culture shock in those moments, her at the idea of me doing laundry, and me at the concept of a man doing laundry as unacceptable. This is just one of many instances where cultures collided while we were in Africa. Be it eating fish bones in Togo, walking a goat home and slaughtering it on the back porch in Nairobi, or having Ethiopian adults seeing nothing wrong with grabbing Robbie as we walked by (I'm thinking a small white person was a new experience for some of them). Over and over again during our five month adventure we discovered, delighted in, and found ourselves puzzled by new cultural experiences. All of these events came to mind one day as I read a bit of David Bosch's, Transforming Mission. In it, while discussing the Early Church, he quoted a bit from an apologetic work from around 200:

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humankind either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they dwell not somewhere in cities of their own, neither do they use some different language, nor practice an extraordinary kind of life ... While they dwell in cities of Greeks and barbarians ... and follow the native custom in dress and food and the other arrangements of life, yet the constitution of their own citizenship, which they set forth, is marvelous, and confessedly contradicts expectation. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners ... Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is foreign ... They find themselves in the flesh and yet they live not after the flesh. Their existence is on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, and they surpass the laws in their own lives ... War is waged against them as aliens by the Jews, and persecution is carried on against them by the Greeks, yet those who hate them cannot tell the reason for their hostility. In a word, what the soul is in a body, this the Christians are in the world ... (they) are kept in the world as in a prison-house, and yet they themselves hold the world together. - Letter to Diognetus (emphasis mine)

Now, without a doubt, there's a certain level of romanticism to this, but what it describes isn't all that different than the life that Peter calls congregations in Asia Minor to live out:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Peter 2:9-12)

As Peter goes on, he describes how the gospel reorients our everyday vocations, addressing topics like how we live in relationship to our spouse, our employer or employees, and the government. Then, as chapter 3 comes to a close, he declares that the people of God will be challenged by the world around them because the world around them won't be able to comprehend why they live the way they do. In other words, the world isn't annoyed by the blowing of vuvuzelas, rather, the world finds itself experiencing culture shock, and sometimes, the only way to deal with the confusion is to lash out in hate. In the end, I'm convinced that our Christian faith should prompt the world to look at us with the same curiosity as these Ethiopian children who gathered around Robbie trying to figure out this strangely colored child: