village stay: the middle second

Ok, so let's take a step back from our dramatic departure, to the middle part of our stay and the middle part of this story. We stayed in two different villages when we went to East Kwaio. We stayed for a week at each and today, I'll divulge into our time at the second village - a bush village by the "hamba" (what, like a Humber super snipe? No, a harbour...). Sifilo.

Sifilo was where we initially thought we would stay for the duration of our trip, but before we got to East Kwaio, our host had decided we'd stay at a different village first and then stay with her family in Sifilo. So we came to Sifilo after a fruitful week in Canaan (which you'll hear about in the first, or rather third, part of this story). We came, ready to try it out, but sad that we had left the promised land.

One experience I had on the first night neatly sums up the challenge I felt the whole time. I came into the Kastom kitchen outside (this house, which was quite flash by Solomon standards, had three kitchen areas - an inside kitchen with gas, a sink with running water, a "scullery" for storing and preparing food and then an outside kitchen leaf hut type of thing). I was all keen to learn as much about women's work as possible so I was in the kitchen as our host was cooking over the fire. She said, "I think this must be the first time you, being a white person, has seen a fire." This was the first of many such misinformed generalisations she made of white people, many of which were negative. Well, I explained that I didn't cook over a fire back at home, but we used a fire to heat the house and heat the water and that as a young girl I would have to chop the wood and light the fire. Anyway, she went out for a few minutes so I sat by the fire to stir the vegies. Then she came back with a packet of noodles and taio (can of tuna).

Ah, good old rice, noodles and taio. Jair and I can't figure out who brought this phenomenon to the Solomon Islands, but it has become something of a staple. The recipe is simple. Cook rice. Fry the taio in the oil, add noodles and spice packet. Stir. Mix cabbage or egg plant in the taio noodle mix if you have any. Serve noodles on top of rice. Bon Appetit. Or not...

So I asked her, why do you add noodles and taio to your cabbage? I never do that... She came over to me and said, "shame. It's because I feel shame about my food." Believe me, I prefer their local food, kumara cooked in coconut milk (hmmmm) to noodles, rice and taio. And I tried my absolute hardest to show her that what they normally eat was fine for me too, but she couldn't get over that shame.

It reminded me of many times as a young hostess in my early married life of feeling a similar sort of shame about what I was serving our guests. Maybe the muffins hadn't cooked properly, or the couscous was too dry. But in any case, often, I let my shame get in the way of really showing loving hospitality. In fact, often I didn't show any hospitality because I was too worried about what people would think. Our culture is very much a culture of perfection (as opposed to excellence... yes there is a significant difference between those two words) and so if my food wasn't perfect, I was ashamed of it and ashamed of me for cooking it.

But both cases, me with my shame and her with her shame, reminded me of a verse in 2 Corinthians where Paul tells us to take our eyes of our light and momentary troubles and focus them on Jesus and what He is doing in us through our troubles. To tell you the truth, his "light and momentary troubles" at the time were no less than facing a church that had disowned him. So if that counts for a difficulty as big as that, surely it counts for our shame with the little we have to offer. Fix your eyes on Jesus.

In the village I longed to tell Joy (our host) to fix her eyes on Jesus, even though she had this huge burden of having two white people over... But I wasn't in the right place in our relationship to do that yet. I pray that one day I'll have the opportunity to talk to her about it. For me, I had to consciously fix my eyes on Jesus and what He was teaching me in this time.

The rest of the trip went much the same. They didn't want us to do things, like go for a walk to a neighbouring village, or go bush whacking in the garden, or cook over the fire, or even do the dishes, either because they thought we were white so we were too weak and unable to do it, or because they felt shame, or because they considered us to be on holiday and so we shouldn't do anything. "Rest first time," became the hourly instruction and by a few days, we

Jair drinking from the first coconut he ever chopped by himself- were pretty sick of resting.

believe me, this is a feat

Maybe we were a bit pushy. I insisted that they let me go to the garden and I ambushed the vines and plants and small trees with the rest of them, wielding a trusty sharp bushknife. We walked as often as possible (even when to visit a waterfall), and took their local food to eat.

We went into the village stay hoping to be able to walk in their shoes, but I think our plan for our village stay was different to God's plan for our village stay. God taught us some other things, including:

-submitting to God's plan and trusting that He knows best

-humility. Sometimes when you are honoured, you realise how small you really are and how little you deserve that honour.

-that over the past decades, white people have come into the Solomon Islands and done things which probably weren't good and have resulted in the way Solomon Islanders view us. E.g. A white evangelist once came to this very

the waterfall we climbed - no safety features here! village 40 years ago (they still talk about him) but every day he and his entire film crew (because they filmed his little "crusade") would fly back to Honiara to sleep and then fly back again the next morning. Honiara is on a different island! No wonder they think their kinds of houses aren't fit for white people when this evangelist they remember with fondness wouldn't even sleep a night in their village.

-we stepped out of this rich, comfortable culture and immersed with this "less developed" culture and there were many things we wondered about (e.g. why do they kill birds and insects just for fun) and we would wish they wouldn't do those things. But it made us think, Jesus came from this amazing place - heaven - and came down to earth, which is well below the living standard of heaven, and he probably thought, why do these earthians hold so tightly to their material possessions etc etc. It gave us a small tiny glimpse of the amazing sacrifice Jesus made just by coming down to earth, let alone actually dying for us.

looking down the falling water -that we, white Protestants, have an addiction to work. We struggle to not work. Laziness is not a good thing, but I don't think our addiction to work is a good thing either. How often is it that we ignore people because we are in a rush, that rather talking to people, we opt for pushing paper around instead. I mean, it's not like pushing paper, or fixing a car, or building a house, or whatever your work is, isn't important. It is. But people are more important. What you invest into people has eternal value. You never read of someone coming up to Jesus and him turning around and saying, "sorry, I'm too busy working right now to help you. Just talk to Simon Peter; maybe he might be able to book you in some time." Yet how often do we treat people like that because we think we have to work work work all the time.

There were many many more things we learnt and many things that are just going to sit, mulling in our minds for a bit longer. I don't know if you'll "get" this when you read it. Sometimes you have to experience it. We're just thankful that we have been able to experience this.