Different or Just Plain Wrong

I was once told that when approaching another culture to apply the saying, “it’s not wrong, just different”. It’s hard to adapt your mindset when engrained in your DNA is the voice of society saying, “don’t eat with your hands, call before visiting, bathe at least 3 times a week, don’t stare”. A guilty conscience signals that you have veered off the straight and narrow…so in what situations do we hit the snooze button on our conscience?

Upon arrival, I found that the local American families use hired house help. This of course set me on edge, are Americans so lazy that they can not do what ladies here have been doing daily all their lives. We are willing to dive into the culture and way of life as long as we don’t have to get sweaty or do the nitty gritty. When I approached these Americans, I was blasted with excuses such as, “we don’t have time, we don’t know how, we don’t want too, they need the work so why not”. I walked away feeling scorned as they mumbled about my naïveté to the culture. And so, I did what any good soldier does – marched to the back of the line and fell in with the rest of them.

Some of the suffocating guilt was relieved by the claim that it provides these women with an income. But the second twinge of shame struck as I found out the amount we pay for their labor-intensive eight hour day…$3. *gasp- robbery* I was about to jump outta the boat when I was assured by the Americans that this truly is a lot of money. It hit me that their thoughts were along these lines: it is ok for these women (husbandless) to provide for their families on $20 a week but Americans living in the same place could hardly be expected to survive on such.

So how do I quiet my screaming guilty conscience that feels assaulted on so many levels? My womanhood howls as I watch another woman scrub my dishes, wash my clothes, mop my floors. Each week my ears burn red as I hand this woman a meager $10. I ache to shower her with love and friendship; and yet, there is always an employer/employee barrier I feel radiating from her smile. How do I bite my tongue as I watch these women serve us Americans who seem to have forgotten that we came to serve these women in Christ and not the other way around? How do I cross this culture barrier that seems as wrong as it seems different?