It's What's for Dinner...

One of my coworkers invited me to dinner at his house last night. He had made sheep soup. Soup here is basically a bowl of grease with a big lump of meat thrown in. One of the dangers of accepting a dinner invitation in this country is that you are going to end up eating outside in the dark- you have no chance to examine your food before you eat it. (Though some would argue that is a good thing…) The soup itself was decent, but the couple of lumps of meat I got were very difficult to eat. There were a lot of bones and very little of what I considered “meat;” mostly just fat and skin. I ate as much as I could (it would be rude to completely avoid that part of the meal), but I just couldn’t force myself to really dig in and finish. My host asked me if there was something wrong with the meat. “No, no, I’m just not hungry.” He wasn’t buying that. So he pushed further. “Ok, well, I don’t really like all the fat on the bone- there’s just not much meat there.” He took out his flashlight and illuminated my meal. “There’s no fat on those pieces at all,” he explained.

I just stared at my plate. The bone I had been digging around searching for meat was, in fact, half a sheep’s skull. The “fat” I complained about was actually brain. The piece that I had been chewing on unsuccessfully about 5 minutes earlier was an ear. A slightly nibbled-on foot rounded out the assortment of sheep body parts that lay in front of me.

I can’t decide which was the bigger mistake: Eating the mystery meat in the first place or allowing my coworker to shine his light on my food after I had eaten it. Oh well, nothing to do but laugh and add “eating sheep brain” to the list of firsts I’ve experienced here in Africa.

I want to change gears for just a minute. A lot of what I write in my posts here and in my emails home is just me messing around. Sometimes I get to thinking that, while living in a place where my neighbors may or may not have enough food to eat, it’s in pretty poor taste for me to be cracking jokes about the weird stuff I’ve eaten or coming up with trivia questions about things like how many times I’ve realized after a class that my fly had been unzipped (3). Usually, I lighten up a bit when I remind myself how important a sense of humor is to the people here as they struggle through life’s challenges day in and day out. In fact, after faith and family, humor may be that most important thing for a lot of Burkina be (and me, too), helping them (us) deal with conditions and hardships that might otherwise be unbearable. I will never know the physical hardships- the hunger, disease, and poverty- that my neighbors here in Bomborokuy deal with every day. The “hardships” I face here don’t even deserve to be called by that word. The people around me are getting ripped apart by lions (not really- there’s actually not much in the way of big wildlife here in Burkina) and I’m complaining about a bothersome fly. At the risk of exposing my naïve, probably juvenile ideas of how I think the world should work, I’m going to take a break from the jokes and the trivia to talk a little bit about one of my hardships bothersome flies.

I was born in Bangor, Maine USA into a great family. For the next 2+ decades, I was given every advantage of education, health, friends, family, and faith. I have never been hungry. No matter how many times I mess up between now and the day I die, I will never be hungry. That is a fact.

But it didn’t have to work out like that. Over the past few months, I’ve seen kids come into this world under very different conditions than those under which I got here. I’ve visited orphanages and met kids abandoned by their families. I’ve been to a hospital run by missionaries where dozens of babies born with AIDS were being treated. On a happier note, my neighbor just gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Yet, even in that case, her husband had talked to me a couple months before the birth about needing financial help to feed his pregnant wife.

Call it “the luck of the draw” or call it “part of God’s plan,” but one thing is clear: I certainly did nothing before I was conceived to deserve all I got on October 8, 1982. And not one of those babies in that hospital did anything to deserve the awful disease they were saddled with before they were even born. I mean, come on, they’re already coming into a hostile world where widespread poverty and disease have stacked the deck against them. It’s like asking a guy with a broken leg to climb a mountain. “Oh, but before you go, we’re going to go ahead and break the other leg, tie your hands behind your back, and blindfold you.” It’s not fair.

Yeah, well tough. Life’s not fair.

I don’t accept that as an intelligent response. Of course life’s not fair. I just described one of many examples of how life is anything but fair. So saying “Life’s not fair” isn’t a response; it is simply echoing what I’ve already said. A more acceptable response might be “Life shouldn’t be fair” or “Life can’t be fair.” I definitely think life should be fair. And maybe life can’t be perfectly fair, but it can certainly be a great deal more fair than it is right now. “Life’s not fair” should be something you tell a kid when his brother gets two cookies and he only gets one- not something you tell a kid born with AIDS whose dad left him after his mother died of malaria.

You know you’ve been truly blessed in your life when your “hardship” is nothing more than your conscience bugging you to do something about all those people in this world who actually know what real hardship is.