It was at Milligan College that I first began examine issues epistimologically. That is, it was where I first began to think. I was asked to examine choices I had made in my life, not based on the cultural norms of my family or the town in Pennsylvania where I had grown up, but based instead on the culture of a group of people who proclaimed that Jesus was Lord of their lives. I began to see that all the things we did in our life were supported by faith, not just my decision to attend church on Sunday morning, but everything required a faith of some sort.
When I walk into a room at night, I reach out my hand to find a piece of plastic which has been mounted on the wall by the door. As I move the piece of plastic either up or down, a light turns on in the room. I have done this so many times in my life that I rarely think about it anymore. I have faith, I believe that when I switch that piece of plastic, the light will come on. Sometimes my faith is briefly shaken when the light does not come on, so I replace the light bulb. My experiences within my culture has taught me to have faith in light switches, and in my mind, a light switch is directly related to the light in a room.
Living and working in a remote part of Africa has shown me how unnatural some of my convictions are to those who have belief systems that have been built by a different set experiences. Ewoi is a young woman who comes into our home each morning to help Katy clean our house, which is sometimes an effort of futility in the desert! At our house we have some electricity that is somehow transferred from sunlight through solar panels into some batteries. We then have inverters attached to these batteries that invert the electricity stored in the batteries into electricity that will run things like lights and fans in our house.
Ewoi has had no experience with electricity, in fact, the phrase “turn on the light,” can not be translated into Turkana. There is a button on our gas stove that allows you to start one of the burners without having to risk your life trying to light it with a match. Pressing the button creates a little spark next to the gas coming out and starts the flame.
Teaching Ewoi how to use this button was a task in its self, which was complicated more by our electric system. The inverter that is attached to the battery saves power by going on standby when there is nothing plugged in that is turned on at the time. It turns back on when there is a draw on it of more than half an amp. Well, the little spark that the stove makes when you press the button is less than half an amp, so if the inverter is on standby, it doesn’t work. The easiest way to get the inverter to turn on (and thus the stove to light), is to walk over to the light switch on the wall, turn on the overhead light, and then go back to the stove and press the button.
This process makes absolutely no sense to Ewoi. The first time we showed her that she had to push a switch on the wall, wait for the overhead light to turn on, than press a button on the stove to get a flame, she just laughed. But now she has absoule faith in that process. In fact, her faith insists that this is the way it must be done—even when the electricity is on, and the stove would light, she first turns on the overhead light to start the flame on the stove.
In Turkana I am constantly confronted by faith that I don’t understand. Men have faith that the contents of a goat stomach, when spread over the chest, will keep them from getting sick. Women believe that pulling a tooth out of the mouth of a child sick with Malaria will heal the child. All people believe that if you see a rainbow, you should break off a smaal branch from a tree and throw it down on the ground to try to counter the curse of the rainbow. The economic system is based on the belief that wealth is accumulated by having multiple wives, and as many children as possible.
How do these systems of faith stack up against our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Is it even possible to simultaneously hold on to the faith engrained by our culture and our faith in Jesus? These are questions we deal with in Turkana all the time. Most of the time they are questions I cannot answer as the missionary—I can only bring them up. The Turkana Christians must decide which faiths are conflicting with the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
But I am an American, and as I have been working so hard to distinguish the incongruities between Turkana culture and the culture of Christ, I’ve been thinking more about my own culture too.