Am I the Monkey . . . or the Monkey's friend??

My language tutor and I spent a class in September swapping riddles, stories, fables, proverbs and mind twisters. As part of my language study, I translated some from our culture and he brought a few from his Fulani culture – as part of my desire to learn more about story-telling in their traditions.

One proverb which he shared touched on a part of life that I oft-times struggle with as I live in Niger:

You are friends with a monkey so your stick is never stuck above.

In the Fulani culture, after the harvest, the feed for the animals is tied in bundles and lifted into a tree – nestled among the branches, it is beyond the hungry mouths of cows, goats, donkeys and sheep. To retrieve the bundles, you either push them down with a long stick or throw a shorter stick repeatedly to dislodge the bundle. Therefore, if you have a friendship with a monkey, your stick will never get stuck in the branches – the monkey will throw it back down to you.

The moral of this proverb is that your friends are useful to you . . . and indeed, friendship in Niger (and likely most of Africa) is based largely on gift-giving.

I asked my tutor if the moral was meant to teach that you search out friends who can be useful to you or if you expect those who are your friends to be useful to you.

His response was that the usefulness of friendship between his culture and mine is the answer to my question. In our culture (mine and yours – that of the ‘white people’), he explained, our usefulness or giving among friends centres around emotional needs. If we, for example, had a difficult day, would we go to someone to talk about this day to a friend who would tell us ‘I have no time nor desire to listen to your problems’?

In contrast, the usefulness of the friendships in the Fulani culture revolves more around what someone is able to give in terms of material objects.

While we have friends of different socio-economic levels, the varying degree of wealth between us is, in the majority of cases, not that large – especially in comparison to the difference of wealth between my Fulani friends and I. Throw into the mix the fact that our culture not only does not expect monetary gifts from our friends, but the asking of said wealthy friends for gifts each time we see them goes way beyond our cultural boundaries. Thus, learning how to navigate the friendship structure of my Fulani friends in Niger is challenging and at times downright frustrating.

I have no answer to the cultural issue at stake, at times I fight the cultural issue at stake, and I believe that it will be an issue that will crop it’s head at varying points throughout my missionary career here in Africa.

I suppose part of the frustration comes more from their expectation or demand that I will help them versus an actual request. In the last year and the past few weeks, I have dealt with the following ‘requests’:

• What time are you coming to my house to move my household belongings? And a week later, when he was unsatisfied with his new house and wanted to move again: You are obligated to come with your truck on tomorrow to move my belongings to a new house.
• My friend and his aunts invited themselves to my house on a Saturday and then Thursday afternoon I was asked how they would arrive at my house . . . your truck? (This I found out later was outside the bounds of culture, as if people decide to come to your house, they come . . . you are only culturally obligated to pay their return taxi fare home – and only if you have the means to do so.)
• Thank you for the sekko mats you brought to help us rebuild our houses (see July 2008), but give me money for medicine too.
• My friend is in town, you are obligated to come tomorrow and meet with him.
• After an invitation to a Fulani cultural event of singing, dancing and poetry, I arrive at 10am to discover this was not until the evening. I was asked to go greet my friend’s parents who were in town, and then an aunt was expecting us. I discovered that the celebrating of this cultural event was to go around and greet all your friends and family and I had unsuspectingly become the taxi for the day – because I had a vehicle and thus should save them taxi money. Even after saying that I was tired and needed to return back to their home versus driving out to airport to greet another aunt, we somehow ended up at yet again at someone else’s house.

I struggle at times now with deciding whether or not I want to help someone with whom I am in a friendship, because I know it sets a precedent to help them again. If I help someone with school fees one year, then I will likely be asked again next year. . . Why should they pay if I am willing? Last year in July when we helped out a village with sekko mats to rebuild their huts, we also gave a few sacks of rice and corn to help out because their food supply was destroyed in the huts as well – this year in July, the chief asked me “Was it not last year you helped us with food when our granary was empty? Our granary is empty again.”

Yes, I want to help people in their distress and needs.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. . . The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Matthew 25:35-36,40

But, from a development standpoint, I also believe in the proverb:

Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.

I do not want to become the crutch for someone, the endless supply of money (which trust me, I am not). I want to help “create” lasting change, to make a difference in the lives of those around me that they can help themselves. It is the daily struggle of missionary life here as we see needs all around us every day that we cannot possibly begin to fill.

But back to the dilemma of the monkey, for yet with all these frustrations and questions, I have to wonder: Am not somehow doing the same thing? I need Fulani friends with whom to practice language, so I am therefore in a sense also seeking friends who are useful to me.

Some friends have been introduced to me as longterm friends of the team. Others, I need to go out and find. I am conscious in all this searching for language partners that I am starting a friendship with them . . . I cannot simply move on after language study once my ministry starts and tell them that I only needed them to learn the language so I could go work in the village - I pray that they will become friends and people to whom I can minister through my friendship.

The paradigm through which we view life is different in many ways. The Bible says to store up our treasures in heaven. Yet, what my friends seek is not treasures to store up but sustenance for the day - Jesus fed the 5,000 knowing that sustenance for the day was important. How do you preach to someone of the hunger in their soul when there is hunger in their belly? Through all this, I long and pray for the day when my friend's paradigms will shift, when they will realize the hunger in their soul and seek that which I can share with them - that which will truly satisfy. For the 'riches' that I have come to share with them, they cannot at this point understand. They desire me to share from my material wealth, and I desire to share with them the riches of our Father in Heaven.

Even if they never desire this, they will still be my friends.

So who is the monkey and who is the monkey's friend? Or are we both each in these relationships? Are they the monkey for me in my western culture of friendship 'giving' in non-materialistic means, by helping me with language? Am I then to be their monkey and give within their cultural bounds of materialistic giving as a friend? And if this is so, where do I find the boundaries - and my sanity - within this . . . within their culture and within mine?