Our Town

People are basically the same.  This is the gentle realization to which I have come today.  Now, I have certainly heard this said before and I know that my saying this is not any great leap in cultural understanding.  Hell, in tenth grade advanced english we read the play Our Town in which the conclusion, if I remember correctly, is that life everywhere, throughout time and space, is essentially the same.  I feel somewhat foolish for coming so late to this new understanding but I suppose everything happens in its own time.  This thought is the culmination of what was, for some reason, a relatively difficult week.  This difficulty, I am sure, is due to the frustrating feeling that we are experiencing a lot of time on the campus and very little in the villages and cities of Tanzanians.  We are basically in a community of education similar to that in which we would be at home.  Life began to really become normal this week.  The first few weeks were so full of these great revelations of cultural and religious difference, especially in everyday ritual and practices of hospitality, and attitude toward people and the land.  Then for a few days I experienced a dip in feeling as realizing these things made me long for home and what I once considered the inferior attitudes of the western world.  This week I met myself somewhere in the middle.  The great high of culture shock and then the great low of missing home has now ended up in what I believe is closer to reality.  Life is normal here as it would be at home.  We all do many of the same things that we would do at home and no one here has become an entirely new person.  Earlier this week, this was very frustrating.  Then I realized that we are all still ourselves (certainly growing but basically ourselves) because life here is not entirely other.  There are still incredibly nice people and those who seem especially upset all the time.  Greed may look different and may more often be need based rather than excess based(like the sales-child that attempted to swindle me at the cattle market) but he evil of excess based greed is still around, as is great charity and selflessness.  There is hunger here and at home.  There is emptiness and love and a longing for technology and newness.  Kids spend the evenings at da club.  I still read a lot, The Office is still funny and Steve’s still a slammin’ hottie.  The differences, while still present and sometimes obvious, are more often subtle and somewhat superficial.  At the bottom of everything people are people.  There are many other things that I could mention but you understand, I am certain.  I think this is a constructive point to come to as the month of very intensive language learning is coming to a close.  I am now past this and can focus on those subtle things that do make us different.  Always with the understanding that the differences are normally just differences in manifestations of the same things.  We are humans at our core who simply express the essences of our humanity in different ways.  It is these expressions, especially as demonstrated in the life of faith, ritual and community that I can now begin to focus upon so that we can learn from each other in our mutual expressions of our humanity and our common convergence with the being of God, the ground of all being.