Last week we had a special tea time at the translation office in town. We were saying good-bye to an American volunteer (now a dear friend) who spent 3 months here helping to refurbish the office and to start some new building work. Three translation teams use the office, plus our group. The office will serve everyone's needs much better when it is completed. It already looks much, much better.
The first job was to build an enclosure wall around the compound. The office is on a busy corner, both for foot traffic and vehicles, and pedestrians often cut through the yard. The wall keeps out potential thieves, as well as (some of) the dust and noise from the road.
During the tea time, one of the translators bemoaned the loss of "la culture africaine", as more and more people put up these enclosures. Traditionally, during a rainstorm, people would welcome in passing strangers to wait out the storm so they wouldn't get wet. But now, with these enclosures, there is no place for people to take shelter, and the traditional hospitality is lost. A couple of months ago there was a very heavy hailstorm, and a man was knocked down and nearly blacked out just outside the office. People inside saw him, somehow, and went to help him. But if the wall had not been there, he could have come in and taken shelter in the building, and perhaps he would not have been so hurt.
We were struck by the hospitality of this tradition of giving shelter to passers-by. In typical, self-sufficient American fashion, we carry our own shelter around with us, in the form of umbrellas. It would never occur to us to ask someone to let us into their house in during a simple rain shower. Self-sufficiency is not a high value in Congo; community is.
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