Made Out of the Same Fabric

Here are two stories that make me smile.

            This little girl’s name is Zooeeah. She is an adorably shy little 4 year old. Her family is the closest neighbor of the missionary women I was living with. She has three older brothers. Now Zooeeah is a spunky little girl, stubborn sometimes, and willful. One time she was trying to do a task (I forget what it was) and she was having trouble. Several people asked if they could help her, including the white women and one of her brothers. No, she did not want their help. “I can do it,” she said. Along comes her oldest brother, Shada. He says, “Can I help you, Zooeeah?” She adoringly looks into his eyes and, in her cute little voice, says, “Eh (Yes).” Another time, Zooeeah was playing with a make shift “car.” It was really a stick with a jug attached at the end of it. She would push it around and pretend it was a car. She and her brother, Moody, who is closest to her in age, started fighting over it. He finally gave in to her, but she started crying. Her father looked up from where he’d been hoeing and observing, and said, “Why are you upset? You got what you wanted.” These stories make me smile because they show how similar people are even when their cultures are totally different. Little girls look up to their older (in her case, oldest) brothers in any culture! There is sibling rivalry too-and often it is between the siblings who are closest in age! People are the same, no matter where they live or in what circumstances. We have the same emotions of affection and frustration and desires for independence and attention. 

            The man in the picture above was my home-stay dad, named D'Atoo but called Baba Asha (Father of Asha). One time, a couple of the women went to visit his home. When they walked into the front of his fenced in “yard,” they found him in a very amusing situation. He was sitting on a stool with nothing on except a kanga (basically a piece of cloth that all the women wear over their skirts) wrapped around his waist. That picture is funny in and of itself. But two of his granddaughters were also there, and he was allowing them to braid his hair! All the people in the village have very short hair, and they are somehow still able to braid it into cornrows. It is not a manly thing to do though. This older man was sitting, wearing women’s clothing, letting his granddaughters braid his hair. That makes me smile because he was so patient with them, having fun allowing them to be silly. At one point he said, “Alright, that is enough. Stop now.” And they begged him to let them keep going. Don’t we all want people to let us be goofy and do silly things to them? I remember when my sister and I convinced our brother to let us dress him up like a girl, put make-up on him, and take pictures. It was a silly thing to do, but don't we all want to do things like that at one time or another?

You see, we are truly all made from the same fabric. Maybe we have different patterns, but the material is the same. God made us; He is the engineer. He has given us ways in which we can relate to each and every human being on the planet. He has created us to be unique too. In that way, we can share points of common interest, yet still learn new perspectives from our differences.