The Outsider

Living in Africa has been quite an eye opening experience. For the first time in my life, I have truly felt like an outsider. Not an outsider like a Michigan fan in Ohio...oh, it's way different than that. I mean an outsider as in "you don't belong here". Don't get me wrong. Here at CORM, I feel completely at home. Maybe a little awkward at times, but I feel completely accepted here. But when you travel outside the little "village" that is City of Refuge, things are different. That is, if your skin is white. 

I've been to Mexico and got some looks and felt a little out of place, but nothing like here. In a sea of black skin, I stick out like a sore thumb! Everyone stares, and you hear people calling "obruni" which is one of their names for a white person. 

I had a funny experience a couple weeks ago. Carissa and I went with Auntie Tyna and Auntie Lucy into Tema. We took a "TroTro" which is a kind of minivan/taxi. At one stop, a woman with a very small child got on and sat beside me. The baby wasn't even much more than a year old, but he was very curious about me. Every time I would be looking away, I would feel a little hand rubbing my arm and pinching at me. If I looked at him, he would look away and act like it wasn't him. I wondered if I was the first white person he had ever seen.

Later, when we were in Tema, we tried to get a taxi, and after Tyna spent a couple minutes in a fairly animated conversation with one driver, he threw his hand up, and drove off. Turns out he wanted to charge twice as much because I was with them. I was stunned. 

I thought of the blacks during the civil rights era, and had a new understanding for how they must have felt. Now I was on the "other" side, in a place I didn't know. I thought of the scripture that says we are "aliens"- strangers on the earth and in that moment, I longed for my heavenly home, where the things of the earth fade away. And then I thought of how we are COMMANDED to love others... no matter where they are from, no matter where I am on the earth, and no matter what color their skin is...even if I'm the outsider.