I was skimming a blog written by an American living in Vietnam who was addressing the question of how much a Westerner can know about an Asian culture. This got me thinking about my own blog and websites. I wonder just how authoritive I end up sounding. After almost 18 years of living overseas – all but four of them in Indonesia – I should know something about this culture, but something always pops up that reminds me how much I really don’t know.
So something new popped up a few days ago. When I returned home from school, my eldest daughter was waiting with two pieces of news. She gave me the bad news first: our dog had killed one of our rabbits while playing with him. He apparently decided that it was like his stuffed rabbit, and he decided to throw it around for a while. We buried the rabbit out in the back next to our two dogs who are no longer with us – one poisoned, the other hit by a car.
The second piece of news was “happy” as Mercedes informed me. She said that we had adopted a baby. Imagine my surprise.
Sure enough, there was a little fellow in the kitchen being played with by my children. He’s a cute little guy. I have a hard time remembering his name, but he’s cheerful and receptive. It’s been a while since I’ve had a baby around, and it was kind of nice to hold one again, although being as we were only “temporary” parents, I was as worried about breaking him as I am when I borrow someone’s car or motorbike.
So what is the new cultural knowledge? I’m still processing this because I just found out that one of my kids was in the same situation once. According to my wife and children and some Indonesian colleagues, this is a common practice on a number of islands – just one of those things that I’ve missed while I’ve been obsessed with a career and keeping bread on the table.
The child that I “adopted” was given to us by a village family because the baby boy looked a lot like his father. This can cause conflicts between the two as the child grows up (I’m not sure what the theory is behind this- I’ll do some checking later), so the family gives the child to another family to temporarily adopt (the time frame seems to be fairly flexible according to the people that I’ve talked to). Eventually after the time period is finished, the adopting parents take the child to the natural parents and offer to let them adopt their (the adopting parents) baby. The natural parents adopt the child and everything is ok.
I find this practice immensely fascinating and plan on looking more it, but my baby “son” was here today and he kept everyone busy.
Besides mentioning some new cultural practice that I was unaware of, the main point here is that no matter how long a foreigner lives in another culture, they will always be a foreigner, and there will always be things to learn.
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