Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [8]
Researching this book has been my grown-up version of the globe game. I wanted to understand what the deal is everywhere. Studying newcomers to Lincoln, I have learned more than a traveler. I have asked questions about family life, cultural collisions, dreams, and value systems. I have had long-term relationships with people who grew up in the mountains of Laos, in war-torn Bosnia, in a village in Jalisco, or on the steppes of Russia. I have talked to a Nuer tribesman about the refugee camps in Kenya and to a Muslim schoolteacher about the war in Sierra Leone. I have heard stories about small villages in Hungary and listened to Afghani women discuss the effects of the Taliban on their lives.
I have celebrated Eid al-Adha with northern Sudanese, the Holi festival with my friends from India, and attended a Latina girl's quinceañera. I have done family therapy with refugees from Macedonia or Romania, gone to a Southeast Asian Buddhist Parents Day festival, and still slept in my own bed at night.
Bill Holm, a writer from Minnesota, taught for a year in China. Afterward he wrote a book entitled Coming Home Crazy. In its preface he said that while he didn't necessarily know that much about China, his year there had taught him a tremendous amount about America. I feel that way about my experiences with refugees. They've helped me see my country with fresh clear eyes.
Tillie Olsen said there are five colleges: the college of motherhood, of human struggle, of everyday work, of literature, and of contrast. Refugees have taught me about contrasts. How do I see the world versus how do they see the world? What are my assumptions? What are theirs? What is particular in the human experience and what is universal?
The borderland where cultures collide is the best vantage point for observing human resilience. Where cultures intersect, all of a sudden everyone must do things differently. I love to be present when teenagers who don't know the earth is round or who have never seen a toothbrush collide with teens who play violins or scuba dive in the Bahamas. I like to watch people who have no written language in their home country learn to use the World Wide Web or to see what happens when third-generation Swedish farmers hire day laborers who have lived for generations on the island of Haiti or in the mountains of Peru.
Like all people, I see the world through my own cultural lenses. My view of reality is dependent on my Nebraska perspective. As I write this, I am a wife, mother, and a grandmother. I was raised Methodist although now I am a Unitarian. I am middle-class, middle-aged, and very ordinary in most ways. I have lived in the Midwest almost all my life.
Like most Americans I speak only English fluently. I value freedom and personal space. I am time conscious. I am comfortable with only certain forms of touch. A certain amount of eye contact and distance between bodies seems right to me. Some things seem much more edible than others. Certain clothes—jeans and T-shirts—feel best to me. I do not cover my head when I go out and I wear shoes inside my house. I like to talk.
In many ways I look, think, and act like a Nebraskan. But it is more complex than that. Nebraska culture is not coherent and homogenous. We have many Native American tribes with powwows all through the year and we have strong African American communities in Lincoln and Omaha. We have liberals and conservatives, sophisticates and provincials who have never left their county of birth. We have evangelicals and Sufis, hate groups and Nebraskans for Peace. Within Nebraska culture there are the cultures of academics, businesspeople, farmers, and artists. There are cultures of folk musicians, pheasant hunters, cyclists, and vegetarians. (Although in Nebraska, the beef state, vegetarians