by Anna De Young
“I was like, ahh, I deserve better than this!” She half-laughed at the church function. She was talking about her shower woes. The stall had been hard to clean, all of the grout between the tiny tiles filled with grime and mildew. Her husband had eventually installed a new shower of linoleum, very easy to keep sparkling white.
“No, ma’am, you don’t,” I thought while I smiled sympathetically. The fact that she had a shower was a signal of her pampered blindness.
You wanna know how I shower? I close the gate at dusk, the ear-splitting noise of metal dragging across sandy cement the nonverbal queue for “I am done for the day.” Let the neighbors be informed. Then I go stand in a giant basin, half-full of my children’s dirty bathwater, stripping my clothes off to fling them over the laundry line within arm’s reach.
And where is this basin? In my courtyard. If anyone did stick their head over the wall, they would see me there, stark naked, but no one ever does. Only my husband and young children are around (or perhaps they are already in bed), and I could care less if they see me.
I reach the liter-sized plastic scoop into the plastic barrel of water, also strategically within arm’s reach, and tip my head back as the glorious water runs down the front of my grimy, sandy, sweaty body. Since the barrel is in the shade, the water is perfectly lukewarm. The second scoop is poured slowly over my shoulders and back.
I can see the stars beginning to come out through the hazy sky as a rare but welcome evening breeze raises goosebumps on my wet body. I relish the feeling, knowing it won’t last long, knowing I will wake up at least once during the night needing to rehydrate myself from all the sweat that the intense exertion of sleeping will produce.
Six scoops. If I don’t wash my hair, I can wash my body in six scoops. Seven, just to enjoy the feeling, but only if the water came on that week. Get wet, soap up, rinse, and tiptoe into the bedroom. No point in drying.
Most people think that the hard part about living in rural Africa is the living part. It’s true, there is no electricity (except there is, because we have a solar system). The water comes out of a spigot, roughly two mornings per week. There is no sink, no AC, no heating, and no pavement. There is only hot sand. No libraries or parks to take my kids to. No dishwasher—that’s what basins are for. No clothes washer—that’s what the same basins are for. No bathtub—I think you get the picture. No dryer—that’s what the unrelenting sun is for.
Yet even so, the hard part is not the living part, at least not for me. Others do struggle with it, I know, but God created each person uniquely, and apparently I was created to live and thrive in the Stone Ages. The hard part for me is hearing the wham of children being beaten at the quranic school two doors down and the subsequent screams. The hard part is knowing that no matter how well I speak the language (and I speak it well), I will never be accepted as a member of this community, but forever condemned to its fringes.
The hard part is the deaths. Three men die by carbon monoxide from their generator as they try to repair a watering hole. A girl dies by falling out of a mango tree, by getting kicked off a horse, by drowning in three inches of water, by burning when the lean-to she was sleeping in caught on fire. The mothers who die of AIDS. The babies who die of diarrhea. I, on the edge of society, still hear of more deaths in one year than what I had known in my entire life until then.
So, how to respond to this oblivious church lady?
“If you deserved a new shower, then my African neighbors deserve not to die of preventable diseases.”
Or maybe, “We all deserve hell and only God has saved us.”
But I simply smile and nod, because the disconnect is too great. This, my first home assignment after an intense three years in rural Africa, has challenged my conceptions of how two such disparate worlds can simultaneously exist. Sometimes I feel like my life in Africa was a dream, and other times, I feel like I am sleepwalking here.
The reality is, there is nothing I could say to this average, middle-class woman which would respectfully convey how shallow her innocent comment struck me as. I just hold my tongue as the memories wash over me, trying my best not to judge her for only knowing one world.
The truth is, we all deserve warm showers, at the flip of a handle, in a clean and sanitary environment. Everyone is made in the image of God. And simultaneously, none of us really even deserves to be clean. We are totally corrupted, inextricably marred by sin, disgusting and unholy. We deserve nothing but death, but the grace of God through Jesus Christ reaches out and purifies us, making us clean.
So I do not deserve the cushy American life, nor do my neighbors deserve to live in such poverty. These are the truths, seemingly incompatible, that God is challenging me to hold in tandem this season. Both worlds are backwards, rife with sin and injustice. People often do not get what they deserve—the positive or the negative. Yet through His grace and mercy, we are here, alive, to do His bidding.
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Originally from the American Midwest, Anna loves traveling and language learning. Her travels have led her to learn English, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She has her BA in International Development and has always strived to be the hands and feet of God in practical, respectful ways. Compelled to reach the least reached, she and her husband lived in Chad for three years with their two little kids and hope to continue working somewhere in the Sahelian region of Africa.
