Learning from Justice Antonin Scalia
Among the many good things that have been said about the late Justice Antonin Scalia, the most impressive to me was that his closest friend on the bench was Justice Ruth Ginsberg, she who is as strong a liberal as Judge Scalia was a conservative. Such a friendship is a tribute to the both of them. Somehow they were able to see past everything that divided them and built a friendship based on acceptance of each other.
Into a Foreign Culture
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| City Hall at Surakarta, Central Java, Indonesia |
I’ve had to let go of some very western concepts such as that of my protectiveness over private property. Complete strangers sometimes came into our yard and helped themselves to the mangoes on our trees totally ignoring our presence. I soon found out that community sharing was a strong value in this culture. They shared what they had with one another, however little they had. They shared fruit trees, music from their radios, television and sometimes, even the electricity that powered their lights, etc. Westerners may be apprehensive about this, but I soon found out that underlying this was a strong spirit of generosity. My tenacious clinging to my privacy had to be shaken loose as I got more attuned to what community was about. Needless to say, this was difficult to accept, but again there was something for me to learn from my Indonesian friends. When they admonished me in many different ways about how to take care of my baby, I soon realized that they had taken us as their own. As family and as surrogate parents, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, they were expected to give us advice and help us treat this baby right.
Learning from our Community
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| A typical neighborhood in our city of Surakarta |
When Don came down with hepatitis on the second year of our term, he was prescribed complete bed rest for six weeks. I will never forget the love and warmth that our community extended to us, orang asing[1] as we were. Each day, I mean every day, a neighbor or someone in our community would bring us fresh fruit for Don for all the weeks he was sick. It didn’t seem to matter that some of them really didn’t have much to spare. They kept tab on how he was doing. They made sure our 5-month old baby and I were fine. It was no wonder that we fell greatly in love with our adopted community which included the ladies who owned the warungs[2] across the street, the pedicab drivers who parked their vehicles by our fence, our neighbors whose children spent a lot of time in our home, our landlord and his family, the patrons who borrowed books from our little library, the university students who studied English with Don, and even some “ladies of the night” in our kampong[3] who had become our friends.
The longer we lived in our adopted country, the clearer our vision became of the people to whom God had sent us. They were not just 135.6 million people, 90% of whom were Moslems. They were our community. Our lives and theirs intersected increasingly. We found out that though divided by culture, religion and life practices, we had many things in common.
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| A Mosque in Batu, Malang in East Java |
Meet Our Friend, Pak Nasrukan
When we moved from Central Java to East Java, we met Pak Nasrukan and his family. They owned the chicken farm where we bought our weekly supply of eggs. Don, who couldn’t get used to Indonesian breakfast, would have his American breakfast at home before he left for the quarter of a mile walk to Pak Nasrukan’s home. As soon as Don got there, Pak Nasrukan’s wife would have an Indonesian breakfast ready for him. It would not be gracious of Don to say “no” to this kindness, so he would then have a second breakfast.
Pak Nasrukan was very serious about his Moslem faith. He had just become a Hadji, one who had been on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He wanted to learn about Christianity as compared to his own faith. He would engage Don in long and countless discussions over breakfast. Both men wanted to learn from each other. There were times when Pak Nasrukan would invite his Imam[4], so they could have a 3-way discussion about their faith. One time Don was invited to attend a Moslem worship service in the Hadji’s home. We invited them to our home for dinner and they invited us to theirs. When they found out we had been married a couple of years, they worried that we hadn’t been blessed with a baby. They promised that they would come to see us when our first baby was born. When we moved back to Central Java, we were sad to lose this friendship.
A little over a year later, we were surprised to see them come through our gate at Jalan Honggowongso. They made good their promise. They had heard about Kristy. It took them a day’s travel by bus to get to our home. They told us how happy they were at Kristy’s birth. They came and stayed for three days in our home. We felt greatly honored. There was no better way they could have communicated the value of our friendship with them. It didn’t matter that we were foreigners, that we both spoke broken versions of each other’s language, that he was a Moslem Hadji and we were Christian missionaries. It only mattered that we were friends and friends shared life experiences. They came to share our joy at being blessed with our first baby.
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| The Royal Palace in our city of Surakarta where Princess Mangkunegoro VIII gave us an audience. We went there in a "betchak" (pedicab) just like that one in the foreground. The Princess sent us home in her air-conditioned Mercedes Benz! |
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