We Americans seem to have a strong need to be liked. We are inherently friendly people and it is almost second nature for us to seek points of reference with strangers. We ask a lot of questions: Where are you from? Where have you lived? Where did you go to school? We’re always looking for something we have in common, something that will make the other person feel like less of a stranger.

As a brand new expatriate, I was a guest and a stranger. I believed I had very little in common with my hosts. Being a guest is tiring – and tiresome. I was always on my best behavior as I tried to find out how things were done. Inevitably, I made mistakes because I didn’t know the protocol. Sometimes, in my need to feel accepted, I found myself overlooking boorish behavior in my hosts, something I wouldn’t have done back home. “It’s their country, and I must adapt,” I kept telling myself. So I swallowed my irritation and, sometimes, my scruples. They weren’t very tasty.

People who have studied the process of acculturation will tell you that the process follows a predictable path. It isn’t long before you realize that you aren’t an adventurer in an exotic country. It hits you that you’re in this for the long haul, however long that may be. You go into a slump. And you stay there for a while. You start to realize that you will always be a stranger. You may feel depressed, even angry. The process of acculturation takes time. But, yes, you do get over it, and if you are patient with yourself and your hosts, you will emerge from the slump. That’s when you start to become productive.

Absolutely! And that takes time, too. I saw many missionaries, and I include myself in the group, who came to Africa with their backpacks full of “helpful” stuff. We tend to assume that the people with whom we have come to live and work are naïve, that they know nothing and are eagerly waiting to learn from us. It isn’t that we are arrogant. Most of us are really pretty humble. But we sometimes forget that the indigenous people have their own history, their own knowledge of what works and what doesn’t within their environment. We need to remind ourselves to listen to them, to learn from them. When we start to do that, we’re well on the way.

Ah! There really weren’t very many of those. The overwhelming majority of Namibians I knew were kind and gracious. But there were one or two – I mention them in the book – who made life extraordinarily difficult, not just for me, but for the whole seminary. Figuring out how to deal with them and their behavior was perhaps one of the toughest things of the entire six-year experience. It very nearly had us packing our bags and booking the next flight home. None of our management skills seemed to work.

Politely agreeing with those individuals would have meant putting the institution on some perilous courses. Direct confrontation wasn’t really an option. Some of the expatriate lecturers tried that, but it exacerbated the situation. The problem was that everyone touted consensus as the modus operandi within the culture. Now, consensus-building is a fine theory, but what we experienced was that the difficult individuals used it as a means of bludgeoning and intimidating others until their opponents simply gave up and acquiesced.

Lou and I learned the limits of what we could do. We could not initiate action against those individuals, but we could support our Namibian colleagues in standing up to them. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t. Although Lou was the dean of students for four years, he really had very little authority. (Pretty tough for a man who, as a congregational pastor for over 35 years, had been used to being in charge!) What usually happened was that the majority of level-headed faculty members were able to place some restraining walls around the difficult ones so they couldn’t damage the institution too badly.

Yes, they were. I suppose it was partly because they called me “Meme,” which means Mommy. My own children were the ages of my African students. Perhaps I was experiencing feeling of the empty-nester. Those young Africans lacked the sophistication of American young adults, and their culture had taught them to respect their elders. It wasn’t really that I thought of myself as their parent. Perhaps “mentor” would come closer to describing the relationship.

Have you stayed in touch with your former students?

Yes! Thanks to the wonders of e-mail, I have maintained contact with a few of them. In fact, a few years ago one of our former students, Paul Muha, came to the USA and was a guest in our home. He preached a sermon at the church Lou was serving, and even made a guest appearance on a local TV talk show!