Servanthood

Imagine you have come with your husband and three small children to be a missionary in Ethiopia. You don't want to live on the missionary compound, so you go house hunting. You have two criterion: the place must have a bath tub, so you can bathe your children and a decent yard, so since you know your children will be stuck on your property most of the time (there are no safe parks and few kid-friendly places in the city and even shopping becomes an ordeal when random Ethiopians grab the kids and kiss them, which the kids do not appreciate!). You find only one house in the city that meets both requirements. You take it.

It is a 2 bedroom, 3 if you count the small enclosed porch that you use as your master bedroom and if you don't count the outbuildings that line the back wall, which you convert into a guest room, an office, a laundry room, a bike shed and housing for your guard. Yes, the house comes with a guard named Bekelah, as well as a tall fence, and a dog. All three are necessary unless you want people to wander through your yard, pee in your bushes or break in at night and rob you. You retain them all even though having a young man on your property 24/7 isn't exactly American home sweet home.

But Bekelah turns out to be invaluable, as well as being totally trustworthy, he has an incredible work ethic and keeps the yard and car spotless. True, he won't let you get your hands dirty, even though you like gardening but he does make and keep the garden beautiful. He sweeps the lawn and washes your car daily and runs to open the gate for you when you honk outside. It's a bit awkward at first, but you get used to it. You know you are helping him: he has a job and free housing (with running water!) even if it is just a one room outbuilding. He can save up money. And you are glad to help him further, too. You give him a night a week off, so he can go to night school and you pay for the costs of his first grade schooling.

Surely Bekelah is enough help, you think. After all, you will be a stay at home mom here, just as you were in the states, and your house is certainly modest enough for you to be able to handle cleaning it, as well as the inevitable laundry, meals and dishes. But no, you discover, that would be terribly selfish! By doing those things yourself you are depriving a needy woman of a job. So you hire house help – a woman named Hobtomwa to do all those tasks that you are perfectly capable of doing. She is wonderful, too—mother of a little girl named Haimee, who your girls love to play with and wife to your friend's guard. She has been well trained and works hard, and can even do a little Western cooking, although her pizza crust still leave a bit to be desired. She's an amazing, gracious person, and you enjoy her company.

But there's still more that could be done around the household, so you eventually hire another woman, Selam, to come MWF, to help Hobtomwa. Suddenly you have gone from running a home to running a household—with staff! All three of your workers eat lunch with you whenever they are working and MWF, you have injeera and wat, traditional Ethiopian foods. Every day, your lunch conversation is in Amharic. You are own longer your own, your belongings, your lifestyle and your child rearing approach are handled, scrutinized and critiqued. To them you are impossibly rich (you own a car!) though you are living a Spartan lifestyle by any Western standard.

You are uncomfortable; you reevaluate. Should you be living in a mud hut in the slums next to your workers? But no, you husband's ministry (professor at a seminary) doesn't require that, and you wouldn't last half your term on the field if you did that. So you love your workers and you try to deal with them Christianly. You are their insurance when Hobtomwa gets Typhus (multiple times!) and you are Blue Cross, deciding whether you will cover an ultrasound when Hobtomwa gets pregnant. All this on a missionary budget, making less than most teachers.

And in the midst of all this you wonder what your role is. Since your workers do your housework, it has been stripped down to only 'mother' but what happens when your kids go off to school? Sure, you try and find a ministry to plug into, and you do good as you can, visiting the orphanage and holding babies. But the fact that you have two women in your kitchen makes it harder to deal with the realities outside your gate. The beggars and lepers that line your road, the mothers with babies strapped to their back who approach you as you shop or who tap, tap, tap on your windows as you drive places, the young boys from the country, conspicuous in their colorful blankets, huddled under the pedestrian bridge at your exit. All these ugly truths, plus the sheer mass of humanity, everywhere, that you can't escape from, is harder to deal with when there are two women in your kitchen. And not being able to escape into comfortable individualism, some how makes you feel more lonely—you are so far from your family, from your friends, people who understand you and communicate the same way you do.

Yet your lunch table is merry because of your workers, laughing and teasing you in Amharic, your relationship motivating you to move beyond your language school level. And yet… and yet… you still long for the weekends when the dishes and laundry start pilling up—a sign of your sweet freedom. And the most attractive vacation plan you can come up with during rainy season is to give your workers the week off!