Cement, Comedy, Confusion, Non-Alliterative Personal Growth

In Lebamba, everyone knows how to mix cement by hand. Seriously. Everyone. They apparently come out of the womb, recipe in hand. Furthermore, There Is No Other Way to mix cement. If you stray from the recipe even by a bit, there's a good chance life as we know it will come to an end.

Given that, it's somewhat difficult for me to help mix the cement, as I have not been brought up in the ways of dogmatic cement mixing. Whatever kind of underwear they wear out here is never so efficiently twisted as when I mix cement wrong.

Story example: For the recipe, first one lays down a pad of sand. Then, one puts however many sacks of cement correlates to however much sand you have. Then, one cuts open the bags of cement, and then flips the cement onto the sand.

One time, I saw the guys cutting open the cement bags with a shovel. They aimed the point of the shovel at the edge of the bag, and then stabbed. Not an efficient method, but it worked. I thought that this was the way, and so the next time we mixed cement, when it came time to cut open the bags, I jumped forward, eager to apply my new knowledge.

I think literally three of the four guys yelled at me in unison. Not like an angry yell, like a "what are you a crazy person?" yell.

Then one of them with a pocket knife stepped up and delicately sliced the bags open. Clearly, this was the way.

After laugh-crying myself to sleep that night, which is a fascinating experience I recommend highly, I got to thinking.

These people don't need me.

The only thing I have to offer, as far as my human self, is western thoughts, western ideals, western money. And even if those things do help in a ridiculously significant way, i.e. they live the rest of their lives in comfort, they can't help with any sort of permanence. They can't take it with them when they go.

My help here has no intrinsic value, it is the reason behind the help that is what makes it valuable.

I am not the savior of these people. It sounds obvious when you say it like that, but I think subconciously, that's sort of something that we as Americans think. We are the rich. We will give money to the poor, and then they will be happy. Go us.

But as Christians, we're not called to be the savior, we already have one of those. We are called to be the messenger. If the most effective way to send a message is to help (and it often is, as actions speak louder than words), then so be it. But we are not called simply to help. We are called to show the love of Christ. This is good, because that means we can apply it anywhere- you don't have to go to Africa to be a Christian. People in America might not need help like people in Gabon, but they certainly need love.