Family Culture

A friend asked me the other day if I was trying to help Nes keep his Ethiopian culture. I have been thinking about culture a lot lately. I frequently go to the dictionary when struggleing with issues. Defining terms can be very helpful when sorting out ideas. What Merriam-Webster had to say was very interesting. Culture comes from the word cultivate, which means to prepare for increase. The actual definition has much more to do with education than I had thought. Of course today the word has evolved to mean the shared set of values, practices, attitudes that define a group of people. I find this very freeing.

I have struggled with how I was going to help Nes keep his Ethiopianness. Obviously I can only teach him about Ethiopia in an academic sense. Learning about a place is not the same as living there. I can teach him about the music, even listen to the music, but it is not the same as listening to it from the lawn at the guesthouse with the smell of frying onions, and children playing outside of the sheet metal gate. What I can give him is knowledge, but the experience will have to come later.

We are trying to incorporate into our family culture some of Nes's culture. We want his people to be our people as much as we can. Sometimes it feels like a very poor imitation of the real thing, but it is what we have to work with. In bringing Ethiopian children into our family we are all sharing our cultures in a very real way. What we end up with is not "our" culture vs. "their" culture, it is the Schumaker culture. We want to incorporate their history into ours. I want to teach all of my children about the history, music, food, holidays, religion, language, and people of Ethiopia, just like I will teach them about all of those things in America, and Europe.

I understand that people outside of our family will meet Nes, and make different assumptions about him than they will K-man. It is important to me that I prepare him for that. That means a lot of work on my part of finding my many, many blindspots. It means that I have to get out of the academic mindset and spend time in places that are uncomfortable for me. I need to spend time interacting with cultures that are not mine. I need to do my best to really feel what they feel.

It is easy to stay in my own comfortable world and say that it doesn't matter, he is one of us. He is one of us, and I want him to be very secure in that knowledge, but he is also one of "them." He is a member of groups that I will never be. I need to get over my fear of offending people and do my best to be a bridge for my children. They can't feel comfortable with being Ethiopian, or African American, or Black if I am uncomfortable. I need to realize that I will always be an outsider as much as they are. This family that God has created is diverse and unified. We have a culture that is our own, and for us includes shared values, and attitude from many cultures. Folks on the outside will not always "get it." But that is okay, it is our own and here we are all included.