I am currently staying with Ezekiel in his parents’ house in Gembu and having a terrific time. I had been to the Mambila Plateau during my previous stay in Nigeria, but since Ezekiel wasn’t around we didn’t stay at his house. Like in the US, each home has slightly different layouts, accommodations, and ways of doing things. Unlike the US, I’m much less familiar with the different varieties here. For example, we’ve all been at the house where you can’t figure out how to operate the shower faucet, but it’s a new challenge is when your shower is a bucket of water and you aren’t sure where you’re supposed to get the water, where you should stand so that the water will drain away, or where to brush your teeth!
While it may seem to the untrained eye that some of these things are arbitrary compared with more well-define facilities, there is definitely a place and a way that things are supposed to be done for everything to work well. Just as we, in the US, would look at someone brushing their teeth in the shower as less than conventional, I’ve received enough questioning looks in the past to now know to ask. Ezekiel has been doing everything in his power to make me feel at home and in doing so I am experiencing radical hospitality.
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