Adventures in Open-Gate Policy

Dedicated to all my friends who have made snide remarks about reading my blog “WHEN YOU POST!” And to my mother, whose not-so-subtle reminders have kept me well-aware of the length between my posts.

The vast majority of homes in Mali are surrounded by some type of fence or wall. This seems so contradictory to their hospitable natures at first. However, it soon becomes apparent that for all their myriad purposes (keeping animals in/out, establishing identity, etc.), they have no intention of keeping visitors out. In fact, visiting friends and family at their home is almost a requirement (not really the workplace/golf course friend-types here). They love to be honored by the visit of a friend, even if (or perhaps, especially if) the visit is unannounced and unexpected.

Malian culture teaches the importance of visiting and hosting from both angles. The hospitality of a host is of utmost importance. A Malian pastor recently told me the Bambara proverb that says, “When someone leaves their home to visit you in yours, they should be considered much more important than you.” And I’ve heard many single guys say that one of the qualities they will look for in a wife is someone who would help them make their friends and family welcome in the couple’s home. However, on the other side, it is important to be the visitor as well. This (as strange as this seems to Americans) allows friends and family to play the role of host and exercise their hospitality. It is a way of honoring the person you visit, and nothing helps friendships here like a visit to the friend’s home.

I can say that I’ve worked hard to be a visitor, and I think I’ve been fairly successful—even if my American tendencies do get in the way. For example, instead of just popping in spontaneously, I usually call and invite myself over. Somehow, in my head that just seems so much better. And my friends visit me with a regular frequency now, even if they do call beforehand. (The differences between their calls and mine: Me—“Could I maybe, please, if it isn’t too much trouble, come visit?” Them—“Are you home…good…I’m at your gate.”) They know that the gate is unlocked and they can just come in. With some of my closer friends, I’ve even tried the route of, “when you are here, you are home—so help yourself. If you want something to drink, just go to the fridge.” This has yet to work, but I have high hopes—all this drink-fetching is getting old fast! However, always having more room for improvement, I was recently challenged on how I keep my gate unlocked but not open.

It started like this. There are women/girls in every neighborhood that walk around selling fruit and vegetables from a large plate they carry on their heads. If at first this seems cool and exotic, I can assure that it also fast becomes annoying to be constantly approached by women trying to sell you some piece of vegetation. My approach up to this point was always to refer them to my house guy and let him deal with it. On the weekends, when he isn’t around, I would always just tell them that they needed to come back and see him during the weekdays. My theory being that once you buy from them—much like feeding a stray, or more pertinently, buying from a door-to-door salesman—they’ll be back. This worked well at all the other places I lived, but then I moved to my current house where the setup is a bit different. The ladies started to let themselves in on Saturday mornings.

One Saturday morning I had just gotten out of the shower and had just started shaving when I heard two young girls greeting loudly at my front door. I decided to ignore them, but they just keep calling. This went on for like 5 minutes, and finally I snapped. I went to the door in my towel, shaving cream still covering half my face, and I told them rather forcefully that they were to leave and never open my gate again. I’m sure this made for great stories out on the streets about the crazy white guy who came to the door half-naked.

A few days after that, I was sitting with a few friends in a friend’s courtyard when two young girls walked up selling vegetables. They were not only politely refused, but in the typical Malian way, some joke was made and the girls parted laughing. So I recounted my story to my friends, and they laughed knowingly. They recounted stories of trying to sleep after a night shift at work and being woken by the girls knocking on their door. But to them, it was just a funny aspect of life and didn’t merit getting upset. That is when the conversation switched to my gate. They proceeded to tell me, with smiles but not subtlety, that Malians think you are mean if you leave your gate shut all the time. I told them I’d have to give the open-gate policy a whirl.

After that conversation, I decided that it wouldn’t kill me to leave the gate open more when I was at home, and I resolved to just sit back and enjoy whatever came through. So far, the traffic has been more of the same—girls selling fruit, curious little kids looking into the courtyard, and two guys wanting to have some leaves from one of my trees so they could make a traditional medicine for orthostatic hypotension. And then there was Amadou.

Amadou rolled up to my gate one Saturday afternoon while I was sitting out under the shade of a tree eating my lunch—a little reprieve in an otherwise chaotic day. He didn’t make it much further than the gate before stopping his bike, looking around briefly, and then blurting out, “Hey, Mr., give me a camera.” Now, a good number of kids in town know enough French to demand something—money, candy, etc—so I wasn’t exactly surprised, and I have formulated two responses to their demands. The first being, “I’ll give you money if you give me candy” or “why?” So I responded with the “why” option, to which most kids can’t respond because they don’t speak enough French. But Amadou responded with a rather hilarious account of his love for photography and technology. I was impressed at how well spoken he was for being young (14, I found out later).

So I switched the topic and we talked about his parents, his church, school, upcoming tests…the works. After 20 minutes of talking, he asked if he could leave me his number. I grabbed a post-it from inside the house and brought it out to him. He wrote his number, and then I asked him, “So you have your own cell phone?” When he said yes, I hit him with a line straight out of the “old-man-my-life-was-tough book.” “When I was your age… I didn’t have a cell phone or a camera.” He laughed, kind of, and then changed the topic. After a few more minutes he took off, but not before asking one last time—with hope dripping from his eyes—“So you’ll call me when you get my camera?” Nice try, Amadou, nice try. But being that he had impressed me, I invited him to stop back anytime he was in the neighborhood. He has been back a couple of times and keeps promising to bring me some peanuts. Haven’t gotten the peanuts yet, but I suppose he hasn’t gotten his camera yet either.

But aside from being a potential story-maker, the Open-Gate Policy was an important move in combating my most recent bout of culture shock. There are lots of descriptions of culture shock, and I think everyone has their own experience with it. I always thought it was a period of a few weeks where you struggled to come to grips with the differences between your present surroundings and your home culture. While this isn’t untrue, it gives the false illusion that once those few weeks pass, things go back to being happy, exciting, and wonderful all the time. For me, culture shock comes and goes in spurts. It is a feeling not unlike a head cold—it makes you miserable and all you really want to do is go lay down, but really you know that you aren’t sick enough to stop working, so you keep going with a vague but prominent feeling of frustration, a throbbing head, a heart wishing to be elsewhere, and a brain that is fuzzy and numb.

When I get in that mood, my temptation is to close up, to pull back into the things that are safe and familiar—my American friends, work at the hospital, Skype, Facebook, email, and movies. I know in my head that the cure is the opposite of retreat, it is further immersion. Instead of allowing myself to paint the culture and the people as “ridiculous and crazy,” I force myself to participate in the culture and enjoy the people. In that way, I feel like I constantly have to push my brain and heart open again. And honestly there are moments when I begin to think, “I’m not from a different country as you, I from a whole other planet!” The desire becomes strong to retreat. But then, just as many (and ever increasingly so) moments arrive where once I’ve forced myself open again, I realize, this is what I was made for, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.