Mixed Blessing

Or: A Mouse with a Killer Hairdo

Remember Dawit, our “mixed-blessing” night guard? Sometimes it was nice to have him around.  And he was always so polite. In many ways, he was a blessing in the early days  of  our time in  Eritrea.

In other ways we did not benefit so much from Dawit. For one thing, he constantly rummaged through our trash and asked me why I threw away some of the things I did. I wasn’t used to defending my Spring-cleaning choices. Sometimes, Dawit would save things for himself. For example, I discarded some old photos. Later, I saw that he had displayed the photos on the wall of his room. I guess I just wished he’d asked me first. But in  his defense, I had trashed them, so I guess I shouldn’t  have cared what happened to them next…

Other Side of a Mixed Blessing

The main other part of the “mixed blessing” occurred after Dawit had been working for  us for some time. It happened like this: We usually traveled to Asmara, the capital city, once a month for the weekend. These were refreshing getaways for us. We could connect with other expats, buy a few items like cheese and bread, and enjoy the cool weather of the highlands.

But we began to notice that when we returned home, some items in our house were not in the same place as we left them. Dawit did not have a key to our house, he was simply supposed to stay in the separate room in our side yard and guard the property when we were gone. But  things didn’t seem “right” each time we  returned. We couldn’t  quite put our finger on the problem. Something would seem out of place, like a bar of soap on the floor that had been on the kitchen counter. Maybe we were in such a hurry that  we knocked it off and didn’t realize it? Most things could be explained  away. Strange, that something “off” would happen on each of our trips.

The Mouse

One time, I found a bottle of hairspray sitting on the floor next to the mirror in our guest room. I suppose I could have, for some strange reason, decided to fix my hair in the guest room and then forgotten that I did so. But the hairspray bottle was a brand new one I’d not used yet. I brought it from the States and it was stored with my other extra toiletries. So when I saw it sitting  on the  floor in the guest room, I knew something “hairy” was going on. 

We asked Dawit about the bottle and he acted as confused as we did. After some thought, he assured us with confidence that the culprit was a mouse. A mouse got in the house and moved stuff around. We weren’t zoologists or anything,  but we knew a thing or two about  mice. They don’t normally need hairspray to fix their tiny little fur-dos. But Dawit was convinced and said he would set out poison to catch the mouse.

So, the next time we went to Asmara,  Dawit set poison out in our house. He assured us that poison would kill this hairspray-stealing mouse once and for all. 

Upon our return at  the  end of the weekend, sure enough, there was a dead mouse, belly up in the kitchen. Somehow, this tiny mouse had been smart enough to remove a bottle of hairspray from a closed cabinet and drag it to the mirror in the guest bedroom, but was not smart enough to avoid the poison laid out for it. Also, said mouse ate the poison and rolled over on the spot, dying under the sink in the kitchen, where we could easily find him.

Last Straw

Detectives we were not, but we did figure something was amiss.  After another incident involving missing money, we had to relieve Dawit from his house-guard job.  He  was such a nice guy that we hated to let him go, but also, we felt betrayed by someone we thought we could trust.

We decided we did not need a night guard anymore. We figured we could defend against those clever mice all by ourselves.

Different Culture = Different Value System

Shocker: people don’t all think the same. Take a look at this list (thanks Dad for helping me put these into words!):

1. Honesty is not necessarily always the highest priority.

2. If you are rich and I am poor, helping myself to some of  your stuff is not all that serious.

3. Doing a good job in the main things excuses and justifies slight dishonesties.

What Do You Think?

These values go against my Western sense of justice. What do you think when you  read the list above? What do you think is the best way to handle these differences in culture in a Jesus-honoring way?

(Here’s a fun little book with helpful tips on hiring helpers in cross-cultural contexts.)

(Also, the mouse pictured is innocent and was not poisoned in the writing of this story. Unfortunately, the mouse in the story was also innocent, and was poisoned anyway, but not by me.)