Post 116 Extreme Hospitality

Nigerian Hospitality

If there is anything I have learned during my 30 years in Nigeria it is hospitality.  Nigerians have been so generous to us when it comes to hospitality, as they are to their own people. One can drop in on Nigerian friends and you are immediately invited to join them in a meal if that happens to be their agenda at the moment. This is true not only of the well-to-do, but just as much of the poorer among them. Now, there is a downside to that. Extending such hospitality to an unexpected guest can be at the expense of family members who may have to do with leftovers, especially children.

Any Nigerian who reads the above paragraph may object to it. Nigeria is a square box containing 400 different nations, cultures and languages. There is no way you can say anything about traditional culture that will hold for all of these cultures. Expatriates who have lived in other parts of the country sometimes marvel at our stories from the country’s Middle Belt. They have not always experienced such hospitality.  But for us, we have always been deeply impressed by that cultural feature.

And, of course, after being exposed to that for 30 years and having benefited from it so many times, it could not help but rub off on  us. My wife and I have also become very hospitable, so much so that the people among whom we now live in Vancouver, Canada, are amazed at how open our door is and how readily we have people we did not expect join us at our table. Thank you, Nigeria, for teaching us such a Christian virtue. 

Western Hospitality

Yes, hospitality is a Christian virtue, though not only Christian. Plenty of other people share that virtue.  But Nigerians tend to laugh at us in a kind of derisive way. They joke that, according to their experiences in the Western world, we are so inhospitable that if we want to visit our grandmother, we have to make an appointment at least two weeks in advance! I had become somewhat estranged to Western ways and denied that “accusation.” 

However, upon our return to the West, more specifically, to Vancouver, I found they were not that far off. Since I immigrated from my birth country, The Netherlands, at age thirteen, I have had little experience with my own grandmothers during my adult years. None whatsoever in Vancouver. However, I was surprised at how inhospitable Vancouver really is. Vancouverites will entertain you, but very seldom in their house. It’s just about always in a café or restaurant by which we are totally immersed here in downtown. It’s even true of the near-by church we attend, though, I am happy to report, not of my other church, the Christian Reformed Church.

And not only Vancouver.  When my wife and I were RV-ing through the American South and attended a city church, they welcomed the guests among them and assured us that they were very hospitable. If we needed a good restaurant for dinner after the service, all we would have to do is ask and they would point us to the good ones in town!  Hospitable?  Yea, right!  In contrast, when we attended a rather conservative Reformed type of church in BC’s “Bible Belt,” we ended up at the dinner table of a large family of seven children. We had never had any contact before. 

Dutch Hospitality--Stories

Why do I write of hospitality in this post? Because of the “extreme” hospitality we experienced in Lutjegast, my birth village in The Netherlands (NL) with a population of around 1,000.  It’s a follow-up to the previous post that I feel compelled to write; it was that surprising and extreme—but not everything extreme is negative. My parents lived in Lutjegast from 1929-1951. My father ran a barbershop, while my mother ran a growing family and, for a few years, a hair salon for ladies. I was thirteen when we emigrated to Canada in 1951.  By 2016 pretty well all memories of our Boer barber family had been erased in the village except among the elderly. 

Two days we wandered around in Lutjegast, partially by car, partially on foot. We came to the church where I was baptized as a baby and met someone living near it. We introduced ourselves, but he had never heard about us. Nevertheless, he invited us into his house for a coffee. There we sat in the dining room, surrounded by the entire family, drinking coffee and chatting about past when we lived there. That was the first one. An hour or so later, as we were looking for a niece who, I had reasons to believe, lived in the town. In the course of the search, we knocked on someone’s door. A lady opened the door and, after our brief introduction, again invited us inside for a tea with her and her husband. They had vaguely heard of some Boer family, but that was all. 

Our second day in the village, a Saturday, we were supposed to meet a cousin of mine who lived elsewhere. We would meet at the church in the centre of Lutjegast. We arrived early to find a spot where we could visit, but did not find anything. The only thing open was a hair salon. We entered to ask them about a place in the village where we could have a coffee. The lady told us that the village really does not have a suitable place for that, but she immediately invited us to visit with our guests around the table in her shop and she would serve us coffee!  We did not accept the invitation since it was not really a suitable environment for the kind of visit we envisioned. But it was another amazing hospitality event.

Soon my cousin and husband drove into the church yard. The custodian met us and after the by now customary introduction, he not only showed us the inside of the renovated church but also invited us for a coffee and cooky in the church hall, where we could sit as long as we wanted. 

Personally, I think that pattern of hospitality to strangers is remarkable. My appreciation for my birth village soared. I am in the process of writing a more detailed report of this hospitality in the Dutch language to be published in the local village paper to express our appreciation not only, but also to make sure they enjoy a positive self-image. They are not just some village duds as some city slickers may think; they display the image of God in their hospitality. 

But we ran into this trait throughout our trip.  We had three main hosts in three different parts of the country and all went far beyond the normal standards of hospitality. Two of these were friends from different phases of our history, but they were absolutely superb. One of them housed us for ten days and nights. The most unexpected was the owner of Hotel Friesland. He took a liking to us and several times invited us privately for a tea and cooky.  A hotel owner! 

Concluding Comments

All in all, I am still a bit dizzy about all this hospitality. Can’t get over it. That’s why I write about it in such glowing terms.  Thank you, my Dutch friends, both old and new. And to my Nigerian friends I can only caution them that whatever unpleasant experiences they may have had in the West, their description of hospitality certainly does not resonate with my Dutch experience. I should probably close with a preemptive admission that race may at least partially account for the difference.    

Post 84--—Time for Explanation and Further Introduction

I had hoped to complete this post and publish it between Christmas and New Year. In addition to all the things I write about in the rest of this post, we visited our youngest son and family in Atlanta, GA. While there, no time or opportunity to write!  Returned home yesterday and decided to post a piece I had written earlier for such a time as this, when it is high time to post but have nothing ready.

I don’t write as many posts as I would like. So many other things that keep me busy, like getting all my published books, articles, lectures and some correspondence—some trivial even or attempts at humour—onto my website at <  www.SocialTheology.com >.  The time you may have spent on Christmas shopping in December, I spent on writing and a host of other things like…. 

I am an active member of our local West End Seniors Network (WESN) here in Vancouver as well as a couple of churches. I am the co-ordinator for the WESN’s monthly Men’s Breakfast Club, while wife Fran does the calling the day before to remind people. We both love social life and often accept invitations to or organize coffee times and visits from or to various friends and relatives whom we have here in BC by the bushel! We visit especially older people who are alone.

Fran, my wife, and I love to entertain people for lunch at home over soup and salads. She enjoys making salads while I specialize in soups. We are both good at our individual specialties. Such invitations are of a “social revolutionary” type, since the people in our West End area of Vancouver almost live in restaurants and do very little entertainment in their homes. Sharing lunch with them at home seldom is reciprocated, except perhaps over a coffee in a coffee shop. Individualism and a sense of exaggerated privacy has gone amuck so that people don’t easily open their doors to each other and loneliness has become a serious malaise in the neighbourhood. 

This particular sentence was written during the early morning of Christmas Day 2015. We had invited four people to enjoy Christmas dinner with us, all of them people who have no family nearby.  In fact, all of us, including Fran and myself, are either immigrants or former refugees, except for one, an Asian born in Canada whose family lives far away in another Canadian city. I do have family near by, but the others don’t and needed a place to celebrate.

I also mentioned churches. Yes, we are full members of the Christian Reformed Church here in Vancouver, while we are “adherents” to First Baptist Church in downtown. Why two? Well, that’s for another post sometime in the future. But these take time as well. We love attending church services and participating in other stuff during the week. The why and how, well, that, too, is for another time.

In addition to all that good stuff we’re involved in, we are both from very large families. Fran is the youngest of seven while I am number five out of ten. She has three brothers, two of whom have already passed away, and after them came four sisters, one of whom passed on. I have four sisters older than me and five brothers younger than me, with one sister and one brother already with the Lord. All of these siblings have together produced an entire battalion of kids, grandkids, even some great grandkids. This battalion is scattered all over North America, with Fran’s concentrating on Michigan, where her family immigrated to back in 1942, while mine are concentrated in British Columbia (BC), where our family immigrated to in 1951. I was thirteen at that time. Being as family-conscious as we are, we serve sort of as the glue for the two different families, though more so for the Boers in BC, since that’s where we now live.  For example, we organize the annual Boer get-together on Boxing Day (December 26) in Surrey. Fran is the Boer family consultant, since she keeps track of addresses and birthdays down to at least the fourth generation.  

Our own three children and seven grandchildren are scattered—near Seattle, in Silicon Valley and in Lagos, Nigeria, with regrettably none in Canada. Well, they did not grow up in Canada but in Nigeria, while they did their undergraduate work in Michigan in the shadow of my in-laws and our mission employer. This means travel and more travel for us to all three of them. Seattle is close by. So, there we can do weekend visits. But when we visit the Silicon or Lagos crowds, we spend a lot of time; Silicon often takes up to ten days a couple of times a year, while we recently spent almost a month in Lagos. 

All of the above personals have—or is it “has”?—two reasons. One is my own feeling that when I deal with people over any length of time, I need to know who they are, where they come from and how they spend their time. I think and live wholistically. I cannot divide my own life nor that of people I associate with into little boxes that would make me deal with them only at the specific point of contact and never mind the rest. I just cannot relate that way, nor do I want to. 

We are basically social creatures more than isolated individuals. Put in another way, we are individuals in community. When either one of these is emphasized over against the other, we get social distortions, sometimes with very serious consequences. I hope to do a post on this subject one of these days. So, if you are one of my regular readers, you may be curious who I am, where I come from and what I do. Well, here it is. I have tried to satisfy your curiosity. That’s one reason for this post:  to establish a stronger connection with you. I hope I am not just imposing a personal opinion or relationship on you guys but filling a need also on your part to firm up our relationship.

The other but related reason for this personal stuff is to explain the occasional time lag between posts. Work, travel, socializing often intervene and leave me little time for blogging, as much as I love this writing activity.  No matter how short of time, my heart constantly urges me to write

So I have made a decision, a policy decision of what I have already started practicing, namely to intersperse my own writings with “guest articles.” Such guest articles-- while perhaps expressing opinions I agree with at least partially, or that I take on to undermine, or that I simply enjoy and want to share with you--, take less time to produce than fresh stuff from me. Of course, many of my “fresh stuff” also frequently includes materials from and references to other writers, something I always faithfully indicate. 

This semi-new policy will not only prevent unpleasant gaps but also create variety. My Dutch language has an expression, “Verandering van spijs doet eten,” which is to say that a change of diet increases your appetite and your enjoyment of food. Though not part of the expression, change is also more pleasant for the cook, at least, for this writer-cook. The same is true of both reading and writing.  

I had really intended to feed you a guest article about Justin Bieber, the singer, today, to be preceded by a short explanation and introduction. Well, that “short explanation” turned into a complete post!  Justin will have to wait a few days. Sorry, buddy. I don’t think it will bother him, since he is not, to the best of my knowledge, one of my regular readers. 

In the meantime, you’ve learned a bit about me, while I snuck in a bit of social philosophy on the side—but that’s also me. I am not a professional philosopher, though I wish I were, but I do like to philosophize about social stuff, especially about the relationship of religions and worldviews to culture and society.

Time to wind up. I hope you had a good Christmas celebration in the midst of family and friends. I end this post with wishing you a very happy 2016. For me, such a wish always goes together with the unexpressed silent Biblical prayer, “Maranatha,”  “Lord Jesus, come back soon.”