Define Normal

A kitchen on a homestead that was damaged by a
storm.  It's normal for the family to keep cooking in
here for a couple of months while they save up money
to be able to fix it or build a new one.

The other day, Mxolisi and I were driving after a rainstorm & as we pulled into a parking lot, he said, "That's weird."  I looked around & didn't see anything too out of the norm, so I asked him what he meant.  He pointed out that a man was fetching water from a puddle.  He was using a shovel to get the water from the 3 inch deep puddle to put it into his bucket.  It was a lot closer than the hosepipe, so it made sense.  

Unfortunately, it's all too normal for young preschool
aged kids like this friend to be out on the dirt roads by
themselves walking to/from carepoints or homesteads.

There were times when I first moved to Swaziland that I would stop for a minute and try to figure out why something caught my eye, only to realize that back in Colorado, people don’t wash their clothes in the runoff from a storm drain or in the water running at the irrigation canal at the end of a field.  Yet now some of these things barely make me take a second glance, and I’m not too sure that’s a good thing!  I was driving the other day and realized that the three semis in front of me (going the same direction I was) were all side by side.  One passing one, passing another one.  On a TWO LANE ROAD.  I slowed down to make sure I wasn’t a part of any accident that was about to happen as these semis continued side by side at a high speed, and finally saw the first semi pull back over just as a car coming the opposite way flashed his lights in warning.  

It is normal for kids & adults to wear shoes & clothes
until they are completely worn through & not even
useful for rags.

A little later, I was walking out of the grocery store, when a young baby caught my eye, and I realized that I was the only one out of the many adults around who apparently thought that it wasn’t normal for an 8-9 month old baby to be sitting on the ground of the courtyard/parking lot playing with the dirty wheel of a shopping cart while his mom chatted nearby.

And I have found myself eating things out of my refrigerator after the power has been out for more than 50 hours this weekend, not really questioning the “2 hour danger zone” my 7th grade science teacher warned me about, because I smelled the food & it didn’t smell bad.  (And, just for those of you who are wondering, I didn't get sick).

It is completely normal for older kids to be taking care
of a relatives kid while the parent is at work.  Here a
high school boy answers a question during discipleship
time while holding his niece.

As weird as some of those things sound, it also makes me question how off some of our sense of normal is...maybe it’s ok for kids to play in the dirt & get dirty, without having someone bleach everything around them before they go play there.  Or maybe it is ok to eat food past its expiration date unless it’s too far gone.  But it also makes me aware of how numb we can become to some of the circumstances around us that aren't ok.  It is dangerous the way some people drive.  It's dangerous for preschoolers to walk to & from school alone on the edge of a highway.  It's dangerous for a first grader to care for an infant.  As I pray for God to continue to help me understand the cultures around me (whether Swazi, American or anywhere else), I also pray that He would give me discernment to how things should be.