4 Things Nigeria Reminded Me Of
Having resided in Montgomery Alabama for the past 15years, spending part of the summers in Nigeria can easily become something I’ve taken for granted. When our children were younger, the tradition of going home every other summer was our way of attempting to keep them connected to family and friends back home, while also keeping them embedded in their Nigerian culture and their heritage. As they have become adults the reasons for going home frequently seems to have changed, and now the trip has become more of solo or couple trips than family vacations. This year’s trip was especially enlightening for me as I learned life lessons from simply spending time “on the continent”, to quote my adult daughter. Permit me to share a few lessons Nigeria reminded me of:
There is value in moving slowly.
Most people who’ve spent time in Africa easily notice that there’s a different perspective of time and timeliness in Africa, and “Nigerian time” is a real thing. While my tendency is to move quickly from task to task, realizing that I seemed to be the only one in a hurry led, first of all, to frustration and then an acceptance of the fact that doing things “around 12 noon” led to the same feeling of accomplishment as doing them on the dot of 12 noon, with less release of stress hormones! So the question I intend to ask myself daily is “what would moving a little slower look like today?”
Being Unipresent (as opposed to Omnipresent) is part of being human.
Unfortunately, it seems that the desire to get so many things done in a fixed amount of time has resulted in multi-tasking, a phenomenon that results in being or doing a lot of different things at the same time. A part of me feels productive if I’m walking and listening to an audiobook, or washing dishes while listening to a podcast or catching up with a friend while cooking dinner. The danger, as we’ve probably heard before, is that I am not fully present in any one of these activities. In Nigeria, though, I wasn’t always connected to the internet, or didn’t always have electricity to keep my phone charged, I learned to just sit and listen to an audiobook, or single- mindedly focus on friends who dropped by just to catch up. I realized very quickly that God is Omnipresent, I am not and that is okay.
What needs to be done will always get done.
In my Ibibio language, the words “eya enam” were initially very irritating to me. When I asked why things that should have been done were not done, I invariably got the response “eya enam” which loosely translates to “no need to worry it’ll get done”. A few examples might help explain the irritation:
Me: Why is the grass not mowed, the event begins in a couple of hours?
The Gardener: “Mma, eya enam”
Me: “where is the person who was supposed to bring the ——- (fill in the blank with anything), we’re running out of time?
Person: “Aunty eya enam”
And the funny thing is it almost always got done. And when it didn’t, it was never the end of the world! So irritation at the words “eya enam” slowly gave way to admiration for a group of people who trusted that what needs to be done will be done, and if it’s not, it’ll still be okay.
4. There is beauty and joy in community:
Unlike cultures in which nuclear families are prominent and prioritized, the Nigerian culture thrives on extended families and communities where people who live in close proximity to each other consider themselves family and behave as such. What this looks like is that almost every younger person who worships with me or lives close to me calls me “mom” and treats me and other adults like we birthed them, coming when we call and offering any service needed. There seems to be a realization that those who’ve been on this earth plane longer than you have are deserving of respect and care, and this trickles down from one generation to the next.
These are only a few things that spending part of the summer in Nigeria reminded me of. Returning from Nigeria, I am grateful for the privilege of being multicultural. I am thankful that our family tradition of spending time in our home culture not only grounds me, but provides an opportunity for me to live life a little differently and hopefully impact positively the people I do life with in these United States!
Thank you Nigeria for these great reminders!