| Who decides when a person belongs
or doesn't belong to a community, nationality, ethnic identity,
religious group? It all hinges on who has power, who makes the
decisions, who decides who is who and what is what.
Being a foreigner is something I have lived and breathed all
my life. In Latin America I am a foreigner—no matter that
I was born here, have lived 38 of my 44 years here, or that I
think and breathe in Spanish. In fact, I remember insisting to
my mother, as a young child, that I had to have “Indian
blood” because I was born in Guatemala (in spite of the
fact that my parents both have roots in England and Germany).
I definitely did not feel like a foreigner! During the short periods
my family spent in the United States when I was a child and even
in college, I was singled out as strange—even had my clothes
stolen during gym class one time—because I came from another
country. It never really seems to matter to people what I consider
myself to be, people react to me based on who they think I am.
Foreigners in Latin America are not all the same, just as foreigners
in the book of Ezra are not all the same. Foreigners from the
United States and Europe are welcome: they bring dollars, they
sustain our tourist economy, they come from more “advanced”
cultures. But the literally hundreds of thousands of immigrants
who come to Costa Rica from other Latin American countries, fleeing
economic and military hardship, they are not welcome: they are
responsible for crime, for taking jobs, for exploiting our health
and educational systems. Then there are those foreigners who have
been here since before “time,” as we measure it, began.
In many countries we have taken their land away (after doing away
with millions of them), placed them on reservations and treat
them like “foreigners” in their own country.
In Ezra, we are not warned against Babylonians and Persians,
ironically enough. Nevermind that Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem
and the temple and that the Persians demanded loyalty and harsh
taxes. The foreigners that are credited with bringing impurity
and threatening the well-being of the returned exiles are actually
their cousins, their neighbors, people who had lived there all
along while the exiles were away in Babylon. Yes, some perhaps
from other “national” origins (if we can speak in
those terms about provinces under domination of an empire), but
in that small geographical area, can we really consider them foreigners?
But the accusers in Ezra chapter 9 call these women Canaanites,
Hittites, Jebusites. Although these peoples hadn't populated Palestine
for many centuries, labeling the women Canaanites generated such
fear among the rest of the community. Such fear, that these women,
called foreign, were expelled along with their children. Such
fear that their husbands willingly allowed them to be kicked out.
Today, as I look at my three nieces and nephews (there’s
one on the way, too) of my two brothers and their Costa Rican
wives, I am grateful that they won't have to worry about being
foreigners in their own country, as I did when I grew up here.
But I do worry that they will learn, just from living in this
society, that certain foreigners are “bad.” I do worry
that they will think blue eyes are better than brown eyes, or
that speaking English is better than speaking Maya Quiché.
I do worry that they will believe that artificially created national
boundaries (more often than not imposed by the more powerful countries)
determine who is our brother and sister, who deserves care and
loving kindness, to be treated with dignity, and who not.
For me, working and teaching at UBL has everything to do with
challenging the logic in our societies and in our churches that
decides someone is “foreign” because of their gender,
race, ethnic background, socio-economic status, or even religion.
Theological education isn't just about information, it's about
transformation. And transformation begins, at least it has for
me, when I meet people different from me and am enriched by their
lives.
Eli Cook
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 56
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