Taboos and Issues

For those of you who haven't been checking out the updates on Ben and Jess' Blog, you'll be happy to know that the Lord has blessed me with a job. I'm teching English at new EFL school here in Malta called The Chamber College. It's a blast!

Among many other things, the school has a mini resource area for the teachers, where all kinds of books and curricula are available for lesson planning. Among the many useful classroom tools is an awsome, spiral-bound, photocopied little book called Taboos and Issues. It's basically just a bunch of news snippets, activities, and questions to act as conversation starters about, well... taboos and issues. One of the chapters is called "Politically Incorrect". It's hilarious because there's a page full of jokes, which they're saying people might find offensive. So you're supposed to read the jokes and mark how offended you are on the scale, and then... NOT TELL THEM TO OTHERS!? Yeah right! They're hilarious! Here's three of the funniest that I hadn't heard before: (if you're offended, then... well... I'm sorry. mark it on the scale.)

Q: What has four legs and eight arms?
A: A pit-bull terrier on a children's playground.

Q: Why do Italian men wear lots of gold chains?
A: So they know where to stop shaving.

A Limmerick:
There once was a man from Calcutta
Who had such a terrible stutter
He said, "Pass the h-ham,
And the j-j-j-jam,
And the b-b-b-b-b-b-butter."

Who knows? Try the Maltese.

Ahh! It feels so good to be posting again! My best friend-in-law, Safiye, has been here in Malta visiting me and Jessica for the last two and a half weeks. We just saw her off this morning on her way back to California. We had so much fun and did all kinds of stuff non-stop. I think it was a good vacation for her, but she was also a great encouragement to us. She helped to confirm a lot of the things that Jessica and I have observed about life in Malta. We had a lot of long discussions and I think I’ve got a lot of thoughts I want to bounce around with y’all. I’d have posted sooner, but I was busy spending days snorkeling in the Blue Lagoon and evenings sitting in waterfront cafes. Ahh!

So… one thing that has become all the more evident over the last several weeks is a certain mindset of the males of Malta. Now I know it’s not a characteristic unique to the Maltese islands, but I do think it’s a tendency more of men than of women. The odd thing seems to be that it’s so annoyingly pervasive in this culture. It’s the underlying need to know everything, or at least to know something about everything.

I could bring up a completely random topic, like the mating habits of the ring-tailed lemurs of Madagascar, and suddenly every grown male in the room is talking like an expert! Okay, that’s a bit extreme of course, but it’s hard to explain. It’s partly just a cultural bluntness, partly a poorly disguised insecurity, and partly a mild type of chauvinism, I think.

It irks me pretty bad, but it’s not quite the same as other types of intellectual pride I’ve mentioned before. It’s not like that humanistic pride that says, “We know enough about science and culture now, we don’t need to believe in god(s) anymore.” It’s not like that religious pride that says, “I’ve got God defined to a ‘T’, and I pretty much understand Him as best as anyone can.” Maybe it doesn’t seem so bad because I can think of it as a cultural quirk among the people of a country 1/3 the size of my home town. Or maybe it’s just a low key kind of pride that makes conversations irksome, without feeling like there’s major spiritual implications. I don’t know.

But I am reminded yet again of one of the many amazing truths that my father has taught me, “Being right is over-rated.” It goes for marriages, friendships, and pretty much every relationship. I think if some of us men (not only those of Maltese descent) would spend more time genuinely listening instead of thinking about what we’re going to add to the conversation, people would feel a little more cared about. Since Safiye has been here, it has renewed our desire to be a presence of love and grace emphasized above (although still important) doctrinal correctness and perfection.