By Emily
Since we moved into our house in September, our 4-year-old daughter (June) has become fast friends with our neighbors, whose backyard shares a fence with ours. Every day for the last few weeks she has strategically played outside by the fence, hoping to be noticed. As soon as they offer an invitation for her to come over she sprints inside and eagerly asks me to hand her over the fence to them.
Like many Lao folks, our neighbors do most of their cooking outside. Food is a big part of the culture and a lot of time is put into preparing meals. Under our neighbor’s tutelage, June has learned how to steam cabbages, chop papaya for the classic Lao papaya salad, peel root vegetables, and prepare sticky rice.
This past week my landlord’s sister called to inform me that workers would be at our home early the next morning to “fix” our fence. Since our landlord has been very concerned for our safety I had the feeling that this was going to be quite an expansion to the flimsy, rusty, chain-link fence that we had been passing our eldest child over for the last several weeks. My heart sank the next morning as the workmen arrived and I had to explain to June what they were doing.
I feared that our budding friendship with our neighbors would fade. I worried that they would be offended if they thought the fence upgrade was our idea. Cross-cultural communication is so hard and frankly, I was tired of it all. There was a dark cloud in our home that morning as I was fighting off loneliness and despair and June bemoaned each inch of progress the workmen made.
I ended up sitting down to journal about this difficult situation.
A few minutes later the girls and I went out to check on the progress and we couldn’t believe our eyes. In the middle of this huge new fence (they actually built a chain link fence on top of our previous chain link fence, ha!) they had cut a door! We walked through and for the first time, Johanna and I joined June on the other side of the fence. We happily sat with our neighbors, munched on watermelon, asked each other questions, exchanged phone numbers and the budding friendship that I was afraid was going to wither, instead grew and strengthened.
We are learning so much. We are grateful for the provision of these dear neighbors.
