“What on earth were you thinking?” his wife cried. “What if the man had died right there on the road?! Didn’t you think about the consequences? Your life would have been ruined, and your family’s lives as well! Is a stranger more important than we are? How could you do that to us!”
If an Otammari man were to rescue the victim of an auto accident from sure death, he would likely face this type of tirade from his wife when he got home. Why this strange reaction? Let me explain.
Of all Otammari sins and taboos, murder is the most despicable and irreversible. However, the Otammari definition of murder includes more than just the act of killing someone. It also includes witnessing a death or touching someone who died unnaturally by accident or foul play. If a good-hearted person tries to help someone who ends up dying, that person will have to undergo a complicated cleansing ceremony and will be labeled a murderer for the rest of his life. For this reason, if an Otammari comes across a badly injured person—even a family member—he will likely continue on his way without helping. In fact, he won’t even tell anyone else what he saw. Speaking of someone is considered the same as touching them, and the same cleansing ceremonies would be necessary. Someone who becomes a murderer unintentionally must immediately go back to his home village and find another murderer who will do a special animal sacrifice for him. He then will have to wash with a special tea to chase away the spirit of the person who died. It is important to do the purification ceremony quickly. If he doesn’t, he will get sick; his whole body will swell up, and he will die. Until the end of the purification rites, his family will set his meals outside for him, and he is not allowed to enter the home. Only the old murderers are allowed near him to do the ceremonies of purification. Anyone who gets too close to him will become impure and have to purify themselves. After two or three days when the murderer has finished the purification rites, he can return to his house and is allowed to return to society. But he is still under interdictions—he is a murderer for life.
When we first learned about this part of the Otammari worldview, we figured the parable of the Good Samaritan just wasn’t going to be useful in this culture. Instead of telling the story of a compassionate, selfless, loving neighbor, it would tell the story of a foolish and imprudent fellow who was forgetting his responsibilities to his family—one of the biggest taboos of Otammari culture.
Then last year, when Gideon and Pam Petersen were visiting our project and helping us get started with lesson writing, they challenged us. As part of teaching us the concept of contextualization, they gave us an assignment to tell the parable of the Good Samaritan in a way that made sense to the Otammari.
First we analyzed the story and stripped it down to what Jesus was actually saying. Then we identified the players. In Jesus’ cultural context, Samaritans were a people whom the Jews despised and avoided whenever possible. So we asked ourselves what people group the Otammari despised. We quickly settled on a nomadic tribe of herders in our area that most other tribes shun. And who was the Otammari equivalent of the Levite in the story? On it went until we had all the pieces together.
Then came the most fun part—acting out the parable. In Harrals’ living room, Reuben became the victim of the robbery. Coming home from a trip to the village on his bike, he got knocked down by some bandits. After being ignored by a chief fetisher and an old respected man, he finally was found by a herdsman who gave him First Aid and transported him on the back of a cow (Jason) to the hospital. There the herdsman told the head nurse to take care of Reuben until he came back to pay for the hospital stay. Knowing people don’t trust his kind, he left a cow as a deposit.
A few weeks later, we had an opportunity to test whether our understanding of Otammari culture was accurate. During our leadership training program, we gave the same assignment to our group of Otammari locals. With slight differences, they came up with practically the same story we had (and they also had great fun acting it out!). Suddenly, the parable of the Good Samaritan took on a whole new meaning. The nomadic herdsman was willing to take a great risk to save the life of someone who despised him. He did something an Otammari wouldn’t even do for his own brother! It was no longer the story of a foolish man, but a story of incredible devotion and love to one’s neighbor, or even enemy.
The exercise was a great eye-opener for all of us, and it filled the Bible story with new meaning. It also made us realize how important it is to know the worldview of our people in order to be able to use stories in a meaningful way.
Please pray for our team as we study the Bible together with our local brothers and sisters. Our group needs God’s wisdom to read biblical stories with traditional Otammari eyes and to know how to contextualize them without changing their meaning.
