(Bill) Broken Trust and Second Chances

I haven’t blogged in a while and its time to get back on the horse.  It’s healthy for me to share the “good” and vent the “bad and ugly” and, unfortunately, there’s been some bad and ugly recently.  It’s got me feeling a bit down. 

We discovered a few weeks ago that Blessings has taken a few things of ours.  We had loaned him an ice pack for a painful abscess in his neck.  It had not been returned and Micah needed it for one of his myriad owies.  The door to his room was open and I could see the ice pack by his bed.  I popped in to retrieve it and saw a backpack belonging to the boys and a flashlight that I had been looking for (helpful item during power outages!). 

OK, a few unauthorized items found.  Not too big a deal.  Blessings owned up to taking them and appropriately apologized.  Turn the page. 

Next day, however, Elizabeth and I discovered that an unused computer tablet and her very necessary iphone charger were now also missing.  Hmm.  These new missing items were now added to a list of other head scratchers accumulating these past months:  some missing money from one of our visiting residents, several missing charging cords and headphones, things that would be missing but turn up later.  Ugh!

 

Elizabeth and I both made the decision that we could not trust Blessings to be in the house anymore.  We hired him last September to be our gardener and to also help around the house.  We pay him generously by Malawi standards (though admittedly paltry by any other standard) and committed to pay for his technical education to be an auto mechanic.  He has a place to stay in our “quarters” and we’ve wired his room for power, provided a bed, etc., etc.  We’ve done a lot to help him and he’s done a lot to help us.  In my last blog post, I talked about our climb up Mount Soche in which he guided us.  He is Elizabeth’s running partner most mornings.  He comes to church with us and takes part in our weekly Bible study.  We’ve considered Blessings as one of our family in the same way that we sponsor 3 other young people through World Vision and Children of the Kingdom. 

What would you do? 

We’ve decided to keep him on as our gardener and stop the indoor tasks.  This reduction of roles has been difficult for Blessings.  He was teary to think that I would be doing the dishes and cleaning our own toilets.  My sense is that this arrangement is anathema to a Malawian to have the “boss” doing anything menial.  The cynical side of me could say that he is sad not to have access to our stuff anymore, but I really believe he wants to be helpful to our family, a family he considers his own in some ways.

And perhaps that is the difficulty of blurring the lines of the employer/employee relationship.  We intentionally did so with Blessings.  We didn’t want to just employ somebody and then leave without giving him/her a hand up for a better future (thus, the technical schooling).  We also didn’t want to feel that we had to continuously keep track of Blessings inside the house and we made clear at the outset that trust would be essential for our particular arrangement.  Well, seemingly all gone now.

We are moving forward.  The garden is looking better with the additional time and attention from Blessings.  I am enjoying taking care of the house (I AM able after all!) without worrying about our things.  Liam is challenging us to think hard about discontinuing his college support after just one year (it is a 3 year program).  We are all grappling with concepts of grace, trust, second chances, boundaries, love.  Far from being conceptual, we are working these things out seemingly every day.  However imperfectly.