I've learned in the course of my travels that you often have to set aside your own preconceptions of "the way things are" in order to pay respect to, and gain appreciation for, your host's cultural traditions. You know, "When in Rome..." Usually this is a no-brainer for me--my openness to other ways of doing things has led me to many adventures and unfamiliar undertakings, everything from eating eel at a French-Japanese wedding to wearing the South Asian equivalent of Hammer pants to conform to conservative Indian mores. But one area of custom and cultural obeisance never fails to put my knickers in a twist: Hospitality. I was raised to offer to pay for a dinner or some other excursion or event when you are a guest in someone else's home, as a way of saying thank you; but in a lot of other cultures, this is the opposite of the norm. I once stayed with a Turkish college student in Istanbul (who had probably as much spending money as I did--zip) who paid for all my meals, all my museum visits, all my transportation, all the tea I drank and all the backgammon games I played, and even bought me a souvenir trinket I'd been admiring. When I asked, for the second or third time, to pay for a meal as my way of saying thanks, she looked me directly in the eyes and said, with a pained expression on her face, "STOP!
You are shaming me." What I thought of as courteous offers were, in fact, insinuations that she and her family didn't have enough of a sense of honor to show the proper care and respect due to guests.
This same principle--the inverse of what I know--applies whether you're talking Turkish peasants or Istanbul urbanites, Varanasi schoolteachers or Delhi socialites, Lousiana ranchers or Gulf Coast dockworkers. And it means that I as an outsider have to swallow my own ingrained cultural patterns, rethink my definitions of "generosity" and "hospitality," and give up the power I'm used to having as an equal contributor. I
hate that indebted feeling--it takes some serious reconditioning for me to accept, in its totality, being a guest.
In fact, it seems to me that the whole guest-host relationship is about power--my inclination as a white American woman is to assert my independence by showing that I can take care of myself (financially and otherwise) and that I won't be sugar-daddied, especially by men my own age. I'm used to being in power, or at least sharing power, and when I can't I chafe against what I see as being constrained to a very limited, passive, female role. This is, in part, why I find myself wanting to rebel so hard against the "Southern gentleman" type down here, the man who tries to pay for everything, all the time, no exceptions--and who looks at you like you're cross-eyed if you even
think of trying to pick up the tab. It's like you're insulting his mother--come to think of it, you are, because you're implying that she didn't raise him right. Now, I'm not sure I could ever be that unequal of a partner, in terms of finances or power, in a longterm relationship--but as a short-term resident of the South, I am having to learn to accept the intensity of the "chivalry" here. (As an aside, let us note that chivalry as a way of life went out either with the Crusades or the pistol duels of the 19th century, depending on whom you ask, but either way it is long gone.)
Really it's a matter of becoming vulnerable enough, trusting enough, to let someone else make the decisions for you; but I tend to see the "imbalance" in this dynamic in terms of what I can't give or repay, not in terms of what I am allowing others to give to me. Something to work on.
The other aspect of this hospitality conundrum is something I often witness workcampers butting up against--accepting gifts from those you have come to help. One pastor from Connecticut who volunteered here told me how frustrated he had been when, as a young man leading a work group at our organization, he and his crew had stocked the empty pantry of the homeowner whose kitchen they'd been rehabbing as a house-warming present, only to find on their last day of work that she had used every last pickle slice and potato chip to make them a huge farewell lunch. "That food was supposed go to her," he had lamented at the time; "it wasn't supposed to be used on us!" As he later put it, he learned some grace-filled lessons about hospitality and generosity that week. I'm reminded of the parable of the Widow's Mite: the fact that the homeowner gave all she had, even though she had so little, amplified the magnitude of her gesture so that it was able to embody the sense of gratitude she felt for the work that had transformed her daily existence. In response, the workers had to learn to give up the control they'd had of the situation all week and, in a Christ-inspired role reversal, let the receiver become the giver, and vice-versa.
Another example from earlier this year: each week for 1o weeks straight my good friend Lucious cooked a massive feast for the volunteers who had come to work on his house. Each week he bought 30 or 40 steaks; he slow-cooked 3 racks of ribs; he boiled, fried, and grilled several pounds of huge Gulf shrimp; he fried up tons of flaky catfish; he roasted heaps of chicken wings and legs; he boiled snappy blue crabs; he whipped up endless batches of onion rings, waffle fries, tater tots, potato salad, etc. etc. Even though he claimed to have an "in" at local butcher and seafood shops (which he probably does, since he's been in the restaurant business for years), it still cost him a small fortune to prepare all that deliciousness; not to mention to do it ten times. And not only was each such undertaking financially burdensome, but it was time-consuming as well: he would start the day before by smoldering an entire section of tree trunk in a burn barrel to make the coals for his grill. Come the morning of the day of, he would spend hours slicing and chopping and roasting and boiling in the hot sun in order to feed his crew (and half the neighborhood). And he consistently met with a withering look of disdain all offers of reimbursement.
Often volunteers expressed consternation about this: "Why does Lucious spend all this time and money on us, when it would be better spent buying supplies or paying for labor to rehab his house?" It's for the same reason he doesn't think twice about buying workcampers a radio or renting a Port-O-Potty for their convenience: it's his way of saying "thank you."
Once again, it's about power--or rather, the lack of power you feel when you have been forced to cram yourself and your wife and your granddaughters into an unsanitary FEMA trailer for over 20 months, the helplessness you feel when even though you are the family provider, you can't get together enough resources or time to restore your family's home to a condition that's fit for living. I can't imagine the humility it takes to allow someone to help you rebuild your life and do for you what you cannot do for yourself, day after day after day. How vulnerable and indebted you would feel... and how badly you would want to restore the balance between you and your helpers, even in a symbolic way. Lucious responded to our doing for him what he couldn't do for himself by doing for
us what
we couldn't do for ourselves--preparing a soul food-seafood feast and treating us to a good dose of Southern Hospitality. Which means put your billfolds away, shut your mouths and "eat you some shrimp, Boo!" A delicious lesson to learn.
I single-handedly hold up the state welcome sign on my first trip to Alabama.
Dormant Mardi Gras float in Ocean Springs awaiting 2008's festivities (in which I will FINALLY get to participate!!)
Leah & Dal in The FEMA Hilton (aka my house before it was finished)
The Hair Cut!!! SOOO short!! 
Can you say line-dancing? With awful posture no less...
Leah accompanies Kate's interpretation of "Old Latin ballroom dancer woos unsuspecting young thing whilst kneeling in a Mash t-shirt" (performance art on our front porch)
Horseshoe crab on the Carolina shore during Thanksgiving--thanks Dad!
My Sistah et Moi tickling the ivories at our Grandma's over Christmas
I single-handedly hold up the state welcome sign on my first trip to Alabama.
Dormant Mardi Gras float in Ocean Springs awaiting 2008's festivities (in which I will FINALLY get to participate!!)
Leah & Dal in The FEMA Hilton (aka my house before it was finished)
The Hair Cut!!! SOOO short!! 
Mission Report:
While she was on her belly stalking these two smidgeons of birds--who, seemingly incapable of flying far enough to get safely back to shore, just kept edging closer and closer to the end of the dock until they had nowhere else to go--I was experimenting with the effect of my shadow on a school of tiny fish swimming against the current like iridescent grains of rice. Suddenly a great, beautiful heron flew almost directly over our heads. The Sister was trying to follow it with her camera as it passed us, when, lo and behold, a second heron as magnificent as the first came in to land about twenty feet away from us on our dock. Yes, we were laying low, and yes, we weren't really moving, but I was awed that such a normally skittish bird (the same species that takes off from the pond I run by in the mornings if I so much as breathe wrong) would choose to stay this close to humans. The heron (a great blue) just stood there for 10 or 15 minutes, unperturbedly grooming itself, inspecting us, and scanning the horizon for... what? Its partner? Food? Do herons just sit and veg out sometimes with no purpose other than to stand there lookin' good? 
The highlight of the visit in terms of comedy was definitely the "heron pretends to be dog by scratching itself with long clawed feet" routine. 
Yesterday a delegation of workcampers talking in baby voices knocked on my door at 7am. I couldn't figure out why they were leading a troupe of small children over to my trailer on a Saturday morning (a belated Easter egg hunt?), but I rolled out of my bed/shelf (watch your head!), threw on some clothes and peeked out from behind my door into the blinding sunlight. They offered profuse apologies for waking me up early on my day off (let's face it, I don't have days off; pretending otherwise is just setting myself up for disappointment), then handed me a basket of cats. 4 mewling kittens, to be exact, black as coal dust, and outrageously eager to escape their yellow plastic laundry container-turned-conveyance.
