Public Nose-Picking and Other Questionable Forms of Cultural Adaptation

When I first started driving in Honduras about eighteen years ago, I was startled (and a little disgusted) by the number of people who picked their noses while sitting in traffic. I admit that I judged them: "What kind of person digs shamelessly into his/her (yes, women too!) nose in such a public manner?!

This past Sunday I was in traffic and I glanced over to the car on my right. The driver was staring at me. You guessed it: I was scraping the crud out of my nose. Now I know what kind of person does that!

I decided to call it "cultural adaptation," obviously a euphemism in this case, but I think I might be able to justify the hypothesis with statistical analysis and photos.

The plot thickens: when I finally reached my destination, a Christian safehouse where Jasmin is living, I discovered yet another sign of cultural adaptation. I was desperate to go to the bathroom, but I suspected that the bathroom in that particular place was pathetic. Oh why did I drink that Gatorade while picking my nose? I tried to wait, but I'm almost 54 years old and couldn't. When I asked Jasmin if I could use the bathroom, I could tell from her expression that my assumption had been correct. She led me to a King Yuck bathroom with only a ragged curtain for a door. There was a guy on the floor in front of the curtain who was apparently still in the first stages of rehab. Jasmin asked him to go outside, but he just grunted.

"Oh well," I thought. "It isn't as if this is the first time I've had to submit to necessity instead of reason." Thankfully God made our brains with a certain amount of shut-down capacity, so I shut down all the parts that have to do with hygiene and modesty and just concentrated on easing my own desperation.

As a sort of bootleg missiologist, I have given lots of talks on cultural adaptation over the years. Those talks were pretty high-brow compared to this blog. Perhaps I've become overly adapted . . . or maybe I'm just one of the millions of gross individuals in the world . . . in any case, at least I haven't tried to spiritualize these "signs" -- yet.