Of Matters Marriage and Culture...

Someone recently had the cultural shock of her life when she was expected to perform certain rituals following an event in the family she was married into. You see this person is from a different tribe so her husband’s culture is more or less foreign to her. She didn’t understand why she was expected to perform these rituals because according to her it was not her culture, to which she was told that as a wife married into the tribe this was expected of her. These events brought up a heated discussion among my networks regarding intertribal, interracial basically intercultural marriages. Some of the comments below...

 

“People should just marry their own to avoid such issues”

 

“If I am expected to perform rituals foreign to me then my husband should also perform my tribe’s rituals”

 

“I now understand why certain cultures are homogenous and enforce who their children marry”

 

“Did she not research the culture into which she was marrying, I mean all this could have been avoided with a bit of research”

 

This is an issue that is becoming more and more prevalent thanks to globalisation which means people are living far away from home and the likelihood of marrying outside of one’s culture is very high, however the majority of the population still marry within their own cultures. You can’t help who you fall in love with but then again marrying for love is a very recent concept and love alone is not enough to hold a marriage together. Differences in culture can make or break a marriage.

 

In my opinion if you are a person for whom upholding your language, your culture and your traditions is of upmost importance then please marry somebody you are culturally aligned to. If these don’t matter to you then by all means marry whoever you want to, but please do due diligence and thoroughly research the culture into which you are marrying understand it, weigh if you can live with or compromise on their traditions and so on and so forth.

 

Research and knowing the traditions of the culture you are marrying into is very important (especially  for my African people) . The story goes about a person from a different tribe who rushed into marriage with a person from a particular region of a certain tribe without doing due diligence. Now the people from this tribe themselves typically do not marry into/from this particular region because their traditions are considered extreme in relation to the other regions of the same tribe. In fact the saying goes among this tribe that “people from that region should just marry each other because they understand their traditions better than the rest of us” in other words let them deal with each other and leave the rest of us alone. Needless to say the marriage did not last very long thanks to the extreme culture shock experienced by the outsider.

 

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May...

 

People named after months fascinate me...what do you mean your name is April, May, June, Julia/Julie/Julio, August/Augusta/Augustine and so on...I find that so fascinating! April was a mixed bag for me, a lot was given back to me and some was taken from me. I experienced the happiest and saddest moments of the year so far in April. But in all I give thanks for that is life full of ups and downs. What I am most grateful for was a calm spirit in the midst of it all, I amazed even myself for the way I reacted to and handled challenging situations. This is definitely growth. I no longer allow things I have no control over to stress me out.

Of Fruits...

I grew up in a medical household and growing up we had to eat a fruit after every meal as per a balanced diet, you could not leave the table without eating a fruit. So once I left home for university I subconsciously rebelled against eating whole fruits, if I wanted an apple I would drink apple juice instead, if I wanted oranges I would drink orange juice instead, and it wasn’t even freshly squeezed juices oh no it was the sugar laden boxed or bottled type most of the time. It hit me almost a year in that I had not eaten whole fruits in months, and that’s when I realised that because we were not allowed to leave the table without eating a fruit, I was subconsciously rebelling against this rule because I was now “free” from childhood mealtime rules.

I “unrebelled” from eating whole fruits after this but I still did not eat them regularly it was more like 2 or 3 times a week and mostly when it was warm, because for some reason during the winter or cold rainy days I never felt like eating fruits. So recently I decided to revisit my childhood mealtime fruit ritual after a certain comment on social media. You see an unregulated  “skincare specialist” was trying to scam people into getting her ridiculously priced injections,  to which a doctor jumped into the comments and debunked her claims and advised people to just eat their fruits regularly to get all the vitamins being advertised as expensive shots.  I went back to intentionally eating fruits every single day regardless of the weather, every day just as I did as a child. And let me tell you my skin has never been clearer I was shocked at the results! I am already a person who drinks water religiously, in fact at one point I was drinking so much water as a child, I remember being taken to the doctors for a series of tests because frequent thirst can be sign of some illnesses, and I have never had a problem eating vegetables in fact I absolutely love my veggies. So I was hydrated, I was eating my veggies but I was lacking in my fruit intake so once I intentionally incorporated them into my diet as part of my daily meal my skin improved tremendously.

All this to say eat your fruits and veggies, stay hydrated with water please not alcohol and your skin will thank you for it.

Anyway here’s to a new month of May.

 

May feels like NEWNESS

May feels like RESET

May feels like GROWTH

May feels like COURAGE

 

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