Bridging the Cultural Gap

In my last post I talked about how my culture places little importance on the privacy/sacredness of a person's dwelling, when the rental/sales cycle sees people constantly moving house and buying/selling homes for profit.

I want to talk more about this now, because last night I attended a symposium organised by Oxfam and Greenpeace, on the issues faced by the Pacific Islands currently being affected by rising sea levels and it made me realise that it's not just that my culture has a disregard for the importance of 'home' in the small sense-i.e., our houses, but a disregard for the importance of 'home' in the broader sense-i.e., the land of our origin.

I was really moved to hear the Torres Strait Island speaker, Toshi Kris, talk about the practice of planting a coconut palm with a child's umbilical cord, at the child's birth, because it reminded me that through our home-birth experience with Sage, we tried to do the same, by burying his placenta and umbilical cord in the back yard of the house we bought in Mudgeeraba. Our intention was to plant a tree over the site, which would become his tree, reminding him of his birth, but in three short years, we moved on from that house, leaving behind a part of us that could have played a really special part in our life as a family.

Toshi Kris described the importance of the palm tree throughout a child's life, in providing nourishment, bedding, mats and shelter, including the mats that subsequent children are born on and the mat that the person is buried in. The location of the tree is also important. Apart from showing a child's birthplace, it is significant in showing where that child's heart or home is.

I was comparing that story in my mind, to birth practices in our culture and realised that an enormous cultural divide exists, making it difficult for most suburban-dwelling Brisbane-ites to appreciate how important it is, that people like the Torres Strait islanders, do not lose their lands by encroaching seas. For them, it is not a simple matter of packing their bags and moving to another country.

Even if Australia did the right thing by allowing these people easy migration, because of their forced displacement, (NZ is the only large country so far, to accept people fleeing their sinking islands) it would mean the end of these people's link to their cultural identity, to their homeland, to their ancestry and many people of the current generation would not want to take that step, anyway.

So, it seems really important to me, as a mother, that the message of the palm tree and the umbilical cord gets out to suburban dwelling Brisbane-ites. If we have empathy for a people who first and foremost, are losing their lively-hood with the salination of soil and failing palm trees (it's some island's only cash crop) and that if the trend continues, will lose their homes and their identity, then we will be more willing to help them, by lobbying our government to reduce greenhouse emissions to the 40% that scientists are recommending for any positive effect to take place with climate change.