Plunger Ears

I love Larry-Boy, the superhero persona that Larry the Cucumber from VeggieTales takes on. He battles an alien fib and a rumor weed which teach lessons about thinking before you speak. In fact, I have always liked VeggieTales, even though I was already out of their targeted demographic when they first came out. Their combination of humor, good story telling and Biblical lessons leaves little to be desired.

Step down to South America with me, to a country called Guyana. A tropical land very, very close to the equator where the buildings are on stilts and the dirt roads are full of potholes. In an impoverished neighborhood my church group spent a week long mission trip running a Vacation Bible School for the local kids. It was loads of fun, but it was also a lot of hard work. Every evening while the adults had a prayer meeting we entertained the kids with low-effort activities, like movies.

Enter Larry-Boy and his VeggieTales fun. We (my church group) all enjoyed the singing, dancing vegetables and the lessons they taught. So we proudly put in our VeggieTale tapes and settled back to relax and let the video do the work. The kids would laugh, dance, and sing with the veggies and have a great time, just like us.

Well, they didn't. They just sat there and stared at Larry and Bob and Archibald Asparagus with open mouths and furrowed brows. They didn't get it. Nothing made sense, and they barely laughed at any of the jokes. To our Guyanese friends, VeggieTales was just a lot of nonsense, so full of American culture and worldview that it didn't connect.

We were stumped. Why wouldn't these kids love VeggieTales? But since they clearly weren't enjoying it, we put in the other video series we had brought. A simple cartoon story following a normal boy and girl as they traveled through Bible stories. No song and dance. No veggies, and no plungers. Totally BORING.

The kids in Guyana loved it. They wanted to watch that video again, and then the next one, and the next one. It made sense to them. What we thought of as a simple, boring story was quality entertainment to them, way better than those strange vegetables.

They say the sign of a decaying civilization is a widening gap between the rich and the poor, as is happening all over the world right now. But there is more than a gap in money and resources. There is a gap in ideals, education, and communication.

Why does it take a cucumber with plungers in his ears to get us Americans to sit up and actually listen to a moral tale? Are we falling out of touch with real life because of this insulated, manufactured world we have created? What happens when we can't connect with 3/4 of the world anymore?

The hardest part about our work in Guyana was not the heat or the humidity but communication. Accents aside, we white Americans spoke a different language and looked at the world very differently then the Guyanese. The problem, however, isn't isolated to foreign countries. The gap between the culture of the rich and poor in America is huge, too.

Look across the city to a neighborhood that does not look like yours. Would you be comfortable striking up a conversation with those people? Why not? Are you scared of them because that neighborhood is dangerous? Or is it also that you don't understand the language they use, don't understand their culture.

We need to close the communication gap if anything in this world is going to change. We need to take the plungers out of our ears. VeggieTales is a great show, don't get me wrong. But we also need to be able to step out of our comfort zone and learn to talk to people who just don't get talking cucumbers. We need to meet people where they are at, understand who they are and the forces that have shaped their lives. We need to stop trying to make people like us, by exporting VeggieTales, and start listening to what they have to say.