Recently, while camping in Amboseli, north of the Serengeti, I was robbed. Maybe.

My wife and I rose early to cook breakfast for our friends. The majesty of Kilimanjaro, so dominant on the horizon the previous morning, now lay obscured behind a mottled scrim of gray cloud. Our kids, still asleep, sprawled on sleeping bags in tents set beneath the sweeping, thorned branches of an acacia tree.

While Kim flipped 64 flapjacks on the camp stove, I manned the fire. After building up the blaze, I flattened it back down, and set the cast-iron skillet on four strategically-placed stones among the coals. Then to the business at hand: bangers and scrambled eggs.

The smell of breakfast and sunshine woke the camp. As I finished the eggs—deliciously muddied with specks and swirls of sausage and grease—a Maasai man appeared in the middle of camp. Without a gesture of greeting, he knelt and scooped chunks of smoking wood and ember out of the fire pit. Without a backward glance, he walked to the far side of the clearing and started his own fire, coaxing the coals into flame to cook his own breakfast—a pot of chai.

Did this man steal from us? Certainly nothing of consequential value. I was almost done cooking, and the coals would have fallen to ash in the next hour anyway.  There was nothing menacing about the man. He wasn’t even dressed in a shuka, the traditional red-checkered drape of a Maasai warrior—just plain workman’s clothes. So why did his actions seem strange?

Maybe he thought language was an issue and it wasn’t possible to communicate with words. Maybe he thought he had a right to take things at this place without asking permission. He lived there and we were visitors. Maybe he didn’t think anything at all—that sharing fire was such an intrinsic part of community life that no explanation was necessary. Starting a fire from scratch can by wearisome. In other African countries, I’ve witnessed first-hand the passing of fire—embers spread from camp to camp via chipped, enameled cups. Maybe it’s not a larger cultural issue at all, but just this man’s personality or mood, and I shouldn’t jump to any larger conclusions. Maybe I shouldn’t bother to wonder. But I do.

Our primary goal as missionaries is to understand people and culture so that we can love people authentically and communicate the gospel of Jesus. So we do our best to understand. We read. We seek counsel from other missionaries and dear national friends. We watch. We guess. Hopefully, we learn. And whenever we can, we share Fire.

We also share pancakes. Our Maasai neighbor got a stack.