arents (and, to a lesser degree, my own parents) are secure in the expectation that they will live their lives surrounded by close family members, enjoying a position of respect and dignity within the family unit.
They expect to be (and will be) cared for as they age and as their health declines. Their biopsychosocial needs, as discussed by Burlingame (1999), will be addressed within the context of the family and not by external agencies or public sector organizations. Their ethnicity û they are all member of the Edo tribal group, which is not one of the three largest tribal ethnic groups in Nigeria (these are the Yoruba, Ibo and Hausa). Consequently, my family has lived as a minority group within a complex culture composed of many different cultural groups (Rubenstein, 1989).
This assignment suggests that the writer will most probably be an American who may or may not be part of an ethnic minority group (e.g., African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans, and so forth). In my case, I am the first member of my family to have immigrated to the United States. Though African and Black, I am not an "African-American" and neither I nor my parents or grandparents have experienced life in the United States from the perspective of the African-American. In writing this assignment I was therefore required to consider how my grandparents' ethnicity û Edo, a tribe found in Nigeria û impacted upon their experience of aging in the context of Nigerian and not American society and culture.
The "Nigerian Ethnic Lens" is itself a multifaceted lens. For my grandparents, the most salient feature of their life in Nigeria as youth, adults, and elders is related to their membership in a minority group within a country that has many such groups. The Edo people are largely farmers and herdsmen; they are not, like the Yoruba and Hausa people of Nigeria, deeply involved in politics or commerce and industry. For my grandparents,...