Bringing Halacha into a New Cultural Context?

Teaching continues to bring small steps forward and larger steps back, as I realize the extent of 1)what the kids have yet to learn and 2)how amazingly hard it is to teach/learn a third language in a second.  Last class, we had talked about brachot (blessings), and the meanings of the words, and today, as we were reviewing I realized--wait, they don't know what these meanings are in English.  Some had memorized the meanings, but few knew what these meanings referred to.  Perhaps I should have realized this before, but as no indication had been made I hadn't even thought of it.  It certainly set me back a bit, but hopefully my definitions of definitions have helped give them the understanding they were lacking, and later this week we will begin to learn the months of the Hebrew calendar, another of the large gaps in the kids' knowledge.

Following my class at Hadassah, I got my first taste of the Yeshiva here, coming in for the last hour of discussion (the classes, such as they are, only run until noon).  A small group of African Jews (from small communities in and outside Uganda) study with Rabbi Gershom so that they may go back and lead their own communities.  When I got there, the Rabbi and four students were discussing "love," certainly not the first topic I was expecting from the group, but it was later revealed that the original discussion had been about the whether a man should/could have more than one wife.  This is actually a particularly interesting question in a Ugandan context (though it's almost moot in the U.S.) as polygamy is rather common here among Muslims and some Christians--last year I met several wives who were some of 18, and many others who were one of four or five.  The question seemed to have taken a different turn and they spent a lot of time discussing different kinds of love (romantic, filial, etc.) and the differences between them, which honestly seemed a bit beside the point but interesting nonetheless.  In the end, the rabbi brought the discussion back to the question of wives, and the halachic view was brought up, along with specifically Ugandan considerations--that a wife might refuse to leave if a husband wants a divorce because the house belongs to the husband, and he is not required to give her anything in the case of divorce.  Therefore, the solution he proposed was that one should have only one wife, but if such a case arose as a woman refused to leave the home, the situation would have to be attended to in a way that may allow for another marriage.
It was certainly an interesting question to hear discussed here, and in a very atypical way, at least in regards to my own education and my understanding of the workings of rabbinical school studies (though I admit I have less familiarity with Conservative and Reform ones).  The Talmud and other sources could only be approached in the abstract--minimal familiarity with Hebrew, Aramaic and Jewish texts in general makes the text a bit too lofty for most except the rabbi--but the core of dealing with questions in a cultural context very different from that of most practicing Jews was certainly eye opening.