Prayers I never used to pray

There's this myth that missionaries are super-Christians, the cream of the spiritual crop.  They pray all the time.  Their faith never falters, their patience never runs out, their joy never dims.  They love and give and serve like there's no tomorrow.   They haven't sinned since that time they pinched their little brother, back in first grade.

Ordinary people never become missionaries, right?  Wrong.  Super-Christians don't even exist.  Instead, it's a simple equation:

ordinary person + extraordinary situation = "fight or flight" 

When you hit trouble, either you fight to grow closer to God, or you book the next flight home.

As a Christian of the decidedly non-super variety, I was quickly bowled over by the diverse challenges of life here, some of which didn't sound like a big deal but threatened to drive me insane.  A stapler with no staples that fit.  Cheap pens that didn't write well.  Ants.  

I had to work on "praying without ceasing" (1 Thessalonians 5:16), even about this little stuff, to make it through the day.  (Eventually I got practical help with some things - I now have a functioning stapler and know which brands of pens to look for - but some sources of frustration are ever-present.)  On the other hand, I've also learned to value things that I'd previously underestimated. 

Here are other prayers that I don't remember praying before Cambodia, but that I repeat quite frequently nowadays:

1. Guide my key.  The padlock to our front gate is rusty (this happens every rainy season) to the extent that my key got bent trying to wrestle the padlock open.  My housemate taught me this prayer, à la Princess Bride, when Inigo Montoya prays to his father to "guide my sword."  

2. Thank You for bananas.  I don't think it's an accident that bananas are plentiful and cheap in the same tropical climates where bacteria and stomach critters flourish.  They and the rest of the BRAT diet - rice and toast (maybe not the applesauce) are so readily available here.  Often on days with stomach trouble, I've arrived in the cafeteria for school lunch, wondering what it is and whether I can eat it just now, and found to my relief that bananas and rice were featured prominently.

3. Heal my laptop.   I promise I never used to pray so much for inanimate objects.  However, the inconsistent power supply does a number on batteries - I'm on my fifth new one in 5.5 years.  Besides, my laptop is extra-creative in breaking with flair - it's constantly finding new ways to confound my school's awesome IT staff.  And sure, there are computer repair shops here, but who has time for that when you use your computer daily in lessons?  Especially when the last (well-respected) shop broke your DVD drive in a fruitless attempt to fix your keyboard, and the one before that (also highly recommended) left porn on your desktop.  So when the blue screen appears, or when programs crash, or when the webcam only stays fixed for 5 minutes, or when the "x" key keeps inserting itself into everything I'm typing, I've taken to praying that God will put His healing hands on my laptop.  And when issues resolve themselves, as they sometimes do, I definitely give Him the credit!

4. Thank You for rooftops.  In America, I thought of a rooftop as something that collected leaves in the fall and snow in the winter, and as Santa's landing pad.  Here, where many homes have a flat rooftop that people can walk on, I think of it as a place for stargazing, praying, and reflecting.  It has the best breezes, the best views of the sunset, the best people-watching opportunities, and the best peace and quiet. 

5. Shut the dogs’ mouths.  This prayer has two contexts.  The first relates to my landlords' dogs, which like to bark incessantly between about 9 PM and the wee hours.  Thankfully my room is mostly out of earshot, so I can sleep through it, but that's not the case for several of my housemates.  I've often prayed for the dogs to be silenced so people can get a good night's sleep.  The other context is when I'm out jogging in my neighborhood, where people's dogs roam free and sometimes chase people.  I've never needed a rabies shot, and I'd like to keep it that way.  

Don't you give me that innocent face, Khla.  You know you and Liep were howling at 3 AM as if your cage were on fire.

6. Help me slay this beast.  I get unduly excited about my improving ability to squash mosquitoes when they least expect it.  When they elude my grasp, though, I need this prayer... just as I do to take on the cockroaches lurking at the back of my sink, and the shrews that occasionally infiltrate our kitchen and living room.  I prayed it quite often as my friend and I battled against a rat in my bedroom late one evening, chasing it around and whacking at it with a broom.  Eventually, with help from my housemate's incredible Rodent Zapper machine, God granted us victory.  

At that moment, we couldn't have imagined a more beautiful sight.

7. Thank You for cold showers.  I used to think people were silly if they showered more than once a day.  Now I realize the beautiful power of showers, not only to wash the dust and mud from the roads, nor just to eliminate odors and wash away that Permasweat sheen, but also to restore sanity and a comfortable body temperature.  And the bonus of not having a water heater is that you don't waste time waiting for the water to heat up... which would, after all, defeat the purpose of cooling you down.

8. Strengthen my wifi. This one often coincides with a Skype call to my sister or a YouTube video I'm trying to show in a lesson.  (If I were more organized I'd download them in advance, but I'm usually not.)  But hey, at least I *have* wifi! At school it's gotten much faster over the years, and at home, where my laptop despises our wireless router (see prayer #3), an Ethernet cable has done wonders for my sanity.

9. Protect my engine.  This prayer occurs when I'm driving through floodwaters.  Several streets in my neighborhood flood regularly during rainy season, and the dark stormwaters make it impossible to spot potholes.  (My housemate prays "Guide my moto" on this one, echoing #1.)  The trick I found out the hard way: you're probably OK as long as you can keep accelerating, but the minute you stop applying gas, water will flood your engine unless you turn it off and start walking your moto.  The other trick: Bikes never need special caution in floodwaters, except to miss potholes.  If I know I need to drive on a flooded street, I often prefer to ride a bike.

Learning the hard way... we walked our moto about a mile that day.  But I still drive that moto today!

10. Thank You for mangoes.  I pray this multiple times a day in April, when "mango season" is a euphemism for "hot season."  I think if these seasons didn't coincide, Cambodia would have lost about half its foreigners by now.  The thing I never knew about mangoes, before coming here, is how diverse they are.  You can eat sour green ones with dried chilis and salt.  You can pickle them and eat them with a main dish.  You can make mango crisp.  You can eat them frozen like popsicles, out of a bag on road trips, dried like a Fruit Roll-Up, or with sticky rice.  You can get "fragrant" ones, tiny ones, ginormous ones, and yellow-orange ones practically falling apart with sweet ripeness.  And for months, most of them cost less than 50 cents a pound... plus half your friends are giving them away from their own mango trees.  It's fantastic.

Even lizards appreciate a good sticky rice and mango combo.

My landlords' niece/helper Srey Pos loves giving me mangoes, fresh picked from trees in our yard (and our neighbors' yards)

It's always the little things, right?  It's the little things that get to you, but it's also the little things that make it all worth it.  Giving the little things to God - both the irritations and the pleasures - helps me invite Him into my day so we can tackle the bigger things as a team.  I'm no super-Christian, but praying more about even the small details has brought me a steady lifeline of supernatural aid, whether in the form of tropical fruit, a Rodent Zapper, or a peaceful heart that can withstand more than I'd ever imagined.

Cambodian education, part 1: beginnings through 1979

I’ve been reading up this semester on Cambodian education, trying to get a handle on what it’s like and how it got this way.  Often the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970's is blamed for the downfall and current disrepair of all kinds of Cambodian institutions.  My conclusion so far: the Khmer Rouge were terrible, all right.  But education in Cambodia has been a mess for ages, and a remarkably stagnant mess at that.  

*I'll try to summarize what's stood out to me - I can't promise it's 100% accurate.*

The first book I read on the subject, David Ayres' Anatomy of a Crisis, details the history of education in Cambodia.  You know the system is in less-than-stellar shape when “crisis” in the title refers not to gender inequality, or to the dropout rate, or to corruption, or to graduates’ academic abilities, but to EVERYTHING.  In fact, Ayres doesn't even bother to argue that Cambodian education is in crisis, but focuses on arguing why.  In a nutshell, the answer is that Cambodia's leaders have never once had their citizens' best interests at heart.  Their capricious, ill-thought-through policies have reflected their true goals: to make themselves look good, to protect their status, and to divert the budget for themselves and their cronies.

Ayres begins with education prior to French colonization.  Cambodian kings never saw fit to educate their citizens.  For hundreds of years, Buddhist pagodas hosted the only education available: informal oral instruction in proverbs, folk tales, and didactic poems for young boys in training to become monks.  A lot of the activities weren't focused on learning, and monks could come and go whenever they wanted, making the schools inefficient.  Many boys spent a couple years learning from the monks, and then most were encouraged to return to the rice fields, while remained monks for years to come.  A few monks learned to read older languages like Pali in order to read Buddhist texts.  The pagodas encouraged children to accept their lot in life and not to question their status or their way of living; this fatalism is consistent with a Buddhist worldview.  For centuries during and after the Khmer Empire period, which began in 802 AD, there were almost no changes in rural Cambodian customs, work habits, or society.

A pagoda in Siem Reap - I spent a week near here on a Logos high school service trip

In 1863 Cambodia became a French protectorate (similar to a colony), but the French did little with its education.  They established a few schools to train administrative personnel, mostly from among the Cambodian elite and those of Chinese or Vietnamese heritage.  The schools were conducted in French after primary school, and their content was similar to curricula in France: very academic, and unrelated to Cambodia.  The French were not impressed by the monks' temple schools, and often reformed them - using the temple facilities with different teachers and their new curriculum for students.  By 1938 almost 60,000 students (mostly boys) were enrolled in primary school, but few stayed longer than three years, and fewer than 300 had completed primary school.  The first secondary school was accredited in 1935.  Ayres argues that while the French had little effect on the life of the average Cambodian peasant, their overtaking the temple schools served to undermine the traditional form of education without offering a solid alternative to replace it.  When they pulled out, the monks' schooling never regained its former ubiquity.

French leaders with King Norodom Sihanouk, whom they enthroned in 1941 and who remained influential until his death in 2012

After Cambodia attained independence in 1953, "Cambodianization" was supposed to happen as Cambodian leaders assumed control of the educational system.  However, no one ever implemented a thoughtful policy addressing Cambodia's needs and resources.  Ayres writes, "Particularly culpable was Norodom Sihanouk, who had slavishly pursued the expansion of educational provision to promote and ensure his uncontested legitimacy" (32).  Sihanouk, a shrewd politician who bounced between prince, king, and Socialist to maximize his political gains, saw education as a ticket to national popularity and international recognition.  

The problem is that Sihanouk tried to "modernize" education while protecting the traditional hierarchy (and thus his power) and he implemented policies haphazardly.  Schools were built too quickly, without bothering to train teachers or fund resources, and their quality rapidly declined.  He ignored his ministers' five-year plan to slow expansion and improve quality, instead deciding to allow many new universities to open without establishing standards to which they must adhere.  He never reformed the French curriculum, based on the assumption that students would attend secondary school and beyond.  While enrollment skyrocketed, most students still dropped out after a few years, having learned no vocational skills and little that was relevant to daily life.  Schools certainly didn't prepare students for the Cambodian economy, where subsistence rice farming remained the main industry and where innovation was badly needed.  Students who completed secondary school still had the old goal in mind: to become civil servants with a lifetime of high status, powerful connections, and lucrative bribes.  Trying to curry favors, for years Sihanouk guaranteed government positions to all university graduates in certain majors...even when the supply of graduates far outpaced the demand.   

His successor, Lon Nol, pooh-poohed Sihanouk's policies without substantially changing them.  During Lon Nol's regime, insurgents were gaining control of more and more regions in Cambodia, and schools were often interrupted by military conflicts and bombings.  Many teachers, influenced by the Communist ideas popular in France at the time, invited students to secret meetings and urged students to rally and protest both Sihanouk and Lon Nol.  A few teachers went on to become leaders of the Khmer Rouge from '75 to '79.  Seeking an agrarian revolution, Khmer Rouge leaders targeted the educated (themselves excluded, of course) among others doomed to violent deaths.  Their "schooling" involved separating children from their families to indoctrinate them with propaganda and occupy them in grueling farm labor.  By 1979, Cambodian education's tentative and uneven progress had indeed regressed to Year Zero.

To be continued in Part 2 and Part 3...