Hanging out, Logos-style

The last post focused on ways that Bible Camp stretched us, but there was so much about camp that was just plain fun! First and foremost, it was so nice to be around students in a non-teaching context. At school, there are a million logistical details to consider all the time: Have I made all my copies? Who was absent last class and owes me homework? Do we have time to finish this activity today? Do students know this word? At Bible camp, I supervised students, but I didn’t have to plan or explain almost anything. In fact, since the upperclassmen were returning, they explained a lot to me. Participating alongside them and hanging out with them was so refreshing. Same with them: my often-stressed students had no homework, tests to study for, or other responsibilities to pull them away from time with the group. They needed that!

Secondly, I got to see more about how they like to hang out. I learned several new games from them, including Ninjas (freezing in poses and trying to hit others), The Stupid Game (I was terrible!), and a name game from Korea (difficult but really fun). All the Korean guys loved playing a form of extreme rock-paper-scissors that I found disturbing, but apparently it’s very popular in Korea. I imported Dutch Blitz, which a few of them already enjoyed, and Four on a Couch. I’d heard that Asian games often involve punishment, but I’d never seen it until this week: every game had some aspect of mocking or hitting anyone who lost or messed up. The chance to do this to teachers was eagerly seized! The skits highlighted their suave dance moves and sense of humor; my stomach hurt from laughing.

Thirdly, we got to create many new memories. Our cabin – art teacher Erin and ten girls and I - had “Bonding Time” every night. It wasn’t scheduled, but Erin suggested it and it became a big hit. The things we did weren’t revolutionary: eat candy, make up goofy stories, give backrubs. But it was so special to a lot of us. I realized that although these girls are around each other often at school, and although they get tons of teaching from the Bible, there aren’t many opportunities for structured girls-only time. The girls’ Bible studies that I was part of from middle school through college were huge in my development as a Christian and as an individual. I was so glad to be able to recreate that for a few days.

Fourthly, I got to talk with many of the students more than ever before. Hearing stories about them growing up, their hopes and fears, their families, and their perspective on life in Cambodia was really meaningful to me. And seeing how they interact outside the classroom – with older and younger grades, with siblings, with teammates in challenging activities – revealed a lot to me about who they are. Out of the 75 students who went, I teach about 50 (plus about 50 middle schoolers who stayed home). That’s a lot of individuals…a lot of stories…a lot of opinions…a lot of challenges faced and life lived. I’ve learned so much this year about them, and yet I’m barely scratching the surface. A week of relationship-building was a really special thing for me.

2 new photo albums!

You all should appreciate this. I have neglected my lesson plans and grading in order to bring you not one, but TWO lengthy blog entries and not one, but TWO full-sized photo albums in the last several days. This is definitely a personal record!

So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce my non-Facebook friends to 2 new photo albums:

1. Smarter than a Chicken: "A wedding, a first-grade birthday party, a boat ride, a Christmas party, a carnival...so much excitement in a few short weeks!"
Location: Phnom Penh Thmei, Cambodia

2. Elbow-Lickin' Good: "5 days. 73 students. 9 chaperones. 53 giant geckos. Countless memories."
Location: Jumbok Hoas Adventure Camp, Preah Vihear, Cambodia

Roughing it...and loving it

I’d been looking forward to last week for nearly a year! Shortly after committing to Logos, I saw Facebook albums from last year’s teachers showing the high school Bible camp. I’d heard it was great for building relationships, and I love anything that involves lots of trees. So I was thrilled to be invited along as one of the nine staff members to chaperone last Monday through Friday. I wrote my middle school substitute lesson plans, jumped on a bus, and headed six hours north to Jumbok Hoas (“Flying Tree”) Adventure Camp, near the Thai border.

Not everyone’s enthusiasm matched my own. In fact, the principals had spent weeks on the phone convincing certain parents to let their children attend this “mandatory” event. This province, Preah Vihear, has had a border conflict with Thailand off and on in the past two years. Although we were hours from the conflict, parents claimed their children might be unsafe. Besides, it’s not appropriate for good Khmer girls to leave their families for a week, even for a school-sponsored activity. Four ninth-grade girls were stuck at home, assigned a “ten-page” paper (which turned into three) and forced to pay the camp fee anyways. Other students grumbled about the hardship of leaving behind their Facebook accounts, their house helpers, and their air con. For some, “vacation” always involves fancy hotels and gourmet dinners. I was shocked at how many would never willingly go into the forest, or any nature setting besides the beach.

You have to understand that in Cambodia, leaving Phnom Penh is always inherently an adventure. It was on the bus that several Korean students and I tried our first fried crickets. They were surprisingly good (kind of like potato chips); I even ate a second without persuasion. At the rest stop, we were swarmed by poor children hawking fruit, craving our ice creams, and clinging to our legs. Shortly thereafter, the thick red dust from the dirt roads started entering the bus through the air vents and choking us, forcing us to breathe through our air masks or sleeves for a few hours. Several students screamed as boards cracked on a few of the bridges. Ten minutes from our destination, we tried to go around a broken bridge and the bus got stuck for a hot, sticky thirty minutes as moto drivers stopped and stared, fascinated. We had to walk a half-mile with our things because the camp’s road wasn’t equipped for buses.

The camp was the most rustic I’ve ever been to. We had electricity for a few hours each evening, which just meant lights in the cabins and along the path. Guys’ and girls’ bathing areas were visible to each other (awkward!) and involved the traditional method of dumping buckets of water from two giant tubs. All the new girls were nervous about their sarongs: you’re supposed to bathe wearing a huge tube of colorful fabric with elastic at the top. (I missed the memo on that and wore my swimsuit and shorts. Next year I’ll know better.) Showers were thus slightly nerve-racking as well as jam-packed, although they took top priority for everyone given the heat. People slept on either thin mattresses or traditional hammocks, both shrouded in mosquito nets to ward off malaria. Our cabin featured footlong geckos and biting ants, I shared the squatty potty with a frog and some very large spiders. Thankfully, there were no appearances by the cobra that had bitten a guy at the camp two weeks earlier.

I was intrigued by the number of students afraid of heights. As I reflected further, I realized Cambodia doesn’t have much that’s safe yet daring. People around us take crazy risks all the time out of necessity. For example, the rappelling tree that we climbed using harnesses and ballayers is roughly the same height as the coconut trees by my classroom window that workers scale unaided weekly to collect coconut milk. But risk-taking might not be seen as a fun thing that someone would seek out, even when it’s actually far safer than the moto rides we brave daily. Some students surprised themselves by enjoying the high ropes elements; others bore it as best they could.

Camp was a new adventure for many of us. Then again, Logos had a poisonous krait snake in the girls’ locker room two weeks ago, and dozens of people in my neighborhood shower in sarongs and sleep in hammocks. So in some ways, it was just like the lower/middle-class experience of life in Phnom Penh. All told, most of us enjoyed the adventure, even those who dreaded it. I personally can’t wait to return next year. But it sure made life here in Phnom Penh feel luxurious when we returned!

Talk it out!

Lately I’ve felt like my life is going to air on Adventures in Odyssey any day now. Am I the only one who grew up listening to that show? It’s a Christian kids’ radio program where each story line involves several people learning the same Biblical principle in different ways. The show always wraps up neatly with everyone coming to the same realization.

My lesson revolves around communication and loving people when you’re tired. At Bible camp last week, my group of 12 high school students tackled team-building challenges together for three days. Together we faced the Dancing Cable (where you hold onto each other and a few trees while edging along 50 meters of wire), the Electric Fence (a rope we had to hurdle over within a time limit), the Giant Shoes (long boards with room for all 12 pairs of feet), and about ten more. Each activity took a lot of encouragement, courage, and initiative. And towards the end, their endurance and patience were really being tried. The same toes being stepped on, over and over, were really demanding bitterness and discord by the last day. For me, those exhausted moments were among the most tender, as students learned to keep considering others’ needs after the novelty wore off.

I came home to about a million applications for these lessons, some ongoing, some more recent. Today alone, I was in on three different conversations with either staff or students that involved communicating your needs and hurts. Each individual problem was seemingly minor: a delay in transportation, a choice in phrasing, a disagreement in planning an upcoming event. Each problem provoked a significant reaction: tears, violence (by a student), feelings of worthlessness. Each injured party refused to bring it up to the offender at first, and yet found it impossible to just let go of the incident. Each reminded me of recent issues in my own heart.

I’m convinced these events are anything but minor: they can quickly become destructive. Communication is hard, especially when you’re stressed and tired. It’s getting hotter and schoolwork is piling up, and I’ve heard that this is the season for strained friendships. But disunity cripples you rapidly when you’re away from your normal supports and routines. In fact, disagreements with teammates are the #1 reason that missionaries leave the field. That scares me so much. It seems to me that Satan would love for us to chalk them up to the individuals involved: I must be oversensitive, she must be a control freak, he’s just so overbearing. We’re Christians; we should be nice. I tend to think I should just get over it, or they should just know better, and so it festers and accumulates in me. But doing that doesn’t acknowledge the discord as a spiritual battle and as a significant test of our faith.

The way I see it, God shows us off in the heavenly realms when we honor Him in the seemingly small issues. Just as Satan sees in these events the potential to shatter unity and interrupt ministry, God sees in them the potential to reveal beautiful selflessness and joy. It’s one thing to trust God in the “shark attacks” of spiritual tests; looking to Him for grace and truth in the “mosquito bites” is quite another. But I think learning to be honest and humble and gracious in the dozens of insignificant moments actually says more about God’s faithfulness than the most extreme crisis we could ever face. I want to be transparent with everyone around me and live drenched in thankfulness for God’s goodness.

And Lord, when you listen for the song of my life,
May it be, may it be a song so sweet…
- Caedmon’s Call

Field Trip?!?

There's a simple equation that every student teacher learns:
First-year teacher
+ Field Trip
__________________
Failure

OK, so I made that up, but it seems logical. There are plenty of variables to manage in the classroom; leaving the school multiplies them by about 50. So when my dear friend and fellow BBC period drama lover Suzanne Johnson suggested incorporating a tour of Vissot Food Corporation, I knew I was out of my league, but I was intrigued by the challenge.

Field trips are hard to come by here. Dan, the principal, encourages us to take students on trips whenever possible, even if it's a non-traditional destination. There's a zoo that's a bit frightening for animal lovers, a water park that lends itself to causing open wounds, an art museum composed almost exclusively of ancient statues of Buddha. Performances and exhibits are relatively rare; movie theaters only show horror films.

So our trips tend to be a bit creative. So far this year, various Logos students have gone to: a Christian-run village for AIDS orphans and elderly widows, the genocide museum, a remote village near the Thai border, and a brothel. Yes, you read that last one correctly. The Service Leadership class sent its girls to a brothel (one of three just down the street from the old campus) to distribute leaflets in Khmer about God's love to the workers. So, comparatively speaking, it seemed normal to go to a factory for an English field trip.

Vissot is a Cambodian-owned health food company, started by the Seventh-Day Adventist church about 10 years ago. Their original product, the delectable Peanut Crumble cookie, is composed of two round crunchy cookies (peanuts and cane sugar baked together) fused together with their all-natural peanut butter. It's available at most grocery stores here. They've since expanded their line to include various jams, curry pastes, rice snacks, and granolas. They employ mostly students and disadvantaged women, seeking to give them a leg up. Suzanne loves to sing their praises, and our colleague Sokcha (the physics/math teacher) once worked in peanut quality control for them. It's located between my house and the school, in my neighborhood of Toul Kork.

I realized that as part of the 8th grade nonfiction unit, we could do a "complex process" paper describing the journey of various products from farms to stores. So I scheduled a visit, handed out permission slips, booked a van, and had students brainstorm prior knowledge and questions about the production process. (That was a revelation: one pair, trying to guess the ingredients in jam, could only come up with "powder." They were shocked to learn it had real fruit.) We were told that since the plant is small, half of the 25 students would tour, while the other half sat outside (in the 2 PM sun) and asked questions of a Vissot representative. As a treat, I let students pre-order smoothies and iced coffees from Sovannary's restaurant for their outside segment. We had them all lined up to arrive when students were outside. I scoped out the factory in advance and clarified expectations with students twice. Sounds organized? Not really. I was a mess trying to figure out these few factors and how to use wisely the mere hour between departure and return. (The vans had to be back early for school dismissal, or we'd have had 90 minutes.)

The day of the field trip, one student said he'd lost his permission slip and hadn't gotten another. Could he just have his brother sign for him? After all, they'd lived together without their parents all last year. One of the girls had a signed form, but I didn't ask who signed it: probably her house helper, because her parents live outside the country. At least one other student was here without his parents for a month in the fall. Permission slips don't seem to fit Cambodia.

I also got a call from the guy who had arranged the vans for me. "Did you mean next Thursday? You told me 11:30 and you're still not out here." (I had watched him write down the real departure time, 1:40.) Thankfully, the vans were still available.

When we arrived at the factory, several minutes late, they wanted everyone to take the tour at once. By the time my students got their drinks (I felt so bad bringing them inside!), found a seat, and waited for the PR guy to begin, it was 2:15. We jammed in there while a hesitant PR rep gave his first-ever student tour. "Tour" is a stretch - we couldn't go near the machines without special gear, so we looked through the glass from a waiting area the size of my bedroom.

After that, we split into our two groups for student questions. They barked out the questions they'd written in class, sounding like journalists. At least my tour guide was Australian and had the upper hand over them in English fluency, unlike the Khmer tour guide in the other group. Students in my group were respectful and attentive; the other group needed some redirecting. But they all thought it was cool that the peanut butter doesn't actually have butter (or even oil) - just ground peanuts and salt. And watching the workers stamp the round cookies held their attention for at least 30 seconds. At 2:45, they were surprised we had to leave already. (Which is good, I guess, that it wasn't too long, although using the first 15 minutes might have been nice.) On Monday, we'll talk about showing respect to those with faltering English and acknowledging the greatness of what Vissot is doing.

So, with my first field trip under my belt, I think I can safely claim it as a learning experience, at least for myself. I learned that "paper wars" are really exciting for 8th graders in vans. I learned that 1 hour is not enough time for a trip anywhere, even one mile away. I learned that if I want strangers to work together, I need to clarify expectations a zillion times more than seems necessary to me. And I learned that Suzanne can put magic and perspective into anything. Most of all, I was reminded that what you want students to learn and what they actually learn are not always the same, and sometimes that's OK.

Chimps, Piranhas, and Tarantulas, Oh My!

My trip to Thailand between Christmas and New Years was delightful! See photos here.

The Notorious Bong Nath

Sarah with Bong Nath and her family

I finally got to meet her this week. For months I've heard stories about this woman, known for her perseverance and boldness that are sometimes beautiful and sometimes aggravating. I don't understand everything about her, but she embodies a lot of my questions and musings.

Last Sunday, I visited the Khmer-language Bible study Sarah's been attending at Bong Nath's (pronounced Bong Not) house. While Sarah taught the kids and led a Christmas program for them, I sat with Bong Nath and others, looking at photos of her kids growing up. Then I gave them a small talk on Luke 3, the Christmas story, which Bong Nath's daughter Samedi translated. Bong Nath was a gracious hostess as always, cooking a big pot of mouthwatering chicken curry with rice noodles and French bread. (The surviving chickens ran around us during the whole Bible study, as we sat in a circle just outside her house.) She sent us home with leftovers, as well as several mangos and two pumpkins that she had grown.

Bong Nath is connected to Logos in that she used to cook and clean for several of the teachers. She's been unemployed since they moved back, and is fighting hard for another job (she gave me her CV to pass along to friends). She's a master at networking, and knows a Khmer TA well, in addition to a number of teachers and students still at Logos. Her family is among the poorest in Phnom Penh - they have two rooms in their house with walls made of scrap tin, and they have often lived hand-to-mouth, including likely right now.

I asked Bong Nath about her faith story, and instead heard a rambling 20-minute tale involving her family's many years of dire poverty. It was in the midst of fruitless job hunts, wandering door-to-door with her CV, that Bong Nath stumbled onto her first Christian church service in the 1990s. The white missionary leading the meeting agreed to hire her in his home, and at some point Bong Nath accepted Christ. Since then, foreign Christians have been directly involved in every good thing in her life. Through them, she's received a steady income for a while at several different jobs, Bible teaching, training in cooking and medical work, scholarships for her two sons (now 8 and 10) at a modest Khmer-language school (public schools are essentially worthless here), and trips to the countryside for her teenage daughters. She's grateful, and proudly showed photos of all the expats she's gotten to know over the years.

Without knowing those foreigners, I doubt that Bong Nath's four kids would have all survived until now. So it's not too surprising that Bong Nath has grown to rely on foreigners for everything she needs. When Samedi graduated high school last year, Bong Nath dreamed of her attending an American university for medicine. A generous and dedicated former Logos teacher arranged for sponsorship at a local Cambodian nursing school, but Bong Nath was not satisfied. She began to rant against this woman, and against the missionaries currently leading a Bible study in her home, who made it clear that they would not give her money. She eventually told them they couldn't lead that Bible study there anymore, causing a split in members.

Now her Bible study consists mostly of non-Christian and new Christian neighbors. It's a neat opportunity, and she's fighting hard for a foreigner to come lead it. (She told me at least a dozen times that I should come every week and teach, despite my flat refusals.) But many Westerners are drained by her incessant "prayer requests" for a job, a scholarship, money, a better life. There's no guarantee that the new teacher wouldn't be similarly kicked out once Bong Nath realizes they won't be her financial savior. Sarah has avoided most such inquiries by explaining that she is paying college loans - a difficult concept for Bong Nath, who pictures everyone having sponsors as her children do.

It makes me wonder: how do you help someone with practical needs in a way that embodies the Gospel instead of replacing it? I think Bong Nath really does love Jesus. She's devoted to other Bible study members and compassionate about their personal struggles. Neighbors know, when they're in need (as they often are), she'll help them if at all possible. But many Khmer and expat Christians have confronted her about trusting rich people rather than God for her finances.

It's hard to deny that for her, as for many Christians, conversion to Christianity has brought significant economic opportunity. In modern Cambodia, where getting a job is all about who you know, her Christian faith is still one of the most marketable things about Bong Nath. Is that a bad thing? Is it always better to give to an impersonal organization than to someone you know? Because the Bible is pretty clear about Christians' responsibility to help when we see someone in need (Isaiah 58, Matthew 25). And it seems hypocritical for someone comparatively wealthy to sing praise songs next to Bong Nath in church while her kids faint from hunger. So what's the answer?

Thankfully, Bong Nath's behavior is not typical among Cambodians. I've heard that many Cambodians' faith in God's provision puts expat missionaries to shame. But the vast economic divide between Cambodians and expats, even those on missions support, creates a dangerous imbalance of power. It takes a lot of wisdom to help Cambodians without creating dependence. It's a question as old as colonialism, but one I certainly haven't figured out. For now, I'm dodging the question by not giving directly to anyone.