A Little Bit More.

The first time I ever went overseas for a community service project was when I was 17. I went with a school team, went- not knowing what to learn or expect. It was there that I met Somaly, there that I fell in love with kites and rice fields, and there that I grew to hate what begging did to people.

The first time I went to Nepal when I was 18, I was alone. I had little idea of what poverty, shortage and leading a meaningful life meant. During those five weeks at that little orphanage, my life changed. The people there helped me to see, to love, to understand. There were 2 bomb blasts ten minutes away from where we lived, a university student was shot, we were under a national curfew for weeks, and there were riots, demonstrations, power cuts, shortage of food and water… in a quaint building where children laughed and learnt and sang happy songs in the darkness lit ablaze with candles.

A year later, after Kitesong, I went to Uttar Pradesh, India alone to visit a missions hospital. I hated it. Hated that it was a hard, scheming, wicked place, that the people were too poor, too sick, too hostile, hated that it was a barren, ugly, wasted land. Most of all, I hated that I hated it, that it was so hard to serve, love the people there. It was very cold, I was at the abyss of my anorexic phase, I cried every night while I was there, I was lonely and very depressed. I saw a lot of surgery, met a newly wed couple who inspired me much with their sacrificial giving- what with coming from extremely wealthy backgrounds to a place that must have seemed like a shit-hole in comparison, loving each other with a tenderness I had never seen before, in the midst of terrible working conditions and odd night shifts.

I visited Nepal a second time alone this June to visit the children again. They thanked me for Kitesong and made me cry again. In those three weeks, I knew, with an increasing measure of certainty, that this was God’s plan for my life.

Every trip is different, every trip breaks me in some way I have never been broken before. In the lonely twilights of different places, the heart fractures in different ways.

Walking past a wholly disfigured man burnt from head to toe, with his wounds still red, swollen and very raw, walking by him and having to decide to walk past him because there were mobs of beggars around and one act of giving could endanger our team. Having to come back to Singapore and recount this to that journalist who asked me about one of the hardest moments I had to bear.

Bathing in the dead of winter with iced water. Listening to the story of how a little girl was gang-raped, dumped by her father and whose mother eventually became mentally unstable. Seeing how missionaries from well-to-do families bring themselves down to live in simple homes, struggling to home-school their kids and work at the same time. Falling ill in a foreign land alone, puking all over the toilet, drowsy with sickness, and having to scrub the entire toilet on your hands and knees while feeling you’re about to faint any moment.

These moments break you, tear you down, and build you up in places you wouldn’t imagine.

Out of everything I had said, I have no idea why that journalist chose to report my embarrassing recount of how that little girl at the orphanage made me cry because she wouldn’t let me wash a muddy toilet that the kids had messed up. It was my first time in Nepal then. I stood at that door of that muddy, muddy toilet and that little ten-year old saw me sigh. “Didi (big sister),” she said endearingly, “You don’t do. I’ll do,” with the biggest, most genuine smile I have ever seen. She insisted. I went to my room and cried after that. I couldn’t do a muddy toilet.

She touched me so much. Her name was Mamata.

During my second visit to Nepal, I had the grand privilege of experiencing the chance of puking all over a toilet. It was a gastronomical disaster, likely caused by the extremely high level of sanitation of the food served on a roadside restaurant there, and the robust immunity of my Singaporean stomach. I was a drunk merlion spewing gloriously onto every tile in my missionary friend’s toilet with the greatest measure of mechanical precision. Clutching a pained stomach and a woozy head, I then cleaned the entire toilet by myself. I was very ill.

But I was singing because I was so incredulously delighted and giddy with happiness, even though I was a physical wreck. Singing because I remembered Mamata. Happy because I had come full circle. You should have seen me. I was beyond myself. Puke. Pain. Laughter. And Victory encapsulated in a dirty rag cloth sodden with green and red puke. It was very, very funny.

I was by myself.

People always ask me why I travel alone. My answer used to be because no one wanted to come along. I often made impulsive, decisive decisions, and it was difficult for people to find time on their schedules which coincided with mine. I used to answer that it was hard to find a traveling partner. Female with a similar vision and time to kill.

But after thinking it through, I think I know the real reason now. After all, if one was really bent on finding a travel partner, a group to travel with, one would surely be able to do so.

At the heart of the matter, I think I just want some time to myself, away from everything.

Away from Everything here. The cars, the streetlamps, ZARA and MANGO, the work, the clean pavements, efficient people, their Stories, and mine. I just want some time to myself, away from Everything.

I suffocate in this place. It is too clean, too efficient, too… predictable. And I like it that I get to learn about what life means outside of my life. Like it that out there, everything is an adventure and a misadventure. Sometimes, don’t you want to get slightly lost, too? Don’t you want to just close your eyes, take a wrong turn, and be surprised? I know I do. I always do.

I want the great outdoors. Woman was made in a garden, a garden. Not a lecture theatre.

Just want some time to think about things, some time to talk to God and myself, without having to constantly entertain banter.

But it comes with a price, and sometimes the lonliness wears you down. But it is good, also. It is like training- they say those who really know God never get lonely.

I'm not a saint. What I do in these places hardly makes any overnight life-changing, long-sustaining impact on the lives of the people there. It’s just a good break for me, something I need, and a calling I hope to fulfill someday. I go to these places to learn mainly, to see what serving the poor there is like, to learn from the missionaries, to prepare my heart and my spirit for that kind of life later on. There is nothing noble about what I do. It’s just the way things are.

People mustn’t think humanitarian trips like these change the lives of people overnight. Long-term missionaries will tell you that they appreciate people coming over short-term to build toilets, paint houses, but more than that, they long for people to come and learn, come with an open heart to be inspired to come serve in the same field. That’s where the long-lasting impact lies. That’s where the challenge is. And that’s where it breaks me the most.

Can I?

For all my talk about missionary work, I’m still praying, still finding out, still learning… because by myself Ill never be up to it.

By myself, I'll never make it there, or back.

Only God’s heart is big enough for that kind of suffering.

So that’s why I keep going to these places. And why I write my life on this space. I go, I keep going, keep writing, hoping that the embers in my heart will keep burning, keep glowing till the day I can finally go with the peace of God in my heart, live in a white, bright house in a shit-hole of a place and find Puke, Pain, Laughter and Victory all in the same breath while serving the poor, and lonely.

So I go, just to learn a little bit more.

Our Blessedness.

Dear Wai,

Thank you for your reply, I also happy to hear from you, sorry for late reply you. it was busy day. I am ok and my study is getting on well, but I have problem with homework and assingments because I don't have computer use, it is the main problem for me now.

Oh I have 3 days off, so I will go to my homeland tomrrow to help my parents on the farm. In Cambodia celebrate water festival, it is big one in my conutry, but every year, I never stay in phnom phen on the festival because there are so many people in city.

God bless you!!!!

Somaly

My Missing Piece.

You know the feeling when you're looking desperately for a jigsaw piece and you finally find it, and see that it fits? That's how I felt this morning, after agonising over Somaly's plight.

I had bought a book lately, the first of its kind, a precious compilation of the stories and experiences of lovely Singaporean medical missionaries who valiantly took off to Africa and many poor parts of Asia to help the needy. When I opened the book randomly and started reading a short chapter written by a missionary doctor in the Philippines, it was as if I had found my Missing piece. It was a lovely coincidence.

So this is what the right thing is.

Dr Chau Chwen Hwe, a lady missionary, who together with her family founded a livelihood programme to help the poor in the Philippines help themselves, writes in Carry the Spices:

French ethnologist Marcel Mauss had this to say, "One kind of giving leaves a man in another's debt, disgracing and humiliating him like a bond-slave, while another kind of giving raises him to the dignity of a genuine personhood."

...

"Whenever generosity of giving and helping is of unconditional character, the recipient must be able to return the gift or some equivalent in order to remain his own respectable self. Otherwise he will begin to see himself as inferior to the giver; his personal sense of worth is downgraded, and instead of being grateful, he will be bitter."

-Dr John Janzen, a Christian anthropologist

...

"Empowerment of the poor is the kind of aid that helps them to help themselves. It is the empowerment when they can take pride in producing results with their own efforts. This is our journey with the poor- the kind of holistic help that lifts a person from dependency to dignified personhood."


So perhaps my best gift to Somaly would be our friendship, us keeping in touch, me writing to her and encouraging her in her faith in life, studies and God. Perhaps that is the best gift I can offer, a gift that both restores her dignity and moulds her character, a gift that sits in fairly well with me- my Missing piece. There will always be a part of me that turns and tosses, wondering how she is doing, how her mother is, what I can do for her, but for now, there is some sort of closure, for her next year of university education at least.

So this is what giving is, what Peace is.

I think I've found my Missing Peace.

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money.

Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them.

So, spread your love everywhere you go.

-Mother Teresa

The Right thing.

Finally.

I was elated to finally find a Cambodian missionary back in Singapore, excited to seek her advice, ask her for help to find out how I could help Somaly. After listening to what I had to say about Somaly's plight, she looked at me squarely and said, “I can’t help you.” I was downcast, and my tears welled up but I understood- it was not that she was ungenerous, or unwilling, but that there were just too many. Too many of these kids in the same dire situations and too little manpower to help all of them out. Time, logistics, dealings were involved and there weren't enough hands. Too many.

But I stayed and I pleaded, and then I showed you Kitesong, of what Somaly meant to me and I was almost in tears because this has gone on for far too long, and I didn't know what to do. You saw my desperation, and what I had written at the back of the book- of how Somaly had been Kitesong's inspiration to a large extent, to help children in their education, you looked at me, tired, worn and said weakly, “I’ll try my best, okay? I can’t promise, but I’ll try. I'm trying only because this means so much to you.”

I held your hands and I said, “Please try. Thank you so much.”

It’s not easy being a missionary. She was juggling many projects at the time, and had to make special efforts to visit Somaly’s home, to check that she was truly in need and not merely writing to me or other Singaporeans to fish for extra money. Weeks later, she emailed me to tell me she had visited Somaly, and though her mother was very ill, her father elderly, and she had many siblings, their family still had many cows. They would get by.

It seems cruel, doesn't it? We have so much here, and yet we take the trouble to investigate the family background of a young Cambodian girl who worries about not being able to complete her university education every day. But is the right thing to do, to just give money unconditionally?

“Why don’t you just send her money? Why go to all that trouble?”

Because it’s not about the money. I had found her a sponsor already, but it’s not about the money- it’s about doing the right thing, the right thing of giving responsibly and lovingly. As short-term voluntary mission-trippers, we see a Cambodian girl in need of money for her education and cant wait to charge forth to lavish upon them our generosity. But are we aware of the social consequences involved, the disastrous long-term mess that we leave long-term missionaries to wrap up?

Some people say we should just give. After all, what is a few hundred dollars to us? But in our impulsive and earnest compassion, do we respect the humble culture and frugal life of these people, or take it upon ourselves to exercise what we deem as more generous, more giving, imposing our cultural attitudes on a different people? We want to give, we want to give, we want to give. It is easy for us to give- but there are social consequences that we leave for other people to clear up.

Sending money is not the problem. Precipitating a social evil of villagers fishing for money from better-off social workers like us is. Breeding a culture of jealousy among them (How come that mission-tripper sent you money and not me?) is. Leaving the long-term missionary to handle all these unintended social ills is.

So that is why we go through ‘all that trouble’.

After emailing missionary after missionary, calling and approaching them, troubling them to help me get connected with her, asking them for advice as to what to do, whether sending money would be right thing to do or if it would precipitate a social evil, I was beginning to get discouraged. I received news that Somaly would be able to cope, and emails from her saying that she could not.

The right thing to do. What was the right thing to do? Term was starting, and she either needed the money or not. She was either truthful or not. I would send it to her or visit her or not. I was tempted to get on a budget airplane and take a short 3 day holiday in Phnom Pehn one weekend to get some sort of closure.

This was the girl who partially inspired Kitesong. This was the girl whose life breathed into me some sense, if any, of decent compassion for the uneducated children around the world and my basic level of gratitude for my university education. If she had to forgo her education, give up her dream of becoming a teacher, work on her farm “like my farmer parents- Wai, I don’t want to be a farmer”, how tragic it would be.

This spanned over a few months. After many, many nights of prayer, finally, an answer.

Dear Wai

I just want to tell you that I can continue my study at university in year III, but everything not getting on well, as you know I don't have enough money, maybe you want to ask me why I can go to study in year III? because my poor brother sold his motor to take money for my school fee.

my family is ok, but my mom often sick.

Somaly


She got by after all. But at what price. How much can we, should we interfere? Is it one evil over the other?

The right thing to do.

The Struggle

I have been disturbed for a long time.

Blue skies, laughing children with smiles so wide they reached the edge of their faces, a feel-good time of playing, joking, tickling them, throwing time recklessly away in a scenic, rural land and taking photos madly before leaving- it seems like this is what mission trips have been reduced to. I went for a meeting with some missionaries lately and they coined a term that pierced right through me. Mission tourism, they said. Going on mission trips has become a fad among youth, trendy, almost.

Most young people are drawn to the fun and feel-good factors, but few realize the impact they make on communities overseas.

I was invited to a fund-raising banquet last night to raise funds for mission work in developing countries. There, I met up with the missionaries from Nepal who looked after me while I was there, and some more from Cambodia.

I was happy to see them. I smiled deeply, and then I saw a familiar group of faces, faces that belonged to a Cambodian orphanage that I visited with my college 2 years ago. I saw him and I covered my mouth involuntarily.

“Lam Da? Is that you? They let you come! ”

The brown cheeky 17 year-old face smiled broadly right back at me. He nodded.

I remembered him, and the many children at that orphanage in Cambodia, who had been brought up in an artificial third culture, where so many Singaporean short-term mission trippers like myself had visited and trampled all over the delicate Cambodian culture. I was no exception. Now, every time I recollect the memory, I am disturbed. The idea of an orphanage is beautiful, but the idea of raising too many children in a place where too many visitors come and go like voyeurs, leaving them feeling unstable, insecure and pampered is not.

Children in orphanages are not exhibits.

Andy Chan wrote an article on The Straits Times lately, questioning if such trips are merely “(unspiritual) desires to just do something now” and if they are “merely free or subsidised touristy jaunts masquerading as spiritual work.” He writes directly, “ Can short-termers actually help people who are linguistically and culturally different? Surely people-to-people relationships take not weeks but years to build. Long-term relationships foster mutual accountability, whereas one-off-never-to-be-repeated encounters don't.”

His article recounts studies conducted by US sociologists who, after rigorous investigations, found very little lasting positive change in goers or receivers. He writes cuttingly, “While such trips may be an exciting experience for goers - 'I have done missions!' - studies showed that all their good intentions to raise money to help others overseas, for instance, tended to have dissipated away just months afterwards.”

He continues: “Goers must stop thinking they go to serve poor Third Worlders. Instead, they should conceive of their trips merely as ways to learn about another people and their problems. Also, they should understand that what happens during the trip - Did I hug enough orphans in Afghanistan? Did I treat enough sick Afghans? - is not important. Instead, what happens after they come back is more important: Will I consistently raise more money for Afghan orphans now? Will I support materially Afghan doctors who stay on for the sake of their countrymen despite all the hardship they
face? And so on.”

His article was not an easy read.

I believe there is a balance that must be struck. On one hand, we chastise the short-term mission trippers for treating the orphanages like zoos, and tainting a pure culture; on the other hand, many of such mission trips were the launching pad for many a long-term missionary who eventually stayed to build a lasting humanitarian ministry and made lifelong, sustaining changes to the lives of the less fortunate.

I’ve had so many people ask me, “Why don’t you organize a medical mission trip for your classmates since you’ve had some experience?”

How do I begin to tell you what I feel about this? How do I begin to explain to you the social ills that have arisen, the mixed feelings I have when people enter orphanages and snap photos madly, spoiling the children, promising them gifts and the word of their return, when they never intend to go back in the first place? Children in orphanages have hearts that break, too. Loving them is treating them right, not by giving them instant affection for our own feel-good rewards, but by treating them responsibly.

Even more, how do I even begin to tell you that for all my self-righteousness and protectiveness, that every minute I am there, I struggle with all these things too. I struggle in knowing that all my undoing is justified, or perhaps not, because of God’s calling for me to be a missionary, and I struggle even more knowing that our hearts are deceitful- I could very well end up in a cushy job and forget about this naïve calling for good.

Some people say I ought not to feel guilty. After all, after returning from Nepal, there was follow-up action and Kitesong made lasting changes to the lives of the children. But what you don’t know is- when I went on the trip, I didn’t know if I was going to be a long-term missionary. I didn’t know I would write a book for them, I didn't even know I would go back. I have no relationship with altruism and I am human.

So what do I say about this? If you want to go on a short-term mission trip, who can stop you? It could very well be the seed sown in your heart waiting to bloom the Mother Teresa within you. It could be the beginning of a beautiful, beautiful thing.

But promise me, search yourself and try and understand that we have the power to do more damage than good. Search deep within and question your motives and intentions. Pray much, and ask yourself if your reasons justify the possible damage done. When you can question yourself till it hurts, till the point you are unsure and doubtful and writhing inside because of your struggling, till the point where you feel small and humble and you feel like crying, then it is time to go.

And when I’m listening to a long-term missionary speak at a conference or at church, please look away from my face, wet with snot, because I am struggling too.