A Different Kind of Kindness

I met a man who lost his three middle fingers. Most of his right hand was gone as well leaving just a stump with the thumb and little finger poking out either side. It all started with a simple cut to his hand while doing his daily work as a cane basket and furniture maker. But the cut wouldn’t heal and became infected. (At the time he wasn’t aware that he had diabetes.) So he went to the local traditional healer who made a poultice of mysterious ingredients, most likely one of which was cow dung – a common remedy for wounds. The healer then chanted magic words, blew on his hand and sent him home.

Instead of healing the infection worsened. The hand swelled up like a balloon, all red and inflamed. Eventually he came to see a medical doctor at a government hospital in Phnom Penh. By this stage it was too late to save the hand and the man had surgery to remove the rotten flesh. I think the surgeon hoped the remaining thumb and little finger would be able to oppose and give him at least some function. But it seems they failed to send him for follow up therapy and by the time I saw him, some three months after the operation, the man’s remaining digits, wrist and shoulder where stiff and painful from immobility.

It is hard to understand how a simple cut can lead to a man losing his livelihood and becoming totally dependent on his family. The maddening thing is that a different response at any one of a number of points along his story would have led to a better outcome.

I felt angry, frustrated and quite useless as a physio trying to address this situation, knowing that most likely he would return home to his village the next day and never return for follow up treatment.

The Khmer nurse who was helping me communicate with this patient suggested in the end that we pray for him. I was all for that as I knew what I’d done so far was not likely to make any difference and the man himself was very happy to be prayed for. So that is what we did. There was no miracle cure but the long discussion that then proceeded between this godly nurse and the patient, full of questions and deep seeking, was itself a demonstration of God’s grace and love. The man left encouraged and hopeful.

Despite my exasperation at the number of the serious but preventable health problems I’ve seen I have been constantly amazed at the way the gospel is so openly and naturally shared through the staff at this Christian clinic. It did, however, make a bit more sense after our latest ‘foundation year’ morning.

We’ve been organising monthly seminars for the newer people in our team. On Saturday we heard from some very experienced people sharing their insights on Khmer culture and Buddhism. An interesting point came up about how we talk about spiritual things. Often in Western cultures we feel it is polite to be quite reserved and careful not to impose our beliefs on others until we feel the right opportunity comes along or the relationship is developed sufficiently. It seems that in this culture if you have something good or know some good news it is unkind and uncaring not to share it with others.* In this context faith sharing with people you meet is therefore seen as something very natural. I’m learning a lot from the people I meet and some of my own cultural values and assumptions are certainly being challenged.

* Maybe this is why the temple and the aerobics dancers love to use loud speakers directed outwards. It would be seen as unkind to not share their good experiences with the whole community. This puts a very annoying aspect of life here in a new light.

Sharing Good News

Nearee had a motorbike accident over ten year ago. She lost her memory, her ability to read and write and suffered disabling nerve damage in her right arm. Today Nearee is a passionate evangelist. She believes that through prayer God has restored her ability to read the scriptures and she shares the Good News with whoever she can. She has plenty of opportunity to do this in her work as a cleaner at the Christian clinic where I met her. She does a little mopping of the floor and then stops to chat to the patients finding a way to encourage them and point them to Jesus. She told me how grateful she is for this job. ‘Many other places would never employ someone like me with a disability. But I have been working here for 10 years. Thankyou Lord Jesus.’

Nearee’s lack of inhibition, probably related to the head injury, does make her an unusual person. She chats away with me in Khmer and I don’t yet understand everything she says but she doesn’t seem to notice my faltering questions and vague looks. I did understand that she lives alone in a rented room which is very unusual for people here. She only sees her siblings and parents, out in the country side, about twice a year. It costs too much in travel to see them more often. When she has some spare money to buy milk and snacks she visits sick people because you can’t go empty handed. She follows up people she has met at the clinic, some of them with HIV, and goes to their homes to encourage them and pray.

In this culture it is believed that a disability is caused by bad karma. You live with the consequences of the bad deeds you’ve committed either in this life or in a previous life. But Nearee transcends this labelling. She knows that she is one whom Jesus calls blessed and it is clear she is being used to further His kingdom in and through her life situation.

I wonder what it would be like if more of us, regardless of our limitations and circumstances, lived with gratitude and love, simply seeking each day to share good news with somebody.

Streams of Living Water

“We think its arsenic poisoning.”

This was the conclusion the doctors came to after examining a boy with a strange lumpy skin rash. His parents brought him from their provincial village to the Mercy Medical clinic in the city which is known as a place that cares for the poor. As the boy’s brothers and sisters have also been unwell the best advice they could give was for the family, and in fact the entire village, to stop drinking the well water.

I have since discovered that there are places in Cambodia where the ground water is contaminated with up to 30 times the accepted ‘safe’ level of naturally occurring arsenic. Over the last few decades with a growing population and increasingly scarce and polluted river water there has been an explosion in deep tube well drilling. Well drilling projects by charitable organisations encouraged the widespread use of well water long before testing revealed that in many areas the water contained high arsenic concentrations.

Arsenic has no taste or smell and it takes years of slow build up in the body before symptoms appear. It can cause cancer of the skin and internal organs, respiratory disease, mental slowness, hearing loss in children, low birth weights and impaired skin sensation. Children are at greatest risk and the damage is irreversible.

Improving access to clean and safe water in Cambodia is essential for the people and the country’s future. Seventy four percent of all deaths in Cambodia are due to water borne diseases. It’s tragic, therefore, that well drilling projects aimed at improving the health of villagers by providing the much needed water inadvertently ended up poisoning them.

This fact got me wondering about other ways the things intended to bring life to us and those around us unintentionally carry instead disease and death. What if that which is flowing out from us is not always the ‘living water’ that Jesus promises but something more stagnant? What if the light within us is in fact darkness? Do our particular theologies, our forms of church structure, our organisational culture, our models of leadership, or our acts of service bring the life and freedom Jesus intends? These are concerning questions as we seek to serve, teach and be ambassadors of Christ.

For us here in Cambodia it is becoming clearer that in our own understanding or in our own ambitious plans and programmes we may easily, like those wells, do more harm than good.

In Jeremiah 2:13 the Lord reveals the sins of His people. They have forsaken their dependence on Him, their source of living water, and have instead dug their own cisterns, thinking their own plans will be safer and better. But the Lord declares that their cisterns are broken and they can not hold water. Only He can be for them the life that is truly life.

May we return constantly to a humble reliance on ‘Christ in us’, the Holy Spirit, who is the spring of living water, remembering the promise of Jesus that whoever follows him would never walk in darkness but have the light of life (John 8:12).

Source: www.rdic.org

Here Lies Pol Pot

“Pol Pot was cremated here” the sign announced. The remains of one of the most famous mass murderers of recent history are located high up in the hills on the Thai border in Cambodia’s remote north. I stood looking at a roughly build shelter about a metre in height made from old wood and rusty galvanised iron. There is no doubt he died nearby, because he was under house arrest enforced by his own cadres. His body was quickly cremated and his demise announced to the world. Pol Pot’s agrarian revolution of the 70’s was a disaster which left millions dead through either direct killings or the dreadful neglect of starvation and sickness.

As we arrived a woman was tending the incense and offerings left daily by the local people weighed down by the bad karma of having such a shrine in their community. I wasn’t sure what to expect. What does one feel visiting the grave of a mass murderer? There was no overwhelming sense of evil. No compelling sense of justice in his death. Rather the understanding that he was just a man who lived a life and then died.

I thought about the decisions he made during his life and the devastating results of his actions. We are constantly making decisions in our lives. What are the values and attitudes that shape those decisions? I found myself thinking of what we Christians have to guide us. I couldn’t go past these words Paul wrote…But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!

Letting Off Steam

‘There! Found one!’

In the oven like sun I weaved my bike between motos, carts and pedestrians across the road stopping next to the man with the key cutting machine. Fumbling with my sunglasses, I rummaged though my bag, found the keys and, with sweat drenched helmet hair, blurted out my request for two new sets of keys. I held up two fingers and the keys as props in case my foreign and bedraggled appearance distracted him from listening to the actual words I was saying.

Once the message was made clear he cheerfully got on with the job, grinding metal against metal. As I waited beside him I took in more of the scene before me. Behind him on the cracked footpath squatted a young woman rhythmically swinging a sweaty baby back and forth in a makeshift hammock tied between a fence post and the key cutting cart. They had a piece of cloth on the ground that looked like their ‘camp’. The heat was almost visibly rising off the concrete. There was no shade to speak of and the exhaust fumes and dust from the road combined with the nearby rotting pile of rubbish made it a particularly unpleasant place to wait a few minutes let alone spend your days. I wondered where, if anywhere, this family went home to at night.

Their seemingly quiet acceptance of the heat, noise and pollution made me reflect on my own nerve fraying struggle though this year’s hot season.

From March until June every day felt like a battle with the heat induced exhaustion and the constant dampness of hair, clothes, and anything I sat on. But there were some days when the addition of incessant noise from traffic, dogs, construction and outdated aerobics music from distorted loudspeakers just about tipped me over the edge. On those days I didn’t want to be here anymore. I longed for the cool, calm, peace and quiet of suburban Adelaide. I dreamt of the autumn colours and beautiful gardens and parks.

When I looked around at how many here were living - no fridge, no fan, no ice, no air-conditioned café escape time – I could clearly see my own privileged position. I know that’s supposed to make me grateful but mostly it just made me feel disgusted with myself and magnified my own pathetic self absorption and desperation to be else where.

The feeling of being close to ‘the edge’ is not just about heat and noise but actually the combination of numerous cultural stressors and the transition grief common to moving into a foreign environment. The experience, however, has certainly helped me see clearly that, left to myself, I can’t do this. I really do desire a clean, orderly and pleasant life. Only Jesus can make me want something else. Thank God he is always at work in us, shaping and empowering us for his purposes (Philippians 2:13).It’s not just down to me.

Responding to Poverty

Last month, in the middle of the hot season, we travelled to a rural province to visit one of our IS colleagues (B) who is working as an agricultural advisor in a Christian development organisation. We rode motor scooters out to remote villages on rugged dirt tracks between bone dry paddy fields filled with cracked earth, the parched remains of old rice stalks and littered with modernity’s curse - plastics bags. In the villages life is hot and hard. There is no electricity or running water and children play in the dust. Currently the farmers in this region can harvest only one crop of rice a year due to lack of water in the dry months. Our friend and her Cambodian team mates are working together with the villagers to get a canal dug so that river water may be accessible to their fields enabling them to plant a second rice crop. This will make a huge difference to their lives and the wellbeing of their families but it is a slow, complicated process.

We were told that in this area they have an interesting way of defining relative wealth and poverty. Wealthy people always have plenty of rice to eat. The middle class only go hungry 2-3 months of the year. Poor people are hungry 6 months of the year and the destitute poor never have enough to eat.

When I think about it, and to be honest I usually try not to, I feel pretty uncomfortable about living so well and eating more food than is good for me while people nearby go hungry. There is an overwhelming impulse to dive in and ‘fix’ things. At least doing something would make me feel better. Couldn’t I simply hand out rice to those who are hungry? That’s got to be better than nothing, right?

I’ve studied community development theory, heard the stories and seen enough for myself to know that responding to poverty is not so straight forward. There are times when direct handouts are warranted and necessary but it won’t improve people’s ability to provide for their families in the long term. It only creates dependence.

Striving for transformation, building up capacity and infrastructure and facilitating community cooperation is very demanding and frustrating work, especially when there are opposing interest groups involved and corruption is an accepted part of life. Respectful discussion, listening to all the stake holders, giving everyone a say, making plans together, agreeing on each parties responsibilities and commitments all takes time, energy, patience and excellent communication and relationship skills. Doing that across culture and language differences is exceptionally challenging.

B’s dedication, love for the people and excellent language ability has inspired me to keep persevering with Khmer study. Her work and community life in rural Cambodia demonstrates that one of the more significant ways to serve the poor in this country is by learning their language.

The struggle for peace continues

The previous piece, 'War and Peace', was written some time ago about my relationship with ants during our years living in Thailand. Returning to live in Asia has reawakened old emotions and caused me to reflect on re-emerging struggles. I thought that I had grown through my experiences, come to a place of mature acceptance and worked through my issues with ants but since the hot season has started I’m finding my tolerance waning and the old anger and irritation resurfacing.

I have been scratching an ant bite on my arm for the last week. The swelling and redness is now larger than a fifty cent coin. I’ve seen signs of ant colonies out the front of our house and have started fearing that we may yet again be living on a major ant civilzation. They have been in our towels and in our food despite our little water dishes around the cupboard legs. Can Cambodian ants swim? Last night there were several tiny ants in my bed. I wanted to cry because they are so devious and will use any opportunity to deliberately aggravate and tease me.

It’s possible my emotional response has at times been out of proportion to the actual threat. There is a history, of course, and perhaps even unconscious fears about lack of control lying hidden deep in my psyche.

It seems to me that our growth is often cyclical. We are faced with a problem, uncover the underlying issues, see the larger picture, work through our pain, let go of things and find a level of peace. But inevitably this harmony is challenged. Something will trigger the old disturbing emotions. So how do we find lasting resolution?

This is an area I’ve been doing some reading on. It is suggested that the path to genuine freedom and maturity is found in the transforming work of Christ through the renewal of our minds and the experience of His love right at the source of our pain. Maybe my prayer, then, should not be ‘Lord, take away these ants (i.e. my discomfort and my problems) but rather ‘Come Lord Jesus, meet me here and reveal yourself to me’.

The struggle for serenity continues but not alone and not without hope. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Elliot has just informed me we have cockroaches breeding in the kitchen !!!!