by Amy Peterson
Maybe Kelly would understand. She’d had to leave Cambodia due to serious health problems, and after a year in Mongolia, was now able to return. She was a little older than I was, with curly red hair, freckles, and a thick Boston accent. She laughed loudly and relished life. Everything was “hilarious” or “comical,” she agreed with things I said “absolutely,” and in surprise or frustration would often exclaim “oyanna!” an expression she’d picked up in Mongolia.
Patrick was a bit quieter, a lawyer in his late thirties with sandy-colored hair and a dachshund named Sam. I felt an immediate kinship with him, like he was the older brother I’d never had. His sister already lived in Cambodia with her husband and three kids—they worked for World Vision. If Kelly and Patrick were any indication, my new team in Cambodia would be good—maybe not all kindred spirits but at least mature adults, seeking to plant their lives across the world.
Davuth met us in the Phnom Penh airport. Patrick would live with Davuth and another single guy, but Kelly and I didn’t yet have a place to live. Royal University didn’t provide on-campus housing for foreign teachers. Davuth took us to a temporary guesthouse run by a ministry that gave a different trade to girls coming out of prostitution, teaching them to cook, clean, and balance accounts.
We stayed there almost a week while we hunted for apartments. We’d live with Amanda, a sturdy blond from North Carolina with a very conservative background. (At a team meeting later, she’d tell us that her spiritual growth really started at college, which her church thought strange since she had gone to such a “liberal university.” When I asked her where she’d studied, she told me she had attended Liberty. My jaw dropped. Jerry Falwell’s bastion of conservatism, Liberty? Kelly burst into laughter at the look on my face. “I’ve never thought of Liberty as a very liberal school,” I managed. Amanda shrugged.)
Finally the three of us girls rented the third floor of a building just around a corner and across a street from the guys’ house. We would live in what had once been a rooftop balcony. The owners had recently transformed it into an additional floor; the ceiling was thin, and when I turned off the lights I could see still light from outdoors coming in through cracks. We had three bedrooms, each with an individual air-conditioning unit, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a balcony. The power went out whenever we ran more than one appliance, a fact I learned during my first shower in the new place: the water, run by an electric pump, turned off three times. Still, the new apartment felt spacious and luxurious, with its cool pink and white tile floors, big windows, and plentiful breezes.
We were within walking distance of both the university and the Russian market, a tented outdoor shopping center selling all kinds of “black market” goods: pirated CDs and DVDs, Nike tennis shoes and Gap T-shirts produced after hours at the factories, and tourist T-shirts with maps of Cambodia or the Cambodian alphabet printed on them. In the market, we could get lunch or iced coffee or a pedicure, which required only a dollar and a willful ignorance of the possibility of disease being transmitted through a hangnail.
A few weeks in, Kelly and I went shopping together. We stopped for coffee at an outdoor café on our way to buy wicker furniture to furnish our new place. Under a terrace thick with flowering vines, I ordered a rich black coffee and she asked for a mango smoothie.
“You know, I’ve never bought furniture before,” I told her. “Sometimes I wonder what it means that I’m doing all these firsts in a foreign country . . . first job, first apartment, first furniture buying. Will I even know how to be an adult in America?”
“That is funny to think about,” she said, smiling. “You didn’t buy furniture last year?”
“No, it was all provided for us by the university.”
“Does Phnom Penh feel really similar to where you were last year?” Kelly asked.
I’d felt, upon arriving in Cambodia, that I was home again: the smell of fish sauce, the sound of motorbikes honking in the streets, the perspiration dripping down the small of my back.
“At first I thought it was,” I said. “Actually, though, I think life here is not going to be anything like my life last year.”
I had gone from a small town in an impoverished area to a capital city flush with foreign aid money. From poor students who had never seen a white person before to wealthy students unimpressed by the color of my skin. From a quiet life on a team of two to a very active life on a team of nine; from a studio apartment with space for my introvertedness to a three-bedroom place with two extroverted roommates. From a place without any Christian presence to a place with Christians, ministries, and churches both indigenous and foreign. From one western restaurant that served pizza to restaurants of every kind: Indian, Chinese, Thai, French, Mexican, American, Italian. From shopping for and cooking most of my own meals to having them prepared by a local woman hired to be our house helper.
We lived like expats.
I wasn’t sure what to think about it. I certainly wasn’t ready to talk to Kelly about it. And I didn’t tell her that when I prayed about the coming year, I didn’t pray for converts. I didn’t ask my supporters to pray that I’d find girls to disciple here. I wasn’t sure I’d done more good than harm the year before, and I’d grown afraid of the way God might answer. When I prayed at all, I mostly just said, “God, help me to believe that you love me, and that you love Veronica.” I asked that I would learn to love God more than I loved doing things for God. I asked to feel things.
The churches of my youth had taught me to “guard my heart” and to shut off my emotions, to distrust them. But a book I was reading for grad school quoted Jonathan Edwards, who said that telling people to ignore and guard against their feelings was a work of Satan.
“There is no true religion where there is no religious affection. . . . If the great things of religion are rightly understood, they will affect the heart. . . . This manner of slighting all religious affections is the way exceedingly to harden the hearts of men.”
I’d always been so afraid of my feelings. Now, I needed to feel the reality of God’s love for me—but all I felt was nothing at all.
22
Why Are We Here?
Cases of incompatibility are of constant occurrence on the mission field. . . . I suppose we must make allowances for troubles between missionaries by remembering that the very strength of character which impels them to the mission work is apt to manifest itself in sharp angles.
Lottie Moon, March 24, 1876
A typical day in Cambodia went like this: I woke early, lifted from my dreams by the sound of water thumping and squealing through the pipes when Kelly showered at five a.m., and I began writing. I brewed a single serving of heady, rich Trung Nguyen coffee in my room every morning while I wrote.
Classes began at eight, and while I could walk to school, I usually didn’t. Up and down the street, motorbike drivers were offering their services, calling out: “Moto by lay dee?” I’d hail one and ride to the university. Driving down the muddy road, swerving to avoid potholes and piles of bricks, we passed newly built gated mansions on the left and rows of wooden shacks on the right. I’d walk through a dirt parking lot filled with hundreds of motorbikes to join Davuth and some of the other teachers in the student cafeteria, an outdoor area crowded with plastic tables and stools, and we’d eat salty fried pork on steamed rice for breakfast.
In the classroom, I’d teach reading and writing to college students in uniform, blue or white button-down shirts and navy skirts and pants. The students were like students anywhere—by turns sweet, apathetic, sleepy, and engaged, but none of them seemed interested in Christianity or in me. The beginning of the semester coincided with the last weeks of Cambodia’s rainy season. Storms came, sudden and intense, rain pounding on the tin roof so loudly that I had to shout to be heard. When the rain stopped, I could hear dogs barking below, cars splashing and honking through traffic, construction workers in the building across
the road, and prayers being sung over loudspeakers at the local wat (Buddhist temple).
From my classroom, I could see across the building into Patrick’s classroom and watch him pace, pause, and lecture passionately about English for Law to upper-level students. As a real-life American lawyer, he was the rock-star teacher here at the university of Law and Economics.
After class I’d head to our offices on campus to staff the English-language library for a few hours. We had two rooms, with desks, shelves, computers, and air-conditioning, but few students stopped by.
At home for lunch and nap time, I’d eat a bowl of our house helper’s tom yum soup, fragrant with tamarind juice, fresh herbs, fish, and shrimp. In the late afternoon, I’d head to a Cambodian language center to meet with my language tutor, stopping off afterward to buy a fresh mango smoothie and read in the shade of a new roadside shop.
Every now and then I’d babysit Patrick’s nieces and nephew. I loved being around children, and these were delightful towheads, full of energy for tickle-fights and face-painting. I’d recognized them and their parents, Bill and Heather, as soon as Patrick introduced us. It took me a few minutes to place them, but then I realized that I’d seen their family picture on Camille’s refrigerator the previous year. I adored them instantly, the way they disagreed and still seemed in love, the way they talked about Bob Dylan and economic development all in the same sentence. I wanted to be like them.
On Sundays I’d eat breakfast, sweet pastries and rich coffee, at Java Café. Sometimes teammates would join me, and usually Thomas came, too. Thomas wasn’t on our team, but he was from Little Rock, and we’d had friends in common. He was a slender, gentle man with big blue eyes. Before moving to Cambodia to join a Christian order among the poor, Thomas had lived in the same country that I’d been kicked out of. Over cinnamon rolls we’d talk about our mutual friends, our different kinds of work, the story-based discipleship materials he was creating for use among the preliterate in the Cambodian countryside.
After breakfast, we’d moto over to the Church of Christ Our Peace, a small Anglican house of worship with a Malaysian rector and an international congregation. God seemed quiet and distant, and I had grown afraid of asking him for things, so I took refuge in the liturgy, words already formed for me when I had none of my own.
Our team met every Thursday night. For the first few weeks, we used our time together to tell our stories and get to know each other. We’d share prayer requests, and talk about our classes or how to organize the English library.
As the semester progressed, though, team meetings became tense, charged with emotion. It turned out that we did not all agree on the right way to live and work in Phnom Penh. Kelly, Patrick, and I, as the new team members, were still just trying to outfit our rooms with furniture and learn enough language to barter in the market, but the rest of our teammates were bubbling over with mission-minded plans.
The young married couple, Chuck and Meghann, wanted to focus on church planting. They had a book for us to read about making cell groups that would grow and divide into more cell groups, multiplying Christians across the city. Chuck asked us what we thought our goals should be: how many students would we convert, how many cell groups could we start?
“I like your idea,” I said hesitantly, “but I don’t like trying to make a numbered goal. Shouldn’t growth be a little more organic than that?”
What Amanda really wanted was to create an after-school club where students could hang out, play games, and do Bible studies. She also wanted to feed the street children who came around begging every day, and to create opportunities for our students to volunteer at local orphanages.
Leslie, the oldest and most experienced team member, spent much of her free time with friends she had made in the villages. She was teaching them how to budget, how to spot a loan shark, and how to get out of debt, which was nearly impossible to do with factory jobs that didn’t pay living wages.
But Davuth, the young Khmer-American, was our leader, and the responsibility of leading a diverse, multi-ethnic team weighed heavily on him.
“We have to focus on the university,” he said with finality. “We are here to teach excellently, to witness to our students, and we need to be pouring our energy out on campus, in programs for the students or our colleagues on the faculty. You can do some of those other things, but the school and the students have to come first.”
Instead of feeling heard and respected, Chuck (and many of us) felt steamrolled and stymied by Davuth’s pronouncement that night.
Instead of supporting our stated leader, when we bumped into each other at the library or met for coffee over the next few weeks, we grumbled to each other about his decision. Team meetings grew quieter, and everyone was more guarded.
Though I didn’t like Davuth’s decision, after processing it with various members of the team at different times, I found myself in reluctant agreement with it. Contractually, and according to the goals of our organization, we were there to teach, not to plant churches, feed street kids, or conduct lessons in finance in the villages. A focus on teaching made perfect sense for an organization that worked in closed countries, where missionaries were forbidden but Christian English teachers were welcomed.
But Cambodia wasn’t a closed country. In Cambodia, we didn’t need to teach English in order to be there. Our organization stayed in the country because the government was not strong or stable, and it seemed likely that the country would soon close again to missionaries. In the meantime, though, we spent hours preparing lesson plans, teaching, and grading for students who were among the wealthiest and most privileged citizens of the country. And they weren’t showing much interest in us or our religion.
Why, then, come as teachers at all? Wouldn’t it be better to come as church planters, or to rescue trafficked girls, or to start a restaurant that trained and employed street children? Surely there were greater needs than English lessons from native speakers.
My friend Thomas, for instance, worked for a group that was committed to living simply among the poor. He built relationships with the most despised members of this society, Vietnamese refugees, and tried to incarnate Jesus in a way that made sense to them in their context.
That kind of life seemed right to me, like the right way to be a missionary.
But I was a foreign English teacher. So I spent my spare time at Java Café and the Russian market, creating a happy, comfortable life, empty of belief, prayer, focus, desire, or love. I sent e-mails on my laptop to people who didn’t respond, and I felt myself floating farther and farther away from what I had been, from the people I had known.
Interlude
Imagining Other Ways of Doing Missions
Google “father of American missions” and the first results that come up point unequivocally to “Adoniram Judson.” Judson graduated as valedictorian of his class at Brown in 1807. After graduation, he and a few friends formed the Society of the Brethren, a secret missionary club for college-educated white guys who dreamed of taking the gospel to foreign lands.
Okay, I sounded dismissive there, with my “secret missionary club” for “white guys.” And maybe that’s unwarranted. After all, these men (and their wives, though they weren’t included in the club) did amazing things. Their group formed at a time when the very idea of foreign missions was up for debate. “If God wants to save the heathen,” one Baptist pastor told the first British missionary, William Carey, around that time, “he will do it without your help or mine!” Judson and his friends overcame ideological opposition and created the first American mission organizations. Judson went to Burma with the goal of translating the Scriptures and planting a church of at least a hundred people before his death. When he died, he left a Bible, a Burmese-English dictionary, a hundred churches, and over eight thousand believers.
But even if we agree that they did some great things, it’s worth considering how the historical m
oment in which those first mission boards were formed shaped them—and how that has shaped our idea of what missions should look like even today. The clergy who supported Judson’s Society of the Brethren determined that to succeed, they would have to form a foreign missionary organization. That’s how the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission was born, under the umbrella of the Congregationalist church. Soon after, Judson parted ways with the Congregationalist church over the issue of infant baptism, and that’s how the first Baptist missionary organization was formed.
America had just experienced the convulsions of the industrial revolution and a surge in capitalism, and among the elite, forming corporations was all the rage. The newly formed mission boards followed suit. A new industry—missions—in a foreign land would require, in their minds, investors, boards of directors, executive officers, employees, recruiters, and accountants. That was just how things were done, at least according to Dr. Manasseh Cutler, the moderator of the assembly of Congregational churches. (He’s most famous for “buying” a large part of what would become the state of Ohio, displacing thousands of Native Americans, and for bribing congressmen to ensure the smooth passage of the Northwest Ordinance, which would lead to statehood for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.)
The first two treasurers of the mission board were known as “shrewd Yankee Christian businessmen,” and they needed to be: to send the first missionaries to Asia would require raising $6,000 for each one—roughly $168,000 in today’s dollars.
