Where ya at on that “Relentless Pursuit?”

When I started this blog, I decided on the title “Relentless Pursuit of Tikkun Olam.” My goal for that title was to actively remind myself that one of my motivations for being here (besides you know, helping people) was to find out if living and serving abroad was my calling.

As you may recall, I answered that question about, oh, one year ago. Nope, no thanks! As I admitted before, it has a lot to do with looking so darn different from everyone. Big, “fat,” white.

The picture says it all...this is a full grown, middle aged woman. Note: not all are THIS short. 

Confession: while American friends know that I am guilty of - perhaps too often- seeking to be the center of attention among friends, I do not always love to be the center of attention here. It brings unwanted attention to my looks (talk about having body insecurities, sheesh, Indonesia! Anybody see my awesome rant about being called fat on Facebook the other day??). I get frustrated that my grammar is crazy and people have no idea what I am trying to say. Attention is taken away from the people who deserve it (like, hello, the BRIDE is over there!)

Anyways, so I’ve answered the question about living in a place where I look too different from others. I want to come back to the US where I “blend in.” (Yes, I am acutely aware of the white privilege of a mid-west American embedded in that statement.)

What about my career? Whoa, that’s already a scary word. Not job, but career! For the first year of teaching here in Indonesia, I loved being a teacher (despite not loving teaching English per se). I was reminded of how much I love working with high school students. Some of you may know that after student teacher and the stress that that experience brought (Hallelujah for Allie and Kelsea standing by me in that harried time!), I wondered if being a “traditional” classroom teacher was for me. I entertained the idea of becoming support staff (a program like AVID, or helping students catch up to peers, or helping with college prep, etc). I don’t feel drawn to teaching the “smartest” students or rich students. (I’m not denying that I was one of those privileged students). Social justice is about giving the same awesome education privileged students get to everyone. Either way, I was thinking in some capacity I’d be in education, teaching in a public high school. Indonesia affirmed for me that I love teaching.

Teaching in the US 

Teaching in Indonesia...

...this uniform deserves two photos!

   

Fast forward to the weeklong Hillsong Conference where I experienced a mini personal revival. You have to understand that I love talking to people about faith. But even more than that, I love singing. Worship songs. I’m finally gonna admit it… my hobby is singing worship songs with a group of people. The secret is out.

Anyways, because I love talking and singing, imagine my delight at suddenly being able to do both in a language I understand with Westerners like me. It was overload. I signed up for the conference knowing that one year into my PC service I was gonna need a little revival. It’s been a spiritually rewarding year in Indonesia, but I knew that I needed to do some worshipping and learning in a language I (usually) fully understand!

Kari Jobe leading worship

Judah Smith preaching. He is hilarious! Free podcasts on itunes.

Needless to say, I was big-screen TV-ing all over the place, Samantha and Forrest!! There may have even been some touch-downing during the best worship songs!!

So the Hillsong Conference just allowed me time to get in my own head and really reflect on what was happening in my relentless pursuit. Should I still be in Indonesia? (That should be the topic of another blog post) Should I be a teacher?

I attended many break-out sessions on social justice, and more and more the work that I saw people doing with refugees and persecuted people, the more I started to wonder where I fit into that picture.

It’s hard to put this into words, but I’ll try to explain. I am more or less jealous of Danielle and Sarah who get to go out and educate people about health and literally save people’s lives. They get to see the fruits of their labor right away. I know that I’m not called to be a doctor or nurse because I tried to watch a body dissection from “Body World” in the teachers’ room about a month ago (true story) and I was freaked out. But it is so appealing to directly serve people and then immediately see the positive results. Teaching is it’s own form of social justice, I won’t argue otherwise. But the call to meet the basic needs of a person is weighing more and more on my heart. Jesus said to feed the hungry, cloth the naked (if you are Brook Davis, the neked), care for the sick. I don’t really feel that I am fulfilling that calling by being a teacher.

Thus began my I’m-almost-quarter-of-a-century-old life crisis (it’s also my half birthday today, 24 ½ years old, sheesh): “When I get home, what do I do with myself if I am not a teacher?” Has teaching become my plan B? The people who get licensed as a “back up” plan drive me nuts. That’s not investment in education, that’s investment in one’s own capitalist endeavors on a journey to discover how to best be economically successful. (Huh, now that I read that again, that’s clearly the perspective of a very privilege person. Again, I’m not denying that I am). I certainly did not get licensed just “in case” I couldn’t find something better. I got licensed because at the time it was what I truly desired to do.

But seriously, do I want to be a teacher when I get home? I don’t know. I would love it, for sure, but would I feel that I was doing what I was called to do? I don’t know.

I began to brainstorm the possibilities. I want to help people that do not have the privileges that I do. Little by little, I am more aware of social justice, so I know that I need to get to the root of a problem rather than put a band-aid on it. So I wouldn’t want to be delivering food to hungry people with "Feed My Starving Children," I’d want to be working on how we can help the people who receive that food grow healthier crops by themselves in their own towns. But I also don’t want to be so far removed from the people I’m serving that I work at an NGO in St. Paul, MN and never meet anyone benefitting from the work I do. Call it selfish, I call it realistic. Jesus saw the people he helped. It makes loving others and giving to others a more human experience.

So I started thinking. Well, I can work with refugees in MN. We have many different populations. What would I do? I’m not totally sure. Help find housing? Help teach English (Lord, not teaching English again!) Help asylum seekers with the long process of becoming citizens (probably not in MN).

Which raises the question, “Do I want to live in MN?” Well, I know that I want to live in a big city and I know that I can’t live without snow. I also know that I love water and mountains. That doesn’t really put me in MN, but if I do decide to teach, my license is in MN. And my best friends from Carleton are all moving back into that area, too. What are the positives/negatives of moving somewhere simply to be where your good friends are?

Man, do I miss this!

The long and short of it is this. These are some of the ideas I am mulling over (Caution: month-old thoughts can seem crazy and/or far-fetched, but we’ll see…)

1.     Work with an NGO/non-profit that works with refugees in MN.

2.     Work with an NGO/non-profit that works in some capacity with underserved populations somewhere on the East/West coast of the US…because big cities on the coasts tend to have large immigrant populations.

3.     Work in California with Indonesian immigrants (that’s where Wikipedia says the highest population of Indonesian immigrants is, anyways). After all, I speak Indonesian.

4.     Live in Australia (I believe Sam’s words were, “[Calm down, crazy.] No one is moving to Australia.”) and work with Indonesian immigrants in Australia. Again, I speak Indonesian. And Australia is awesome.

5.     Live in Australia and work with Indonesian teachers to funnel their scholarship-winning Indonesian students to Australia. (That doesn’t really get to the root of the following social justice problem: “Why do Indonesian students have to go out of country to get the very best education?” But at least it trains Indonesians who can go back to Indonesia and work on that…)

6.     Be a host mom to lots of Indonesian students studying abroad (be it the US or Australia).

7.     Start an NGO in the US some day.

8.     Adopt a child. Literally, not like Compassion International. But maybe do that, too. Preferably with an Indonesian friend’s child whom I already know and love.

9.     Do a lot more political lobbying/protesting in my state.

10. Become a local representative? If anyone made me believe that this was a real possibility, it was my student teaching teacher supervisor, Ethan. I perceived him to have a passion for local government. He also seemed to truly believe that he could influence political community leaders and had a social responsibility to do so. My perception of him, not his words. Anyways, encouraging others to feel empowered is always a great thing, so thank you for teaching me that, Ethan. I didn’t really care about local government before working with Ethan, but now I think about it a lot more. It’s pretty true, isn’t it? A lot of the laws that really, truly affect our everyday lives are local or state laws.

11. Make volunteering a much more routine part of my week. I’d ideally like to volunteer at one or two places a week, but that depends on how busy my work schedule is.

12. Become a member of the UN. Or work for an NGO that works for the UN. That idea came from the UN Millennium DevelopmentGoals (MDG). The MDGs were put back on my radar at the Hillsong Conference. Everyone really should know about them, so check out the website, even if you just browse for 5 minutes. Essentially, in 1990, the UN countries got together and said, “It’s almost the freakin’ 21^st century. We gotta get it together and help ensure that every country is succeeding. So let’s set some goals that we all agree to work on for the next 25 years.” Those 25 years are up in 2015. In less than 1,000 days. And guess what? It’s working. Granted the goal is to halve poverty in a variety of areas. That means that if we started with 1 billion people in 1990 who didn’t have access to a toilet and we reach the MDG by 2015, 500 million people still have no toilet.

There you have it. 16.5 months into this crazy 27 month endeavor and my pursuit is still in process…

Down Under the Doona

Translation: I was in Australia, using a comforter on my bed because it was freezing cold, in the 50s!!

It is hard to put into words how “normal” it felt to be in Sydney. This is my first time back in the official “Western World” since arriving in Indonesia in April 2012. Yes, I went to Singapore for Christmas in December 2012, but something about Singapore was still not “The West” like I expected.

Honestly speaking, it could have been the fact that Singapore still doesn’t have that many white people. I am aware of the racialized ideology behind my unconscious-made-conscious idea that “The West” = white people. It’s a gross non-truth but it is still planted in my mind, despite the fact that I am righteously angry when Indonesians are shocked that not 100% of the American population is white (a fact I try to slip into conversation as often as I can!) As clarified by my friend Lauren, the US is about 72% white (2010 Census), though that includes everyone who identifies as Hispanic, so take that stat and reduce it, maybe by almost 10%?? (Check out the Census Bureau website, though, to accurately calculate for yourself. I find the way the stats are written confounding at times!) 

So maybe in my mind there has to be a certain percentage of white people for a country to be “The West?” Again, a very non-ideal way of thinking, but this is my blog and I aim to be honest, even if that means exposing my deep-seeded white privilege ideas. Sigh.

I’m working on unlearning white privilege. That’s the best I can say at this point.

Anyhow, why did it feel normal to be here?

•  A “normal” airport where I knew what to expect I’d see. Tons of gates, working Wifi, cafes, duty free shops…
• A super efficient train station
• White people. Tall people. Fat people (though not as many as the US). Thank you, Australia, for reaffirming for me that I am a normal-sized, beautiful young woman!
• Attending a dinner party at a friend of a friend’s house felt so comfortable. I’m missing those dinner parties, Inara, Kelsea, Allie, Wookie, Katya!
• Fast wireless internet
• I wander around and I am not afraid or bothered to be lost
•  Hiking in the Blue Mountains and being absolutely alone. Absolutely alone. I can think of one time when I felt that way in Indonesia. I went biking around my community and went out into the middle of a sugarcane field to get away from everyone. But that lasted literally only 6 minutes before some man came trudging through the fields to check on them. You are never alone in Jombang, East Java. Never.

Hiking in the Blue Mountains

Yet the Peace Corps was truthful when they said that I will be changed upon returning home. Australia wasn’t even “going home” yet (though admittedly it feels like it could have been!), but I still felt myself being aware of weird (yet normal) things and feeling a little strange in situations that, pre-Peace Corps, would have not been strange at all.

·      A desire to bend down with my hand out when passing in between two people who are in conversation.

·      Unconsciously not using toilet paper in the bathroom

·      Desiring a sprayer thing in the bathroom

·      Paying for stuff with my right hand, lest an Australian not be scandalized by me using my “dirty left hand.”  (Turns out, that habit left after just a few days.)

·      Feeling sorta empty when shaking someone’s hand to meet them and NOT then touching my hand to my chest. That handshake just felt, cold and incomplete.

·      PDA on the train was not cute. It was uncomfortably too intimate in a public setting.

·      Immediate gut-reaction fear of a group of school children in a museum. Oh God, they are gonna want a photo, or they will stare at me and giggle. But in Australia, I took a picture of them instead of vice versa!

·      Noticing that all Australian businesses, bars, tourist places, train stations, museums, everywhere have the same lock on their bathroom doors. I guess I noticed this because I usually am freaked out to touch Indonesian bathroom door locks??

·      Wearing my scarf around my nose (again, because I was freezing!) made me think of the handy masks Indonesians wear on the bus for germs. Darn it, why isn’t that a normal practice back home? It’s actually quite smart!

·      Taking a nap in the grass in Olympic Park. Now, for starters, in the US I was an avid, non-public sleeping person. I’d rather walk all the way back to Hunt House than try to take a nap in the Libe at Carleton, even if I only ha 30 minutes. I don’t “do” public sleeping. But since Indonesia, I’m just sleeping all over the place! I headed out to a grassy patch one day during the Hillsong Conference, and imagine my joy upon seeing people sleeping everywhere! There aren’t really public grassy parks where I live in East Java, so I almost threw myself to the ground and kissed the grass, but I composed myself. Instead, I sat down, got adjusted, and proceeded to nap with all the other nappers. What a concept!

Some most interesting things I learned in Australia?

·      Australians and Americans did/are doing the same things to Aboriginals and Native Americans. Genocide, relocation, assimilation laws, and now, court cases for land rights. Fortunately, I have been impressed by how often I read about and saw traces of Aboriginal culture and political/social issues when I was here. Unfortunately, how much of that was linked to cultural appropriation for tourism? Aka selling tourist objects. While this at the very least raises awareness about the need to preserve and respect the cultures, it does not encourage language learning, respecting religion, recognizing culture.

Black on White: Aboriginals on White Australians. NSW Library Exhibit

·      Just because they speak English doesn’t mean I can understand a darn thing they are saying. I found myself giving up after asking people to repeat themselves 2 or 3 times. Between the slang and the accent (but mostly the unclear sorta mumbly accent), I could not understand what someone was saying to me!

·      Many people called me darling, dear, hon. It was great! As one American pointed out, that may be rather creepy in the US. But here, it gave me a sense of belonging.

·      You don’t die Couch Surfing. It’s out! Mom, Grandma, I stayed at the house of a stranger that I found on the Internet. I stayed for three days with a Carleton friend’s wife’s friend, then for a week with a Carleton friend’s cousin, but with the last three days unaccounted for, I turned to Mary Wilcox’s Couch Surfing. I picked a 25-year old, very normal-looking girl (aka not an up-close, super tan and hot-stuff girl in a bar) to stay with, and it was great! She was very nice, well-travelled, and down to earth. She took me to a bar where there was crab racing. Awesome. Verdict? Couch Surfers don’t necessarily murder you. But maybe the guy who emailed me to tell me I could stay with him, calling me “sweat cheeks” (yup, he typoed. Sweat cheeks, how flattering) would have. Thus, I did not take up his offer.

Maya the Couch Surfer doing a ballon race! 

Perhaps the number one thing about Australia that made me feel like “Wow” was when I was in the National Museum the first afternoon I arrived. I was looking at the rocks and minerals, which I feel obliged to do at least a little because of Tyler Mackey and Nick Holschuh, and I had a sudden wave of emotion. Not because of the rocks, I assure you of that. But because I felt so normal. I was at a museum. Reading in English. People were not staring at me. I just felt right. Finally comfortable again.

Here’s to hoping the next year in Indonesia can teach me to be comfortable and truly, truly “kerasan” (to feel at home).