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…