Many years ago I signed up to volunteer with a refugee organization in Denver. I guess I had this idea of which ethnicities I preferred to work with, like picking things out of a catalog, or browsing which classes I wanted to take next semester. So I was surprised when instead I was assigned to a Burmese family.
“Burma? Isn’t that one of those…isn’t that, like, tucked in with those other Asian countries?”
I of course jumped on with my own self-made mission. I bought some expensive books on Burmese, a culture guide, and probably did my first read-through of George Orwell’s “Burmese Days”, none of which actually mattered, but you could have predicted that. They were a Christian couple, my age, with two kiddos. In a different world, in a different life, we could have been friends, grown up together, have known each others’ parents.
I was assigned to a team, yes, but we were a worthless team. Well, not the older couple from Lakewood, or myself, but the others, even the leader, kind of were, I hate to say. She signed up to lead and then just…refused to lead. Always had an excuse. Never any ideas. I hated that.
There was an awkward moment after our first meeting with the family, when we were all leaving. The translator that the organization had hired for our first meeting was departing, and I realized it wasn’t to her own car. It was likely back to Colfax where she could take a bus to wherever home was for her. This assignment, lasting no more than an hour or two, had probably been one of her only ways to make decent money as a translator, while we all just…got in our cars to go home.
After the six-month commitment, I kept working with the family. The husband, I’ll call him Po, and the wife, I’ll call her Mae (because George Orwell) were Christians who were pretty well established in their refugee community. Po had a good job and Mae stayed home with the kids but had some opportunities to attend English classes nearby. Po had experience with English from the various countries they had stayed in along the way, Mae had really no experience, and she was terrible with English. She knew the alphabet, but despite the boxes of cards the group had bought for them, she seemed to have never spent any time studying them. Po was fluent enough to converse with. As our sessions went on, Po would quickly learn things, while Mae would at some point lose focus and end up handling the kids, who were mischievous little rascals that always wanted the attention. What are these white boards for?! Oh, for drawing on when that guy comes over, of course!
I came to feel so bad for Mae’s lack of progress, while I could only converse with Po, that I had to realize I have no actual skill teaching or dealing with situations like that. Mae would need to keep taking those classes, and she’d have to develop her own motivation to work harder on English. Po would be fine, his English was really pretty impressive even though he understandably didn’t fare too well with legal documents. I loved that little family, but I had to pull the plug, as I could feel the liberal-feminist hatred of my own culture oozing out at me for not helping ‘the woman’ more. One of my last visits was to bring them a Christmas gift, a file folder bin in which, with the help of Google, I had written out the English and Burmese for each tab — Taxes, Medical, Car, Citizenship, etc — for documents and mail. Because ‘Murica.
White Savior.
It’s so easy to want to make a difference, or to think that you can or that you have. Reality is more difficult.
I didn’t know how to help or how to teach. I guess I have just enough slack in my personality that I was fine turning up and winging it. Po would often say it was a good lesson. Good for him. But what about Mae? If I had done a better job, maybe she could have told me herself. I’m not a teacher. I would buy this or that, just money, money. And there’s always some jerk making a living writing guilt-trip Christian propaganda about how time is better than money, except they always ignore when that really isn’t the case. I don’t read those books anymore because I just no longer have respect for people whose only source of revenue comes from making others feel guilty. There’s that part of the heart that wants to make a difference, and that other part of the heart that feels entitled to make a difference, and I don’t know where I ultimately fall on the spectrum.
I guess I can now turn up to the meetings of the missional-minded and show my Jesus military patch for operation help-those-poor-Burmese. I’m being a jerk, of course, to myself this time, and perhaps veiledly toward missions groups in general, but still. Pat myself on the back for being a crappy teacher who smiled well enough that, hey, he was a decent guy.
Those were special memories. Those kids were fun. I’m not very good with kids, but I like kids, and I miss those kids. But no, I did not have the training or the education or the skill to really make the most of that teaching experience. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. It’s just…for those of us who are drawn to social and cultural issues, what are we really trying to accomplish?
I never really fit in with the missions circles at churches. I guess I never gave off the right vibe, or something. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have friends who were into mission trips and all that, it’s just like…nobody ever took me seriously. Because, of course, caring about other cultures means you HAVE to spend thousands every year just for that one sweet little trip you can add to your identity resume. Add to that the fact that my parents never had much money to help me out in those endeavors and you basically get my 20s, almost slavishly dedicated to responsibility and frugality. The message here is that being debt-free comes at a price, and it’s a price I’d pay again, but not everybody has the luxury of jetting across the world. I remember one acquaintance planning a large group trip for a moderately long stay, so I vetted several friends to keep me in-the-know, but never heard a *word* about it. I found out long after the fact that it had been cancelled. And of course, there’s way more to that story anyway, but I don’t think I had ever felt more ignored in this area.
Our problems matter to us. Our problems matter to God. It’s not like, because so many people are suffering so greatly across the world that we are somehow invalid, that our aches and pains somehow don’t matter. It is, I think, just an invitation to remember our true position in life. A challenge to find contentment. I’m not going to live in some mansion and then go and tell refugees that that is what life is all about, that I’m helping them so they can finally live, ya know, the “good life”, too: closet-loads of crap, fancy things I never use. Yes, you can treat yourself. Please do. Just don’t…waste your life. If your money could preach a sermon, what would it say? “I love overpriced booze on the weekends”? “I’m so addicted to feeling good about myself that I give to everything”?
I’ve had to reevaluate some of my thoughts for five years from now. I don’t think it’s healthy to plan too much in advance, but I’ve really had to think about my relationship with programming. I do it decently well, and I find it relatively enjoyable. The new sort of volunteering I’ve been doing has really shown that it’s not so much about being some amazing, sold-out programmer as it is just…being available. Doing the work. My open source project could improve this company’s processes, which could save them time and money, and who knows? Maybe they hire a few more people with that money. That’s not what most people imagine when they set out to “make a difference” in the world, but I’d like to be content with that. I mean, damn. It’d be pretty cool to actually create jobs for a few people.
I watch these little documentaries on YouTube. People living off $10 a day. People paying a whole month’s average wages for a street vendor hotdog. Can you “save” them? No. You can’t. I’m sorry. It’s easy to get flash-motivated, but that’s not wise. I’d say let it ripple through your soul. We can’t be saviors. There’s only One. But the Spirit works in and through us, to shape the world around us, to claim back territory once lost. We can be the hands from time to time. God, I want to be the hands from time to time.