A Place

Do you know what would be amazing?  A place where the believers in this neighborhood—English and non-English speakers alike—could come together and grow as the Body of Christ.  Where refugees and Americans could receive Biblical teaching and fellowship in their own languages, but could also be unified and edify one another across languages.  Where people with practical needs could go and know that they would be shown God's love, even before they know that's what they're experiencing.

So, do you know what would be amazing?  A church here.

Don't misunderstand me—the Church is already in this neighborhood.  There are believers here from multiple continents and languages, who are loving and growing and ministering.

There's a house church of more than fifty Jarai speakers that meets down the street from me, crammed into a tiny apartment.  The host/pastor of these people approached us recently, asking if we knew a bigger place they could meet.  We haven't found one.

There are people here who have only a few other believers who speak the same language.  They want to join American Bible studies, but the language is too high and fast for them, or the churches are too far away.  Most people here rely on walking as their only consistent transportation.

Now, this is the American South.  There are already many churches—church buildings—in this neighborhood.  Granted, I haven't visited every single one, but there doesn't seem to be one that has actively embraced this community as brothers and sisters.   There doesn't seem to be much interest in helping meet practical needs.  Honestly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of love in these churches in general.

So often, we find ourselves thinking "X could happen and it would be awesome, if only we had a place to do it."

I know that God is big.  Far bigger than I let him be, most of the time.  I don't know whether his answer to this will be to give us a brand new place, or to transform the hearts in one the churches already here, or whether we need to keep waiting, or something else we haven't thought or imagined.  I do know, however, that there a couple properties for sale in this neighborhood. To us, they seem ideal, space- and location-wise.  We're excited to be looking into them, and seeing them as possibilities; but we also know that what seems perfect to us, with our limited vision, is not always what God knows to be perfect.

So, please pray with us, for wisdom and faith and patience and boldness as we listen to what God wants to do here.  Pray about these properties, that it would be clear whether to pursue them.  Pray that we would hold our ideas and hopes with open hands, and remember that God loves this community more than we ever could, and that he wants his glory to spread here even more than we do.

...It would be so helpful to have a place.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory 
in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, 
forever and ever.  Amen.  -  Ephesians 3:20-21

Refugee Backgrounds: The Bhutanese

Many of you have asked me who my neighbors are, where they're from, and why they're here.  I've decided to spotlight some of them for you, starting with the Bhutanese.

At a glance:

Country of origin - Bhutan

Refugee camp country - Nepal

Primary language - Nepali

Primary religion(s) - Hindu (some Buddhist, a few Christians) 

Primary reason for leaving their home country - Ethnic oppression
Total number of refugees - Almost 58,000 as of Jan 2012
Resettled in Charlotte* - More than 2,200 as of Dec 2012

Photo: The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

Although it's true when I say that the refugee population in Charlotte is from "all over"—including people from Burma, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, Eritrea, Congo, and Afghanistan, among several others—most of the new arrivals, including almost all of my neighbors, are from Bhutan.

Many Americans mistakenly call these people Nepali instead of Bhutanese, and the confusion is understandable.  My neighbors speak Nepali, not Dzongkha (the official language of Bhutan).  They wear Nepali clothes and practice Nepali cultural customs.  Ask any of them, though, and they will tell you clearly and proudly: they are from Bhutan.  Not Nepal.

So, how did they get here?

Bhutan is a small country in south Asia, north of India and Bangladesh and east of Nepal.  

In the late 1800s, people from Nepal began migrating into the farmland in southern Bhutan.  They didn't have very much contact with the Bhutanese in the north, so they retained their Nepali language, culture and religion.  The cultural differences didn't really cause conflict, though, at least at first, and Bhutan became their home.  By the mid-twentieth century, they considered themselves thoroughly Bhutanese—they were simply ethnically Nepali Bhutanese instead of ethnically Bhutanese Bhutanese.

In the 1980s, though, the Bhutanese ruling majority began to feel threatened by the growing number of Nepali-speaking "Lhotsampas" ("People of the South"), and began a campaign of "Bhutanization": they outlawed the Nepali language, instituted dress codes, stripped many of the Nepali-speakers of their citizenship (or refused to recognize that they had ever had it in the first place) and civil rights, and removed them from positions of political and cultural influence.  Protests in the late 1980s and 1990 led to violent encounters between the two groups, and in 1990 tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalis were forced to flee the country into Nepal and India.

Since 1990, thousands of Nepali-speakers have been sitting in refugee camps, waiting to be allowed back into Bhutan.

If they are ethnically and culturally Nepali, you may ask, why don't they just settle in Nepal?  Two of the simpler reasons in this complex issue: 1) the Nepali government won't let them integrate (refugees are rarely allowed to leave the camps or hold jobs), and 2) they don't want to settle in Nepal, because they aren't Nepali.  They're Bhutanese.  (Being "American" is a huge part of your identity, right?  This would be roughly like the White House suddenly telling you and all your neighbors that you're not Americans and aren't allowed to live here anymore, because your ancestors came from (we're pretending) Canada a hundred years ago.  Even though Canadians speak English and share some cultural similarities, would you shrug and say "Fine, okay, I'm Canadian now"?)

Unlike many other refugees who know they have left their home countries permanently and are relatively eager to leave camps and resettle, ongoing (yet fruitless) talks between the governments of Nepal and Bhutan and the UN have left most of the Bhutanese refugees in limbo—with just enough hope that they'll be allowed to return home that they are reluctant to resettle into new countries.  They want to be ready and nearby "when they are allowed back into Bhutan."  Many Bhutanese refugees also seem to see third-country resettlement as a political and cultural insult.  For them, a return to Bhutan is the only just—and therefore the only acceptable—outcome.

Some of them, of course, are glad to leave the camps for America.  One of my Bhutanese neighbors is my age, and wanted to come—she's excited about learning English and the educational and job opportunities here.  She came, though, with just her aunt.  The rest of her family wanted to stay near Bhutan.  She doesn't think they'll ever come to join her.

All refugee situations are sad, but something about the Bhutanese story is particularly sad to me.  I think it's the sense of lingering, unrealized hope—it's almost certain that they won't be allowed back into Bhutan, but not so certain that the hope has really died.  They keep getting told, "maybe soon," which, to me, sounds like the worst place to be.  I would rather just be told flat out that I couldn't go back, so I could be free to move on.  Maybe it's my American need for closure.

I honestly don't know the individual stories of most of my Bhutanese neighbors at this point.  Most of them aren't proficient enough in English to really tell me yet.  I don't know whether the majority of them actively wanted to resettle in America or were pressured into it.

What I do know?  I know that most of them are farmers (and that they find my lack of agricultural knowledge both appalling and hilarious).  I know that many (although not all) of them are Hindu.  I know that many of them have seen and suffered horrible things.  I know that many of them find city life overwhelming at times (even though America and Charlotte are usually both "good! [big grin]").  I know that they almost always smile at me and that they love their children and grandchildren. 

And I know absolutely for certain from every one of them—limited English or not—that they are Bhutanese.  Not Nepali.

----------

Although I've pieced together this Bhutanese history from several sources, the dates and whatnot above are mostly from Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal, as published by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center (COR Center) in 2007.

Further info:
UNHCR - Bhutan
COR Center - Bhutanese Refugees
Map of Bhutanese arrivals to the U.S.

*A note on resettlement numbers: It's hard to track refugee numbers accurately, because people are often resettled in one city and then quickly move to another city or state to join family, etc.  This 2,200 accounts only for those refugees resettled into Charlotte straight from the camps, not those who may have moved here (or away) since.

Another nephew!

Peter Allen Harms came into the world yesterday.  He is amazing.

He is also already a celebrity.

Welcome, little man.  You already have lots of people who love you.

A Voice is Sounding

Listen, a voice is sounding
"Christ is near,” we hear it say
Cast away your dealings of darkness
All you children of the day

Shaken by the solemn warning
Out from the shadows we arise
Christ, the sun, all ill dispelling 
Shines upon the dawning skies

Come and see, in awe and wonder, The Word as silent babe
And with a blast of thunder, his majesty proclaim!

A voice is sounding loud: Christ is here, Christ is here
A voice is sounding loud: Christ is here, Christ is here

See the lamb so long awaited
Comes with pardon down from above
Let us haste in tears of sorrow
To receive his benevolent love

When he comes again in glory
And the world is wrapped in fear
He will shield us with his mercy
And, in love, will draw us near

Come and see, in awe and wonder, The Word as silent babe
And with a blast of thunder, his majesty proclaim!

A voice is sounding loud: Christ is here, Christ is here
A voice is sounding loud: Christ is here, Christ is here

- "A Voice is Sounding," as performed by Sojourn on A Child is Born

Based on a 5th century text | Written by Jamie Barnes

For what it's worth, I highly recommend Sojourn's albums Advent Songs and A Child is Born, as well as The Soul Felt Its Worth by Maeve—both bands bring out the rich truths that make me like Christmas music in the first place, in that steeped-in-tradition-yet-somehow-new-sounding way that's hard to find.  (Plus, Maeve uses harmony and syncopation in a way that just makes me happy.)

Wait— Should I eat the banana now?

Yesterday I stopped by my neighbor B.'s house to drop of some decongestant.  She has been having terrible sinus headaches, and was unaware of the miraculous existence of pseudoephedrine.

I was distracted and in "America mode" when I went over there, and—without thinking—expected to stand on the stoop, hand her the box, explain the dosage, and leave.  Not so.  I was immediately ushered inside by B. and her daughter and son-in-law.  They sat me down, handed me a Coke, and we visited.  B. and her daughter don't really speak any English, so that mostly meant I talked with her son-in-law, who I could understand about 80% of the time.  He interpreted some so I could talk with B., but we also did a lot of sitting and smiling in silence.  (B. smiles all the time, even with terrible sinus headaches—an amazing lady.)

After a while, B. started talking animatedly to her son-in-law in Jarai, and stood up to go get something upstairs.  He explained that she wanted to show me something—I caught the words "movie," "Vietnam," and "Jarai history."  They stopped the old Jackie Chan movie they had been watching and put in the DVD B. brought.  It was a home video of a Jarai holiday held in Greensboro a couple months ago.  Hundreds of Jarai people had gathered there to celebrate their culture with dance and music and speaking.  They are an often-oppressed minority in Vietnam, and I love to see how they proudly show their culture here.  It was a privilege to see something clearly so important to B.  It was a privilege to be invited into her home, period.

The situation also had its beautifully awkward culture gaps to navigate.  I wouldn't let B. pay me for the medicine, even though she offered.  As I declined, though, questions were running through my mind: Is this the right call here?  Am I insulting her?  Does her culture have a strong reciprocity code, where she's now indebted to me in a way that stresses her out?  I know the Jarai I've met take family responsibility very seriously—am I insulting her husband or son-in-law by "providing" for her in a way they think they should?

A few minutes after I told her the decongestant was "no problem, I don't need money," she handed me a bunch of bananas.  I took them, and thanked her.  Maybe—I thought—this would take care of the reciprocity issue.  I gave her medicine, she gave me bananas.  An exchange of gifts.  We're good.

As I sat there with the bananas, though, she came over to me again—this time with a paper towel, which she carefully lay on the coffee table in front of me.  I'm stymied.   Is it for the bananas?  Is a place to set the bananas?  Am I supposed to eat a banana right now?  I'm holding several bananas.  Is she expecting me to eat one, or all of them?  Is the paper towel totally independent of the bananas—a place to set my can of Coke, for example?  Or maybe it's not for me at all.  It's right in front of me,  but that might be coincidence.  Now I see she set one in front of her son-in-law, too—wait, am I supposed to give a banana to each of us, so we can all eat?  Does it look like I'm hoarding them?

In the end, I just continued to hold the bananas and chat normally and smile.  It was a pretty low-risk decision—they had been clear enough about where I should sit and whatnot that I knew they could communicate with me if the paper towel or banana-eating was extremely important somehow.   And, as far as I know, our  friendship survived my confusion unscathed.  It's very possible, though—I'd venture to say likely—that they were laughing at me as I left.

Every time that happens—every time I'm sitting somewhere, trying to be friendly and wondering whether I'm showing friendliness in an understandable way—when I'm trying to show goodwill or gratitude and hoping not to insult anyone instead—when I hear everyone else in the room speaking Jarai or Nepali and know I can't be a part of what they're saying—when they gesture towards me while they're talking and I wonder what they're saying about me, or they laugh and I don't understand the joke—when I have no real way to gauge how well the situation is going socially or whether I'm breaking all sorts of norms and I know I probably look a little silly, sitting there in (to them) strange clothes, clutching a bunch of bananas and sipping Coke while conspicuously ignoring a paper towel—every time that happens, there's this moment when I remember that for my neighbors, life here is like that almost all the time. 

I mean, I'm able to laugh at myself for my ignorance at B.'s, but that slight tension of cultural confusion ended for me with my visit—it lasted for all of forty-five minutes.   I imagine it being there every day, often involving people who aren't nearly as gracious as B. and her family were to me.

How tiring that must be.

And as I remember that, I feel even more privileged when my neighbors allow me into their homes.  B. invited me into her one space where she and her family get to relax and set the social rules themselves and not be expected to know English or crazy American customs.  It's a humbling thing, you know?

(Then again, maybe it's just therapeutic for them to get to be the ones laughing at the American for a while…)

A strange trend continues...

I have been summoned for jury duty in every single county in which I have resided--four counties between turning eighteen and moving here, which makes my fifth--but I have never had to report.  They always summon me either the week before or within the couple months after moving out of that county.  This morning, Marion County, Oregon summoned me to appear next week.  This morning, for the fourth time, I was excused by reason of "not a resident."

I just think it's kind of weird.

The Truth

I often had to recognize that the need to 'do something special' was born of a restless spirit.  Such  persons wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those that lay nearest did not satisfy them.

- Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

One can never see, or not till long afterwards, why anyone was selected for any job.  And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity.

- C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

I came here without knowing what "being here" would look like.  I knew some things—I would live in a place where they resettle refugees, I would volunteer in the nearby refugee-ESL classes—but overall it was sort of vague.

Yes, when people asked "What will you be doing?" I could rattle off a list: "Well, I'll be living in the refugee community and loving on my neighbors.  I can do practical things like give people rides to appointments and help navigate social-services bureaucracy and make sure they have enough food and teach them things like how to use drugstores and buses.  I have training in language and culture acquisition and cross-cultural communication and adult literacy—I can help people learn English and understand our weird customs and explain words and situations they don't understand.  I can be a friend to people thrown into an inherently bewildering and intensely lonely life situation.  I can advocate on their behalf when people are taking advantage of them." 

Those are good things.  

The truth, though?  The reality I desperately try to disguise and am secretly terrified that you and my church here and people I meet will find out?

I really don't do any of those things very often.

The truth is, my life here is—at its core—exactly like my life was in Portland, and Baltimore, and Salem.  Yes, some of the superficial details are different—the sights, the smells, the languages—but overall it's the same: I work, I eat, I try to have a social life, I pay bills, I try to love God and people better.

And the truth is, I often fail at loving God and people better.

And the truth is—the big glaring truth is, to my shame—that I have made "being here" all about me.  Whatever I may have told myself and others, at the end of the day I expected to come here and get to be this amazingly useful person.  A hero of benevolence and self-sacrifice and evangelism.   A spiritual and cultural adventurer and guide.

And the truth is, I'm not.

… I'm here because God invited me.  I still don't really know why.  I mean, yes, many of the skills and experiences and desires he has given me fit well with being here, from a practical perspective.   I'm also introverted and non-confrontational  and have to work really, really hard to pretend I'm comfortable meeting new people—those things don't fit quite as well.   Maybe God will use all of that here in a way that makes sense to me.  I don't know.

The thing that I do know, though, is that he did not invite me here so that I could be, or claim to be, extraordinary.

I so distinctly remember coming back from visiting my brother in Haiti, and reflecting on how beautiful and powerful God was in the "ordinary" lives of him and his fellow missionaries.  I remember recognizing how often my own desires to go overseas or do "missionary work" were rooted more in a desire for the exotic—in a desire to look different and special—than in a desire for God and his glory.  I thought at the time that I had learned that lesson. 

Ha. 

… Truth be told, I am often discouraged by and ashamed of how useless I feel here.  I have my three or four solid "I did something helpful!" stories, and cling to them and tell them and hope that other people will assume the rest of my days are filled with equally "good-thing-Marybeth-is-there" usefulness that I simply don't have time or inclination to share.  I hope that they—you—won't know how the majority of my days are spent doing nothing that looks special, and how often I see my weaknesses and fears and feel at a complete loss even how to begin "helping" here.

I am discovering, though, that the shame is not so much the shame of actual failure or sin.  It's just the soul-squirm of pride being mortified.  It's embarrassment that I'm not in fact the amazingly-awesome hero of service I want you all to think I am.

And—despite all that I have just written of my "uselessness" and fear—I am also discovering that this lack of clarity about my role here and "what I can do" is not in itself failure.  It's even, in a hard-to-grasp way, freeing.  The pressure is not on me.  God is here.  God is not useless.  God invited me here.  Apparently, though, God is needing to break or heal or change some things in me before he can use me in any way I can recognize.  Or maybe I won't ever recognize it.  Maybe that's the point.  I don't know.

I still want to be useful here, and I think that's okay.  But I am having to address the underlying question of what I mean by that.  Useful, like "people will love me and be so glad I'm here and be aware of how wonderful I am"?  Or useful like "holding my time and skills with open hands for God to do his work through them, however the heck he sees fit and however big or small my role looks in that work"?

I want to say it's the second, but so often find myself stuck in the first. 

I think I'm going to be learning this lesson for the rest of my life.

O for a thousand tongues to thank God for his patience with me. 

My grace is sufficient for you, 

for my power is made perfect in weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:9

Cats. Everywhere, cats.

These fluffy guys are all over the place right now:

I've counted at least eight.  They live under my neighbor's apartment. People here have been feeding them, but not adopting them—and they are multiplying.  This is the third litter since I've lived here.  Cats are great for keeping rodents at bay (a very helpful thing here), but this is getting a little excessive.

They're super cute and fluffy though, hey?