I’ll be honest. When I applied to do the internship with Servants in Cambodia I was secretly nurturing an idea of myself as ‘Anna, patron saint of the slum children’, wandering through the slums with a collection of impoverished, yet delighted children skipping along in my wake…
That little delusion was shattered pretty early on when I was reduced to tears by a baby who screamed every time I smiled at her. I think it’s safe to say that the slums were certainly not what I expected… I expected to struggle with the day-to-day realities of living in a cramped squatter community. I expected to be terrorised by rats as I lay on my sick-bed weeping over the state of the world. And these weren’t altogether unrealistic expectations: I was living with a family of 8 in a house roughly the size of a one bedroom flat back home. The jib-board wall of my bedroom in no way muffled the blaring karaoke that greeted me when I returned home after an exhausting day. The rat-sightings were daily. I was hit with 3 bouts of food-poisoning in 2 weeks.
But what really challenged me was how I felt. Which was…uncomfortable. Disempowered. Utterly useless. I had thought of myself as someone who could always get by with a smile, but in the local community I just felt awkward. I worried what they thought of me. With minimal Khmer, I struggled to talk to anyone, and when I tried I came away feeling silly and inadequate. It felt like the one thing I prided myself on at home (my ability to make friends) had been stripped away from me.
This feeling came as quite a shock – it didn’t seem noble enough to be struggling with in the midst of such poverty. But one thing the slums taught me is that God isn’t actually that interested in what’s “noble”, God is interested in us. On reflection, I believe that God used my time in the slums to work on the area of my life where I felt totally sufficient without God’s help or input. It was only once I’d admitted defeat and acknowledged that perhaps I did need God’s help, that I could let go of my ‘socially capable’ self-image. And once I’d done that, if felt much easier to sit on the wall in the middle of the slums without wanting to run and hide in my room. And just sitting on that wall, doing nothing other than being my most useless self, is how I made some wonderful friends among my neighbours (or rather, they made friends with me…). And funnily enough, it was then that my ability to really grapple with those ‘nobler’ issues of poverty was transformed too.
My time in Cambodia left me not only with a richer understanding of poverty, but with a real awareness of how much I need God in my life. I guess I was reminded who’s really in charge after all! As I walked home through the slums on one of my last days, some children starting skipping along behind me. The further I walked, the more children joined in and the louder their shrieking laughter became. People started poking their heads out of their doorways to see what the din was all about. It was my glory moment, my ‘Anna, patron saint of the slum children’ moment, but all I could think was: God is gracious.
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