Early this year the Manila team accepted an internship application from Joshua Knowlton. He came to us in late May as part of the Human Needs and Global Resources (HuNGeR) program at Wheaton College in Chicago. He is here until December.
We placed Josh in a family setting very different from what he knew in America. Nora, his host mum, had nine others living with her in a small house, no bigger than 30 m2. In his first couple of months he shared a room with four others, including a 2 year old, and with the light on all night as he tried to sleep.
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His diet has also been a radical change. He eats rice three times a day and more often than not it’s accompanied with fried fish or maybe a few pieces of bony chicken. This is a far cry from the chocolate chip waffles he tells me eats for breakfast while boarding at Wheaton.
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His time here has reminded me, again, just how significant immersion based experiences are to opening up our eyes to the world around us and what we’ve taken for granted. These liminal experiences, like Josh is having right now, take us right out of our comfort zones and place us in an unfamiliar environment that often feels quite hostile. But, it’s in this place, that we have the biggest opportunity to grow. In fact, Fr Richard Rohr tells us that all transformation takes place in liminal space. He urges us to be “drawn out of “business as usual” and remain patiently on the “threshold” (limen, in Latin) where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence.
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I see this happening for Josh. While living in a slum community in Manila, he is engaging with new questions about the world he once knew and so a new world is opening up for him. I have a prayer of thanks for what this means for Josh and, while they know little of it, the immense contribution Nora and her family have had in Josh’s life.
–David Cross, Manila Team Leader
