7 Things to Remember While Serving Abroad
Here I am, sitting in the house-like office of our development project in rural Cambodia. I can almost hear the tinkling of water buffalo bells and smell the aroma of dog meat being grilled down the street. Yum…? It’s been two years since I arrived in Manila, Cambodia. Wait, Philippines. Two years ago, did I know I was going to move countries halfway through my program? No. Did I know a lot about what was going to happen to me over the next two years? Not really.
Back then, I was fresh out of college, ready for an adventure. Four years of battling Chicago winters will leave you willing to move anywhere you can’t be hospitalized with frostbite. That turned out to be Southeast Asia. Being Asian, I thought that moving to Asia would be a piece of cake. Well, moving continents is one story. Moving worlds—the developed to the developing—is another.
They say that Southeast Asia as a region may catch up to the European Union by 2030. Step into one of the high-end, air-conditioned malls in downtown Manila or Bangkok and you’ll believe them. Then take the crowded (as in armpit-to-armpit), gender-segregated train a few stops down to the slum by the river, or an open-air bus a few hours out to a village, and you’ll just as quickly doubt them. There’s inequality in the West, but here it’s powerfully raw.
I came as part of a pilot program so my day-to-day life is probably not very representative and/or useful for you to hear about. But there are a few general lessons I've learned here that I can share:
1) The world is complex. This sounds obvious. But I never realized how much complexity I take for granted. For example, it’s almost universally acknowledged that education, health care, and human rights are good, necessary things. But what’s the point of paying for school if there are few decent jobs to graduate into? What use is a hospital if staff aren’t properly trained and people don’t go because it’s too far? What good are human rights if the government ignoring them is just another Tuesday afternoon?
Which leads to the second lesson:
2) People do what they do (and don’t do what they don’t do) for a reason. Again, maybe obvious. As a kid, I stayed in school, got vaccinated, and read the Constitution. But why did I do these things? Somewhere, someone made a good decision for me, or I modeled the good behavior of kids around me. Most people don’t have it this easy. We wonder why that woman doesn't send her kids to school, when we should really wonder why she doesn't, because there's a reason. One of the hardest things I did in the Philippines was live in a rural village with no plumbing or electricity. It got tiring really fast to boil drinking water, use soap, and read by candlelight. I don’t know if the kids in the village ever did their homework, because if I were them, I never would have. A good exposé on this subject is the book Poor Economics.
The third is related:
3) Assumptions are meant to be questioned. Even discarded. ‘The poor’ are broadly defined as people who live on under $2.00 a day. But I’ve met mothers with healthy babies who live off what they grow on their farms and forgotten that according to the books, they’re ‘poor’. There are squatters who probably make more than a couple bucks a day but live in fear of their makeshift home being washed away in the next storm. Much of what I ‘know’ about the developing world I assume, or have read somewhere. So I often have to rewind and try to see the world through people's eyes, starting with: how would I react if back home, some foreigner I couldn't understand knocked on my door and offered to give me a ton of stuff because they read somewhere that I was ‘poor’?
These three lessons are about being humble and open-minded, which I think are more helpful things to be when abroad than smart or freakishly good at languages. That said, it doesn’t hurt to be informed:
4) Due diligence is important. You may feel called to a role and country, but have you thought about whether the role is aligned with your skills and interests, and whether the country is one you’ll enjoy living in? Better to be called and cheerful than called and crabby. Even on the field, think, what kind of work has been done before in my community? How effective was it? How is my work building on this? A little planning can go a long way.
At the same time:
5) The only thing certain on the field is uncertainty. Last November, a colleague asked how I would feel about moving to work with a project in another country. No one had said anything about moving to Cambodia when I started in the Philippines, and I was just getting the hang of the language. But two months later, I was on a plane to Phnom Penh. If I'd stayed behind and griped, I would have missed out on a great learning opportunity.
When things go crazy, you’ll be tempted to compare yourself to people whose lives seem calmer, à la ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. Remember:
6) Social media is both a godsend and a curse. Gchat and Facebook keep friendship alive. They also keep jealousy alive. Not every day serving will be a picnic. On your hardest days, you’ll wonder why you ever left home, and seeing your friends post about getting a new puppy or being promoted (because they will) won’t help.
So:
7) It helps to have a life outside of work. I wish this one was more spiritual, like ‘Remember that your job is not just a job’, but for me, that’s easier said than done. So instead, pick up a hobby, take a fun online course (I recommend edX), be friends with people outside of your organization, and make yourself take an occasional retreat to do some soul-searching. You may feel expected to be in service mode 24/7, but you need your own space. Stepping back and looking at the big picture may help you recall why you came in the first place, and keep you from burning out (and maybe even remind you that your job is not just a job!).
So that’s it from me. I’m pretty sure I’ve grown more in these past two years than I did in any two years of college, and possibly more than I did in all 18 before college. I’m staying on a bit longer because I’m still working on a few projects I enjoy, and plus, when am I ever going to get to do something like this again? To use my major, travel, learn about the world, and serve at the same time is a rare opportunity, and I plan to make the most of it while I can.