Bringing in the answers to my fears

My desk is littered with a bunch of mementos. The coloured rock I got at a spiritual retreat. The tile I painted with my neighbour. The teddy bear I brought in Germany. The marketing pen from my husband’s NGO project. 

I am one of those people who remembers the stories of how and when I acquired things and get sentimentally attached. And I often use this to justify owning too much stuff. 

And sometimes I pay too much to take those things around the world.

The books we read to prepare us for moving overseas reinforced the same things. When moving to your new country, take things with you that will remind your kids of home - pack their favourite toys; their favourite sheet sets; and things that will make you feel at home easily. Take the things it will take you a while to source - towels, kitchen gear, your favourite brand of toothpaste.

But here’s the thing the books don’t tell you - the mattresses in Cambodia are a different size to the ones in Australia. So none of the sheets we took with us fit the beds.

Thick, fluffy bath towels are useless in hot, humid weather.

Who knew? Well, every Cambodian knows the size of their mattresses and not to buy thick towels. We just assumed that it would be the same and didn’t think to ask any Cambodians these questions. 

Within days of our arrival in Cambodia, other foreigners had shown me the LEGO shop for my kid’s birthday present and the playcafe for her party. I was shown where to buy Milo and which of the 5 supermarkets sold weetbix and vegemite. By the end of our time in Cambodia, the import markets had opened so much that I could (admitted with a bit of a cost) eat a Villis pie for lunch, a Balfours custard tart for dessert, and washed it down with a Bundaberg ginger beer (if I had so desired). 

In fact the only thing I was regularly bringing back from Australia out of a sense of necessity by the time we left was underwear and kid-sized motorbike helmets manufactured to Aussie standards. And even then, I could have got underwear if I didn’t mind awkward conversations at the market.

The stuff we took

Do I regret some of the things I took to Cambodia unnecessarily? Some days. Do I regret the stuff we brought back from Cambodia? Not at all. So, what’s the difference in my mind?

If I am totally honest, the stuff that we took over to Cambodia was, for me at least, partly driven by fear. It was a fear of not being able to cope in a new place without familiar routines and mechanisms. It was a fear of not having access to the things I wanted. It was fear of not having the financial resources to acquire new things. It was a fear that my children had to have a certain experience of childhood and certain toys as developmental markers in order to be ok. 

The things we brought back to Australia? Well most of the things we brought back were actually things that we had taken over in our second and third trips back to Cambodia - things that we had missed when living in Cambodia, not things that we took out of concern. Or we brought back things which would serve as mementos of our lives in Cambodia - salad bowls, picnic mats and too many scarves. They were things that we had actually proven would remind us of home.

The things we took to Cambodia came from a fear of scarcity. The things we returned to Australia with came from a gratefulness of abundance. 

And my fear of scarcity came from two things - and neither of them are comfortable.

Consumerism

It stemmed from the belief that life requires access to certain things. And yes, this is true of things like housing. It is less true of my sewing machine. It showed how deeply I had bought into the lie that quality of life was determined by having access to particular things. That somehow my kids would “miss out” if they couldn’t play with their My Little Ponies, or have prams for their dolls.

I had emphasised the need for physical resources for navigating problems and issues and downplayed non-physical resources that affect quality of life - relationships, education and spiritual growth.  It is still uncomfortable to realise how tightly I link my understanding of how to do life, with the tools that I use to do it. And that I relied (and still do) on those tools more than I rely on other people, and I miss out on community and relying on God in the process.

And of course, linked to that is the idea that the stuff that we have is representative of the way that life needs to be. 

Western superiority

I came with the unrecognised assumption that these are the tools that we have developed to live life the way it should be lived, and therefore they must be the only tools that can be used to do what we need done. It would have been much better for everyone, for me to learn what new tools to use, rather than be seen to bring in all my own. True relationship can be built much more deeply, leaning on each other.

But it was pride. I had to bring in my Australian textas (that’s markers for the rest of you), because they were better quality than the ones I would buy in Cambodia. My knives were better than the market ones. All the electronics would be fake.  

My assumptions were lies. Some things were made cheaply and of bad quality but with some time and resources,  I could buy the same things I could in Australia. But all the stuff I brought from Australia was made in China anyway.

The bigger issue than needing my tools, was the assumption that things would be so different that I had to bring the solution with me.  It was born of my understanding of poverty as being deeply connected to access to resources. That “those people'' were so lacking that they didn’t have access to ‘stuff’ and I needed to bring ‘stuff’ in to make it better. Like I said last month, the white saviourism runs strong. 

It wasn’t until I had been living in Cambodia long enough to have local friends who would give honest reflections about how foreigners were perceived as relating to locals that I had other words to think about what fears and assumptions led me to bring all my stuff in. The phrase that Sarady was willing to say was “You all come in here with your stuff and your education and you think you are superior to us.” Superiority is of course a word closely linked with racism - and it was confronting and something I didn’t want to think about. But the more I thought about it, I realised that Sarady had hit the nail on the head. My underlying belief was that people living in a culture and place that I didn’t understand were a) so different to me that I wouldn’t be able to navigate their world without my tools  b) their solutions to how to navigate life would not work for me and c) at some level I believed that people needed the tools I was bringing. 

The stuff that came back

So why do I bring this up? 

It’s not actually about self-flagellation. It’s not a sob story about how I went to Cambodia and discovered how racism isn’t just using racial slurs or refusing someone service. It’s because we cannot disconnect resources, and how they are used and perceived, with relational and societal power. It’s the reason why questions about money can destroy political careers and why the question of how money is used is so important in the aid, development and missions sectors. 

It’s because a dependence on consumerism is so deeply ingrained in our Western worldview. It’s because racism is too. It’s why I suggested the racism podcast for our book club - because we can’t separate our intentions and our behaviour with how they are experienced by others.

And it's because bringing our stuff into places to solve a problem that may or may not be there is one of the biggest ways that we contribute to charity work. We see a need and feel the need to provide resources to fix it. And either sending resources to somewhere, or bringing resources into somewhere is one of the biggest ways that we contribute to short-term missions. 

And I bring it up now because it's nearly Christmas, and our desire to post pencils around the world seems to increase at this time. 

It’s because money, our relationship to it, and the unspoken biases and assumptions we bring, is one of the most complex things we have to wrestle with on this journey. 

So where do we go from here?

Over the next few weeks, I am going to raise some ideas about how we can approach this topic differently and give some alternatives.

But I’d also love to learn from you. Have you made the same mistakes I have? Have you had the joys of paying lots of money to take something somewhere only to discover it was already there? (I’m looking at you Connector Pens!). When did you miss out on being blessed by relationship and shared resources instead of relying on your own solutions? When had you assumed something about somewhere that didn’t end up being true? 

Complexity isn’t all doom and gloom but it does require us to always ask 2 more questions.
So what questions does this raise for you?