This week was so packed, I don’t know where to start! I am finding beauty in places I didn’t think I would. Being in another culture allows me to look at things from a clean slate – to judge and value without a context of historical understanding. Its frustrating, and its beautiful.
I have a few things to share with you this week. With my feet now firmly under me, a LRT pass that feels like my very own, and a restaurant owner now recognizing my face, I feel as if I am starting to get into the swing of things. About every other day, I head down to a little restaurant a block from the office to grab a couple of Diet Cokes. They are the HARDEST thing to find here (believe it or not, more difficult than coffee!). There is a little shop that not only sells them, but sells them right out of the cooler.
Yes, crisp Diet Coke + Hot Malaysia Day = Jen’s Moment of Bliss
By now, the gentleman recognizes me as I enter his shop. “Miss! 2 Coka Light’s? Good to see you today. You looking fighting fit!” Don’t ask me what fighting fit means. I’m going to assume it is a compliment. I smile, hand him my RM 3 and wish him the best. Next week my goal is properly introduce myself and by the end of the summer know his story. Stories are truly the best in a new culture. Stories of marriages long ago, children grown and gone, professional aspirations, loves had and lost. . . To get one’s story, a true story, an authentic story, you must invest relationally, even if it’s only a Diet Coke every other day. By August, I will have this man’s story.
I started working on a funding proposal to the EU this week. Truly, I just jumped feet first into a pool I’m not sure is my swimming level. I have help – or rather the true author has help from me – but it is proving to stretch and challenge me professionally. Not only to understand what Tenaganita’s long term objectives are, in the area of the proposal, but to increasingly use my education to assist wherever Tenaganita has needs. I realized today that using an education you have paid for, both financially and emotionally, to be used in the way you desire to use it, is a great joy. Having worked in positions that you are ‘qualified for’ doesn’t necessarily mean they are the jobs that have a return to you, or further, bring you a sense of, well, accomplishment. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean that was what we were built to do. I am jumping into a pool of what I was meant to do, and as the splashes of water hit my face, I get a glimpse of fulfillment.
I attended a lecture on the Rohingya people this week. If you click on “Rohingya” it will direct you to a great BBC article – if you are so inclined. I think what grabbed my attention most at this lecture was the professor’s sense that the Rohingya are in ‘chronic distress’. That is to say, the Rohingya, for four decades, have not been able to access citizenship from a nation. These children have been born into statelessness. My concept of ‘belonging’ comes from the ability to seek protection from the state of the USA. Imagine being kicked off your land that you have farmed for years, and having no fall-back because the state your heritage comes from doesn’t claim you. It is chronic, and although the Rohingya are listed as ‘refugees’ according to the UN, ( Malaysia, Myanmmar, and Bangladesh, the places the Rohingya seek refuge, do not recognize the UNHCR) for the Rohingya, it doesn’t connote a sense of emergency. I typically associate refugee with a state of emergency. If you have been a refugee for 40 years, and you now have three generations in ‘refugee’ status – it begs to be seen as an emergency. I don’t know if this connects for you, but for me, things that are ‘emergent’ are taken care of, they go to the top of the list. The Rohingya are continually slipping from a position of importance in the international community. Further, because of this status, they are highly susceptible to become trafficked. With no papers to prove who you are, no missing person report able to be filed, you are easily trafficked into slave labor. And nobody but your family would know.
There is a depravity of man that we can change, that we must change, if we choose to not look the other way.
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