Home Thoughts From Abroad

On our second day in Mumbai, we met up with the American students for a visit to Dharavi which is one of the largest slums in the world, renowned for its prominence in the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  Situated on just over 500 acres of land, it is a multi-ethnic settlement that is home to upwards of a million people (2000 per acre) most of whom are rural poor from all over India who have migrated to the city to find work. We made our way through incredibly small passageways, some too low to even stand up in, past the tiny, stacked homes of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhist and Christians who work and raise their families together in this slum.

As this area, which is located on a tract of land that runs between two suburban railway lines, has been in existence since the late 1800s, it is considered a “legal slum” so the government provides electricity and a source of water. However with an inadequate supply of clean drinking water and only one toilet for every 700 people, a creek which runs through the district is widely used by local residents for toilet functions, leading to the spread of contagious diseases. There is a very active market place, community organizations and numerous mosques, temples and churches to serve people of the community. Inside the houses appear very clean, and some families try to make their, often single room homes, pleasant with curtains and flowers and plants.

The amazing thing about Dharavi is that it has an active informal economy of household businesses that employ many of the local residents that is estimated to have an annual turnover of more than $650 million US dollars and exports goods around the world. The district has an estimated 5000 businesses and 15,000 single-room factories. We saw many people hard at work in industries recycling plastics and aluminum, creating leather products, textiles, baking and pottery but could not begin to figure out how they managed to organize it all. Somehow through these crowded rabbit warrens masses of raw materials are brought in, processed, packaged and carried back out to markets and someone keeps track of all of this. The income for workers here ranges from $200 to $500 US per year.

We saw the finished projects and these hides leave the slums as beautiful purses, briefcases and belts ready for the name brand companies to add their special logo.

Mumbai is a city where house prices and rents are among the highest in the world and Dharavi provides a cheap and affordable option to those who move to Mumbai to earn their living. We were told that the poor in Mumbai are not those who can afford to live in the slums but the “pavement dwellers” living under a tarp or cardboard on the sidewalks. The message clearly was that Dharavi provides a safe, affordable home, an income and a sense of community for the residents and is not the filthy, dangerous place that it appears to outsiders.

I am afraid that I was not convinced. It may provide all of those things for people but ultimately I do not believe that anyone who bears the image of the Creator ever deserves to work that hard just to survive nor should they be subjected to the indignity of living in these circumstances. It is a shame on those of us who have plenty and the wherewithal to meet needs and transform lives.

As part of Steve’s work, he was asked to represent the school at a meeting in Mumbai and to meet up with an American team who were doing a project in India. Since his costs were covered and we have not yet been to India, it seemed like a good opportunity for me to tag along. We arrived in the brand new, majestic airport shortly after midnight and fortunately were greeted by hotel staff who escorted us into the night. As seedy and frightening as the area looked in the dark, it was even worse in daylight. The scene outside our window was reminiscent of our memories of Bangladesh nearly thirty years ago. In spite of the area, the hotel was actually quite pleasant and the customer service was excellent.

We met up with a group of students and staff from Andover and Exeter academies in the afternoon to visit quite an amazing and unique project called Mumbai Mobile Creche which serves more than 4500 children in Mumbai.  The construction industry is the single largest employer of migrant workers in India with an estimated 30 million men and women moving to cities with their children and living on construction sites. While parents are working their children are often left to fend for themselves and are at risk for malnutrition, injury and illness. MMC exists to support the health, education and safety needs of these children and their families.

The site we visited was a massive project building a Marriott hotel near the international airport, employing over 500 labourers and families. There are about 40 preschoolers there who receive food, early childhood education and medical surveillance through MMC. As well they provide basic hygiene, health and parenting education to mothers, and support to ensure that school aged kids are enrolled and have the supplies needed to attend local schools. MMC also provides a yearlong training program for local women who wish to become teachers either for MMC or in government schools.

After a brief stop at the hotel to freshen up, since the temperature was in the high 30s, we went to the India National Sport Center for dinner and an evening get together hosted by the India co-ordinator of the international school project we were observing. It was a great evening with three speakers who each lead a major initiative and gave their perspective on leadership. We enjoyed some excellent food and a rousing lesson in Bollywood and regional cultural dances.Our Indian hostess Avanti, (on the left wearing green) lead the event with great confidence and poise, spoke knowledgeably and pasionately about her leadership and experience in the program and the goals and rationale for what she hoped to accomplish through her work. We just kept shaking our heads at the realization that this young lady is just sixteen years old and has already accomplished more than many people do in a lifetime.

My children made me a father. I don’t mean that they came into the world and my name was entered into their birth certificate in the appropriate place. That was true also; but that is not what I mean. I mean that through their influence I grew into the role. I became the father they needed. This is why:

They trusted me. Trust is a huge motivator; much more effective than fear. Fear causes you to close down; to seek the most available route out of trouble. Trust causes you to grow to meet your children’s (often unrealistic) expectations. You want to be larger, not smaller. You want to give more, not less. Their innocent trust in your abilities drives you to develop those abilities. Their trust in your character drives you to refine and purge that character. Their trust in your wisdom drives you to research and understand the issues that concern them. A child’s trust is not something you can mess with. You have to earn it.

They loved me. I so do not deserve that love. I am tough-minded and even cruel on occasion. Life has often kicked me in the face and I have fought back. Hard. I can be unforgiving and relentless. But my children loved me. And I wanted to be worthy of that love. I took their rebuke and disappointment in me and turned it into lessons for improvement. I confessed my unworthiness and sought to be more worthy. I dug deep into my faith and asked God to show me what needed to change. My children’s love for me transformed me into a better man, and continues to do so.

They respected me. This is the ground of a man’s being. His children’s respect will drive him to heroics of self-sacrifice. Men who lose the respect of their children lose the better half of themselves. My children may not have agreed with every decision I made, but I ran every decision through this filter: Is this worthy of my children’s respect? Not their agreement; not their compliance. Those are different issues. But everything you do has to meet this standard or it is a non-starter. My children have their own priorities and concerns and they do not perfectly align with my own. But I know they respect me, and I am determined to live a life that is worthy of that respect to my dying breath. Their respect influences my behaviour. Always has.

My children made me a father; made me a better man. But here is the icing on that cake: their lives bring me great joy! They are no more perfect than I am. But they all live lives that are worthy and uplifting. They are all ruled by kindness and consideration. They all understand the value of relationship and are not slaves to money or superficial consumerism. They care for others, and they care for each other. This is the sweet legacy of having tried to be the father that my children needed me to be. My children made me a father, and that has been the greatest joy in my life.

“Sometimes life takes us places we never expected to go and in those places God writes a story that we never thought would be ours.” Our family has had its share of ups and downs, as has all other families. No couple can raise three children in such a tumultuous age as ours and put four parents to eternal rest without heartache. We come home to North America each year knowing that we will face our share of whatever our grown children and their children are going through, and determined to be a closer part of their lives, at least briefly, so that we might share in their joys and their burdens.

This year our time in Seattle was unexpectedly early and lengthy, a blessing that was a result of our reassessment of our course load for our Master’s degrees that will reduce our burden by six courses each. We enjoyed the additional time in a beautiful part of North America, and had the rare privilege of looking after three of our grandchildren for a week while their parents enjoyed a well-deserved and long overdue vacation in Hawaii. Having the opportunity to get to know these three adorable children a little better and walk/ride/drive them to school daily was to us like winning the lottery, minus the money of course. Though we greatly enjoyed all that we did, we had a lot less energy by the end of the week!

Flying on to Calgary in a gorgeously clear sky over the Cascades and the Rockies brought us to the other two grown children, Dave and Liz, and the lives in which they are engaged. Liz and her husband have one son, a dear fellow with a happy, inquisitive nature and a fearless thirst for adventure. He was due to have a little brother in October, but the baby was stillborn at twenty one weeks into our daughter’s pregnancy: his little heart succumbing to a congenital defect.

The families rallied around, as good families do at such times, and our daughter was well-supported and cherished through this difficult time. Her own character is strong and resilient, the heritage of a loving home and a capable and caring mother. As devoted Christians, we are of the conviction that a loving God arranged for us to be home at this unusual time in the year for us so we could be present to help out wherever we could. It would have been unbearable to be in Malaysia while our daughter and her husband were going through this. Jon flew up from Seattle to be with his sister and show his support as well. Though overwhelmingly sad, this loss was tempered by the evident love of all for the little life that was lost.

We also found comfort in the joy that Liz and Greg’s little toddler, Russell takes in life. He is crawling fearlessly and standing with support. Soon he will be walking and falling over the place. Seeing the world through his eyes was a great joy. Dave was facing an unexpected slowdown at work, and was doing his best not to be anxious about his job. Yesterday his company landed an enormous contract for a reservoir outside of Calgary that will see them right through the winter. The two of us snuck in a few brief minutes at a local driving range with a promise to get in a least nine holes next time we are home. Our evenings were often spent in family meals around Greg and Liz’s dining room table eating the finest barbequed beef that Alberta could produce, Greg’s parents joining us on occasion.

Now I am sitting in the airport lounge at Calgary airport, nursing a soy latte and trying to put into words what the last month has been like. Living in Malaysia has been a tremendous adventure and it is a much appreciated opportunity to serve God and do some good in a part of the world that needs the expertise and skill set that Pam and I possess. But a month like we have just been through reminds us that there are more things to our life than service, no matter how significant, and whatever we do now and in the future must include our families in a meaningful way. We don’t want to be visitors in our children’s lives; they are too important to us.

Forgive my digression in the midst of a very nice family holiday, but I was drawn to a recent article by former National Post columnist Mark Steyn who goes all apoplectic over the picture of Michelle Obama posted here. Poor Mark. He really does dip his toes in the obtuse and ridiculous, doesn’t he! Desperate to find something to criticize in the sane and restrained foreign policy of the current American government (Bring Back Ronald and his Rayguns!), he lashes out at the First Lady for showing some solidarity with the girls abducted by swinish Muslim rebels in Nigeria.

Finding this a useful starting point, his rhetoric takes flight, condemning all diplomatic nuance as so much perfidious twaddle. Metternich would not be amused, neither would the indefatigable Bismarck, who steered his country to geopolitical prominence from practically nowhere with consummate skill. Without him it wasn’t long before Germany stumbled into the disastrous WW1. But then, as I have noted before, Mark is primarily a social critic with little aptitude for history and those who are fond of his flowery histrionics undoubtedly know even less.

In contradistinction to the disappointing Mark Steyn, here, gentle reader, is how history moves. Eras or epochs have certain central ideas that govern and define them. The illuminating Paulo Freire calls these central ideas “themes.” Marx referred to them as a “theses” and postulated that each era’s thesis was opposed by a competing “antithesis” and through dialectical struggle a new synthesis emerges. Others see these central ideas as a civilization’s narrative; a story it tells itself about who and what it is. However you wish to construct it, theme, thesis or narrative, what characterizes an age is its ideas, not its actions.

Those who fulminate against inaction and the promotion of debate, dialogue, and discussion are missing the point. Attacking Iraq, Afghanistan or Syrian accomplishes the sum total of nothing. They are a meaningless drain on the economies of the world, making a few Machiavellian manipulators rich and marginally slowing the tide of history, but only changing it in the dogma of the dim-witted.

Did Darwin kill anyone? Start any wars? Overthrow any governments? Who has had greater power in writing the narrative of this present age? Did Martin Luther King or his namesake, Martin Luther start wars or movements? Did Marx launch rockets or words? As dismissive as Steyn and others who call for action of any kind so long as it involves invasion or conflict, this is not the way that intelligent and social beings who form civilizations develop. The Obamas apparently understand this

It is undoubtedly comforting to some to think that it will only take one more war to put our enemies in their place and for our way of life to triumph. That is the dream of the adolescent and uninformed. We will not defeat our enemies with war, but with words. It is the strength of ideas, of concepts, of ideologies that turn the tide of history. There is a growing consensus that the kind of neolithic brutality that we see in Syria, in Northern Nigeria, on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is just so yesterday. It doesn’t need action as much as it needs contempt and ridicule. And yes, solidarity with those who are oppressed.

We flew from Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, taking a route through Taipei in Taiwan for the first time with EVA. The carrier is nothing special, eight seats across on our flight and packed all the way back. But the service was decent and the in-flight entertainment worked. The bonus for us was the terminal in Taipei which was clean and efficient. The longer flight from KL meant a shorter flight to North America, and anything that reduces the length of that monster is appreciated.

Jon and Nic and the kids were waiting for us at the other end and it was a total delight to see them all. Ben was good enough to vacate his room for our stay, and we have been quite happily ensconced outside of Seattle since then, confining ourselves to walks to the school and the grocery store and going no further than the valley for church yesterday. If you were to ask us what we having been doing, I’m afraid it wouldn’t amount to much. And that, I suppose, is precisely the point.

Going home doesn’t mean you dash around doing all the things you miss, because quite frankly there isn’t much of that we miss. What we miss, and are getting stocked up on, is simply sitting around chatting with our kids and grandkids and fitting back into their lives. Having a barbeque on the deck, and a ride on our bikes around the block; having a meal together and snuggling on the couch reading a book with the grandchildren. These are the things that you can’t get anywhere else.

We went out for dinner at a very nice restaurant overlooking the water, and then took a walk around the locks that are still much in use nearby. We watched for a while as the boats went through and the bridge went up, and then we had a look at the fish ladders that have been built nearby so that the salmon can swim downstream and out to sea in the Spring (late May), and upstream to spawn in the Fall (September). The grandkids have been a constant delight with their chatter and their cheer. We both love that uncluttered take on life. When we were talking through our options for the year ahead, Pam said at one point, “We’re not quite sure what we are doing.” Eli, the youngest, said in exasperation, “We’re eating supper, grandma!” Love the statement of the obvious!

Family, friends and former students; that is about the sum of it, I’m afraid. Nothing terribly exciting; nothing terribly new. But irreplaceable. And being away from them is the cost of serving the Lord in a foreign land. I can’t imagine how it must have been in the early days when missionaries got home once every four years. How did they ever manage to leave again? We are finding that an entire year is just too long, especially when the little ones are this age. We are missing so much!

I spent this past week somewhere in Mindanao, at a beautiful private resort high up on the slope of Mt Apo; the highest mountain in the Philippines. The facility was built by a Filipino man as a private get-away for his family but he allows select groups to use it, free of charge for ministry purposes. The majestic views, peaceful surroundings and lush gardens were really quite astounding with plenty of quiet little gazebos and sitting areas to think and pray. It is beyond the end of the maintained roads and definitely “off the grid” so there was no electricity, only a generator that was turned on a few hours each evening, to pump water for showers. Unfortunately, the water hose to our room was damaged so we only managed to fill a small bucket with water, for three women to share for bathing and flushing each day.

The event was the first meeting of the Sub-regional CHE Working Group, consisting of representatives from Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, to explore more effective ways to work together to reach our respective communities. The conference was very well organized with a nice balance of year end updates, new learning, spiritual retreat as well as practical demonstration through a visit to a developing organic farm managed by our host from Well of Life. As I work largely alone, it is always so encouraging to spend time with others who share my burden and passion and have much wisdom gained through many years of experience in community development.

In terms of practical learning, we worked our way through a curriculum on Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation developed as in-service training for the Peace Corp. The modules provided processes for identifying hazards, risks and vulnerabilities in order to prepare for potential disasters, as well as short and long term interventions to be implemented during and after a catastrophic event. These will be adapted to CHE lessons to train front line workers and community members in for the vulnerable communities in which we serve.

This was not an easy trip in that it required a full days travel in each direction, but was well worth the effort. When I look at the needs of so many in SE Asia, it is easy to be overwhelmed by my own total inability to address the situation and it is equally distressing to look at the failed efforts of the powers of the world to address needs in the well publicized “War on Poverty”. We were reminded by the guest speaker of the story of the Burning Bush in which God showed up and addressed Moses by name, creating a holy place in which Moses was reminded of God’s commitment to His people. God’s nature was revealed in the fact that He has heard their cry and is aware of the suffering of the oppressed and promises deliverance.

Ironically, God chose Moses, a weak and fearful individual, to go to Pharaoh and lead the people to the place freedom and provision. God also promised to strengthen, guide and protect Moses in the task before him. It is only as God steps in that the real needs of the people can be addressed and this is what gives meaning and hope to the work of CHE in this region and keeps me going.

IDEAS ( Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs ) was founded in 2010 as a Malaysian think tank dedicated to promoting market based solutions to public policy challenges. One of the major initiatives supported by this group is IDEAS Academy and last evening we enjoyed a fund raiser for the Academy which was held at the home of the Dutch Ambassador to Malaysia. The Academy recently received endorsement and support from the UNHCR which has a goal to have 1 million stateless and refugee youth worldwide in secondary school by 2016.

IDEAS Academy well open in August as a secondary learning center for the under privileged youth in the core of KL many of whom are stateless and thus not entitled to education in this country. This is one of the projects that Taylors, Steve and a number of the Canadian staff have been involved with, providing input into curriculum development. When the center opens some of the Canadian teachers will volunteer their time to teach core curriculum and mentor local teachers.

We thoroughly enjoyed the evening on a gorgeous patio and yard with an actual lawn, sharing ideas with others from many organizations who share our passion to change the future for young people and families in this country. This is a huge problem, not just in Malaysia, but many countries in this part of the world as economic and politic refugees flee poverty, oppression and violence in the country of their birth. Malaysia has half a million registered refugees, and probably four times that number who are flying under the radar. It is also home to a large and growing population of expats who are looking to do some good in the world. Hopefully we can be part of getting those two groups together.