Learning to Teach or Teaching to Learn?

Did you know bananas come from an herb and not a tree? How about that a banana “herb” only produces bananas one time? That’s right, what most people think of as a banana tree is not a tree at all. It has no wood-like material in it. The banana herb will grow to maturity, produce bananas and then will put off a new shoot at the base of the old plant. The old plant will no longer produce fruit.  What is it good for then?

Now, you may be wondering how and why I learned something like this. It wasn’t from reading a book, sitting in a classroom, or going to Google. I learned it from the staff while we were teaching people how to make money by raising chickens! We were teaching chicken-raising skills to villagers living in poverty with few resources to work their way out of their desperate situation.

Banana Plants and Chicken Raising? You see, once a banana plant has produced its bananas, most people would think the banana plant is useless. On the contrary, the plant itself is then a huge resource for food. You can actually slice an entire 8 foot tall banana plant up into tiny pieces and make it into chicken or pig food! Just add a little rice bran and a little ground rice (all of which are in abundance, cheap, and often free in a warm, tropical climate) and you have chicken feed to start your own chicken ranch at minimal cost!

I’m not telling all of this so we can all go out and start our own chicken farms. What I am saying is many of the most empowering lessons I’ve learned in life were by experiencing them in real life and preparing to teach those lessons to others in real-life circumstances.

Just like teaching chicken-raising skills helps people start on the road out of poverty, teaching them real relationship with God will start them on the road to life transformation. Stepping out to teach others often requires us to learn, and vice versa. I want to challenge you today.  Who and what are you teaching/learning?

You don't have to go to Cambodia to change lives,
there are people all around you

^“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded…” Matthew 28:19-20

The Rest of the Story:

To give you a quick story of how teaching/learning something simple can make  a significant impact in someone's life. The staff at Samaritan's Purse recently took me to a village right on the Cambodia/Thai border. It was a village where we taught/I learned how to make chicken feed. The village was about 10 km away from the nearest middle school. In recent history no children had attended middle school from this village. It was too far and the families were too poor to afford transportation. The children have to work to help provide an income for the family instead of going to school. Quick fact: In Cambodia 28% of the household income comes from children. Many of the children would cross the border illegally each day into Thailand to work.

The staff went into the village and talked with leaders and parents and told them Samaritan's Purse would provide bicycles for the kids and provide chicken raising training and resources for the families, IF the parents would agree to enroll and send their children to middle school. After receiving the bicycles and learning how to raise chickens for income, seven families were ready to enroll their children in middle school. There was only one problem.

This area is remote and there aren't many homes on the 10 km dirt road from the village to the school. I actually asked the staff where in the world they were taking me when they took me down the bumpy dirt road out into the woods the first time. (The recent landline clearance signs were not reassuring either). Anyway, the parents of the girls were worried that their daughters would not be safe travelling on the road and weren't sure about sending them to school by themselves. 

Fortunately, the local military commander in charge of border security, asked his men if they would patrol the road each day and ensure safe passage for the kids to school. The entire village was excited because for the first time they now had seven young boys and girls who would be attending middle school. It was a milestone event for the village. 

P.S. I've been back again and the kids are all still in school! AND, those chickens taste pretty good barbecued in local spices. A guy has to eat lunch somewhere, so the least I could do was help the local economy. 

Building Much More Than A Building

During my days as a mathematics teacher I would spend hours preparing lessons each week to make sure what I presented was engaging for students. Because they had access to so much technology and entertainment at home, a lesson had to be interesting to keep their attention. I never had to worry about the conditions in the classroom though. We always had comfortable desks, great lighting, air conditioning, etc.

Teachers in Cambodia deal with a very different scenario. When the Samaritan’s Purse staff first told me about the conditions at some of the rural primary schools here, I was shocked. But when I visited them in person I was not only deeply disturbed, but I became highly motivated to do something about it.  I tell the story of one of these schools and the schools principal in my blog Search For Significance

In another primary school nearly 200 kids have to take turns going to class in 3 shifts.  Two grades have class at the same time in the same room. Their wooden school was in such bad condition the teachers moved the school into a one room metal rice barn with only three walls.  For those of you from West Texas who have been in a metal barn on a hot July day, you can imagine how hot and unbearable every day of school is for these kids. Cambodia is like a Texas July almost year-round. The teachers and students are facing some almost insurmountable hurdles to learning.

Well, in the next four months all of that will change.  During my first year here I found out about grant and funding opportunities to see new schools built. I was able to write for funding and Samaritan’s Purse Cambodia was awarded the funds to construct two schools in Banteay Meanchey province. While all the paperwork, process and planning has taken over a year, construction has now begun!

Construction has begun on 2 new schools

While writing this blog I found out two more schools we’ve wanted to construct now have commitments! That means it is likely that in 2014 four new primary schools will be built! For all of you who I’ve shared about these schools with, thank you for praying for us. Samaritan’s Purse now has an initiative to build 20 primary schools in Cambodia!

Plays Well With Others: A 3000% Return

 Every report card period my boys come home with a set of marks showing how they are doing in school. When they were in their primary grades there was always a section giving us an idea of how they were doing socially. “Plays Well With Others” was always at the top of the list of items on the report card. For every child this is one of the most important life skills they need to learn!

Having been involved in Christian ministry for over 25 years, I have often heard this same principle taught in the Church. Playing or working well with others may not be an exact scriptural quotation, but we have all likely heard “We want to be a Kingdom Church” or “We want to work with the whole Body of Christ to see our community transformed”. Hearing these things I’ve always looked for examples to show me what that looks like. I don’t mean churches or organizations having special events together once or twice a year, but really unselfishly giving of themselves to each other and to the community. Working together in order to see real community-building relationships.

This past month I’ve seen some of the greatest examples of churches and organizations working well together to see their community transformed.

Today I was in a village that is likely the greatest story of working together I’ve ever personally encountered. Two years ago I made my first visit to this village in Kampong Chhnang. Pastor Say was a pastor who had moved with a group of people into the forest to start a new village for those who were poor and had no land or possessions. Samaritan’s Purse worked there with the Seeds of Hope project to assist people trying to build a new life for themselves with pig raising, chicken raising, vegetable gardening and water wells.

On my visit today I was with a partner organization with Samaritan's Purse working with villagers to build BioSand water filters to provide everyone with clean drinking water. I was shocked as we worked with the villagers and they began telling what has happened over the last two years. We were introduced to five pastors, all who had planted churches in the village. Unfortunately, my first reaction was “Oh, no why would a village need five churches, why not just one or two?” I guess I was expecting the pastors to start competing for attention or start trying to one-up each other with stories. Many times my experiences where there are multiple churches in an area is that they compete and sometimes fight with one another instead of work together.

But today was different, they were all working together with us. They were laughing together, probably “at” us as they watched these white men work with Cambodian tools. They appeared to truly be friends. What I realized as I watched them talk and work is that they were working together with an entire village, not just to plant  churches, but to help people start a new life, both spiritually and physically. They were helping the village work together to develop a community. If the village didn’t work together there would be no future, especially for their children.  It made me begin to think, “Is this what Christian ministry should look like?”

The result of working together was phenomenal! As we talked I casually asked how many people in the village were now Christian. One of the pastors said, “Oh, about 60 percent of the village I guess.” The others looked at each other, said a few words to each other, and then everyone agreed that was about right. Now, I don’t know about you, but how many pastors in your community could say they have worked with 4 other pastors to see 60 percent of their community come to Christ in the last 2 to 3 years. To put it in a different perspective though, stop and think about this. Cambodia has very few Christians. Less than 2% of the population of the country are Christians. These five churches have worked together to see that miraculously changed in their community.

That is a 3,000% increase over the rest of their country.  I guess what Henry Ford said is right:

"Coming together is a beginning: keeping together is progress; working together is success."

And oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the household income of the villagers has increased, people’s health has improved and families are stronger than they’ve ever been before!

Learning an Asia Language isn't for Wimps!

In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. For example, German has a 60% lexical similarity to English.  Furthermore, most western countries use what is called the Latin “alphabet”. This makes it very easy as a beginner to study and learn languages like Spanish or French because it is written in letters and characters that make it easy for us to understand.

Latin Alphabet World Distribution

The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main script. The light green shows the countries where the alphabet co-exists with other scripts.

Now, if you look at the map closely, Cambodia is in the grey. This is when I say to myself sometimes during language study, why didn’t God send me to a GREEN COUNTRY! This would have made my life so much easier.  I do have to make another confession right now and say that sometimes I even go on to say “Those Latin American or African Missionaries have it so easy!” OK, so hopefully you can overlook this character flaw in me!

So, here is an example of the Khmer written script:

This is what I tell my language tutor every week, "SLOW DOWN, please!"

The Khmer language is influenced predominately by Sanskrit and Pali through the vehicle  of Hinduism and Buddhism and is the official language of only one country in the world with a population of 14 million.  Now, if your thinking this can’t be much further from the Latin alphabet and English language then you are right! Which is why Cambodia is exactly half way around the world from Texas!

Sometimes, and quite often, I think back at just how easy it was taking Spanish and French when I was at university.  I now often laugh at myself remembering how I moaned and cried about how hard it was to learn a new language back then.  My hat goes off to anyone who is learning an Asian language that does not use the Latin alphabet.

Danny, my language tutor

So, what compels me to learn this most difficult language?  It is my deep desire for one goal. My desire is to be able to go out to remote villages with my medical bag and medications and help those people who would otherwise not be able to receive healthcare due to poverty. I want to be able to go without a translator. I enjoy using my healthcare knowledge to unconditionally serve others. That is what is the most fun to me. That is when I am happy. 

So, I am still plugging away at language learning…..it’s not my gifting, but my desire still burns to learn. As long as God continues to put people in my life here in Cambodia that need medical help then I will continue to learn this fascinating, but difficult to pronounce language.