The language thing

International service is important. It has a value that I’ve often struggled to name. Sometimes that struggle doesn’t bother me. I find peace answering the call to international service. But sometimes I’m bothered. This could come from the importance of naming and relating missionary life. It could also come from a need to prove or explain myself. (I hope for the former and recognize the latter.) Domestic service has imperative value. Faced with injustice, you are moved to respond. You care for family and friends. You cut the neighbor’s grass. You volunteer at a homeless shelter and work in the community garden. You teach. You organize communities. You strive to fix broken systems. You see a need, and you fill it. It’s beautiful and necessary and real.

So why go away?

It’s a question that reaches me when I reflect on the ways that international service is both idealized and criticized. Images arise of this tall white girl crouching through a straw hut in the middle of the Peruvian jungle and greeting yet another beautifully tranquil day in an impoverished paradise. That image may exist somewhere, but it is far from my reality. I wake up (usually cranky) in a bed, take a hot shower, cook breakfast on a gas stove, wash my plates in a sink with running water and walk through clean streets to a school that is not made of straw nor mud. I’m not in the Sisters of Charity, and I am still very privileged. International service is also criticized. “Aren’t there enough problems in your own backyard?” “Why do you need to pay all that money to do service?”

These statements reveal their own troubles. The first insinuates that those people who live closer to me and share my nationality are somehow more deserving of my time and talents on the basis of proximity. The second reduces service to a monetary value and reflects larger problems like the idolization of money and the commodification of the human person.

But recognizing that there is value to international service isn’t quite the same as naming that value. And so the question remains: Why do we do it?

We do it because this is a uniquely transformative experience. Something happens to us in this time and space.We say, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” There is a tremendous truth in this statement. Significantly far from everything known and comfortable for a significant period of time, I am learning how to let go. I let go of what I know. I allow all of the walls I’ve built up fall to the wayside so that it’s just God and me. And then comes the really scary part. I learn to lean in with a reckless dependence. I fall, immersing myself in the culture. I don’t just let go. I actively unlearn lessons that have been so deeply inculturated that I didn’t even know they were a part of me.

This is a beautifully catastrophic fall. Jumping off a cliff into God’s wild breathing that catches me as I unravel, unlearn and fearfully, joyfully dance through Her air… until I catch my breath and rediscover Her loving embrace at the bottom. There lies the value of international service: at the bottom. I never in-the-know, always a guest, always out of my comfort zone. This is because I am in a new place and a new culture. This is because of the language thing. I forget sometimes that I am always out of my comfort zone because I am still learning this language. We talk about the walls that are built up from the language thing. Sometimes I see fluency as this magic key that once attained has the power to unlock the doors and take down the walls. In reality, it’s more like taking apart walls with a few hammers (shout out PG13). We fail to talk about the beauty of the language thing. Its beauty is like the beauty of the fall. It humbles us to the point where we are always the learners. I see each person as my teacher because they have the magic key of language, which has the power to unlock the secrets of human connection. Yes, I mean each person: From my third grade student to the principal of my school; from the smelly dude standing next to me on the bus to the cute guy in a bar. I am the student, and everyone is my teacher.

I also learn what a privilege it is to understand and to speak. By leaning into the discomfort and locating myself on the bottom, I am learning what it is like to be here. Here. In the place where you are talked over. In the place where you are ignored. In the place where you are voiceless. Words are privilege, and they are powerful. When I give up some of my language abilities, I give up some of my power and privilege. I also receive gifts of kindness and compassion when people choose to include me, welcome me and love me. I’m losing myself here at the bottom in service with the Other: the kids, the elderly, the uneducated, the disabled, the poor… the people we leave out of the conversation. In a very small way I am choosing to exclude myself from conversation (and most of the time working like hell to be a part of it again). I’m choosing dependence and vulnerability. I’m humbling myself to reach here, where the voiceless and marginalized reside, hoping to begin learning what solidarity is all about. I’m reaching here, where I find myself, the woman God created me to be, utterly and willfully dependent on God and my human family. Being in this space and in this time, I’m learning how to shut up and listen. When we listen, we hear it— the voice that says, “these will be your people, and I will be your God.” We go away to get lost enough so that we look, listen and find out where we are. What we find is that we are exactly where we belong—with and for others.