GRIFFITH GLEANINGS NOVEMBER

Laughs, challenges and discoveries are all characteristics of learning to communicate cross-culturally. Learning the words of a new language are only just the beginning. As we discover more about the Khmer language and culture we are starting to see some of these facets. Body language is something that can be just as different from one culture to another as the spoken words. Here in Cambodia the locals don’t use their hands to gesture like some of us Westerners. We were made aware before we arrived that certain types of pointing with our fingers and even feet can be offensive in the Khmer culture. It was fascinating for us to first observe how some Khmer use their mouth to point rather than something less subtle as a hand gesture. We have also observed Khmer people becoming distracted with how we like to “talk with our hands”. Humour can be one of those areas that is difficult to navigate. Humour can be an ideal way of breaking the ice in conversation in ones own culture, but humour is one thing that is often lost in translation. Deb had a recent experience sharing with our local Khmer friends about cooking a vegetarian dish. As she was listing the ingredients in Khmer she realised she had just used the words for spiders (bpeeng bpee-ung) when she meant to say tomatoes (bpayng boh). Everyone laughed. Laughing is easier with closer friends as they know us better, but sometimes we are laughing at different things, which makes us all laugh again. Our humour needs to be subdued a little as we grow in Khmer friendships. In many Asian cultures honour and shame is more important than in Western culture. When it comes to humour it is important that it doesn’t cause shame or loss of face in our Khmer relationships. Navigating cross-cultural communication often has a lot to do with balancing taking some risks, being sensitive to the locals as well as learning from mistakes.

Prayer Requests:
Discernment in our visa and work permit progress.
Physical and spiritual protection in our daily life.
Our family shared time next month.

GRIFFITH GLEANINGS OCTOBER

This month we have moved out of the city centre of Siem Reap to a new rural home. We are still close enough to stay engaged in our formal language learning and important relationships we have in Siem Reap, but oh it is good to look out a window to see trees rather than concrete! We are now residents of a small community separated by fields of rice and vegetables dispersed around a local market and school called “Chreav”. You can find “Chreav Primary and Secondary School” on Google maps, but our road has no official name so you might want to call us for directions before you try and drop in for a visit. We are still learning the correct way that the locals pronounce the name of our village. Our neighbours also have some different vocabulary to those city folk from Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, so we have some rich learning experiences ahead. Actually that is one of the main reasons for our move. We expect to have more opportunities to develop our language skills in a community that doesn’t see a lot of foreigners and we will need to keep trying until we are understood. Our new landlords front door is 60cm from our back door so we literally are on our landlords front door step. We were encouraged by our landlords to hold a new house opening before our fourth night in the new home and to ensure to invite the head of the village who is one of our neighbours. The only time available for the village leader to visit was our third day in the home and he came after our other visitors had left. While a house warming party is familiar to most Westerners it has much more spiritual significance in Cambodia. A traditional house opening party will involve Buddhist monks officiating a “blessing” and various symbols are used to seek spiritual protection of the home and make offerings to appease the spirits. The occasion for us didn’t involve any monks and was opportunity for a conversation about our trust that Jesus will protect our home. The Khmer people live in a world that for them is deeply influenced by spirits and deceased ancestors with good and bad impacts. It has been fascinating for us to explore  Khmer cultural insights into how they seek to protect themselves and their livelihoods with our local Khmer friends.
Sitting with our local Khmer friends in the new home sharing over a favourite Khmer dish “Nom Ban Chok” (a rice noodle accompanied with a variety of salad ingredients, including flowers, then a curry or fish soup to top it off) we also had the unwelcome guests of a colony of ants joining the party. It added to the experience for some to pick the ants out of the food as we sat around with our Khmer friends.

Relocating well with the help of local Khmer friends.
Our children gathering together regularly supporting each other.
The provision of a new country home and community.

Prayer Requests:
Growing understanding of the language and culture of our Khmer neighbours.
That Khmer living with significant fears would know true peace.
That we would continue to be equipped for serving the Khmer people.

GRIFFITH GLEANINGS SEPTEMBER 2017

As each month passes we continue to gain more insights into Khmer culture. One of the ways we do this is to go on outings with our language nurturers. Our language nurturers are more than teachers. In some ways they feel like members of our family. Although we are old enough to be parents of a couple of them, it sometimes feels more like we are the young children and they are the parents; helping us with phrases, fostering understanding of stories and caring about minimising some of the ‘accidents’ we may have. We have gone on a couple of whole day events together where we have gone out of Siem Reap to places of cultural significance, or where we can just interact with them to learn more about their culture. A highlight of our recent day trip was sharing breakfast at a country home with the family of one of Rob’s nurturers. As his father had recently had an accident with a cow that broke his hip, we took some fruit and drinks as gifts and used our limited Khmer to talk with the family and learn about what life is like for them. Rob learned about how to throw a fishing net and work on his Khmer names of plants, while Deb had an encounter with one family member who expressed a desire to share her next life together! It is truly a privilege to be growing participators in the Khmer culture here.
This month we have also enjoyed learning more about where Khmer people live, how they get around and explored why they are more likely to get on a motorcycle to go even a short distance rather than walk.

GRIFFITH GLEANINGS AUGUST 2017

Whoever said learning the A-B-C is as easy as 1-2-3? When it comes to the Khmer letters and numerical system, the counting is actually significantly easier to learn than reading. The numbers are repeated when you reach the number five, except the tens so less than half as many numbers to learn as the English equivalent. We have increased our face-to face learning hours to 5 hours per day to facilitate an hour learning to read Khmer. The Khmer writing uses a different script to English and there are no spaces between words, so it will take us a while to learn to read. We know that we will still be learning for as many years as we are given the privilege to live here. We learnt this week that in the writing of the Khmer consonants they can have hair, body and legs. Learning a new culture and language reminds Deb of the “Tadpole Blues” song her second eldest child sang many years ago at a school assembly with great gusto at age 5 years. Here’s the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgM20r6WnHI The morphing of a tadpole to a frog involves many changes. In the song there is a subtle message about facing fears and finding things out for yourself. In the experience of traversing into a new cultural there can be a tension between what was (home culture) and the new identity (new culture).

The team Cambodia language facilitators Catherine and Janelle have worked hard to put things in place for the language nurturers, ourselves and those families preparing to join us here in Cambodia. Although we are the first Global Interaction team members in Cambodia to utilise the Growing Participatory Redemptive Approach (GRPA) to learning language, the model initially designed by the Greg and Angela Thomson a couple serving with WEC International at the time and has been used by many agencies around the world since the late 1970’s. Here’s the link for GRPA for those wanting to know more: https://growingparticipatorapproach.wordpress.com/six-phase-programme/ We are presently mid-way through Phase 3b. Later in the year there will be a meeting here in Siem Reap of representatives from most teams among the nine locations where Global Interaction are working to refresh training with the focus on this culture and learning approach. Deb hopes to join these sessions to glean from other cultural and linguistic insights.

Thank you for the many ways you support us to be here. Really it makes a difference to be sharing in this together. ‘We’ with ‘you’ are part of what God is doing here in Cambodia bringing his wholeness and wellbeing to the Khmer people. Now having lived in Siem Reap, Cambodia almost 8 months we are drawn to the country areas where we are able to watch the rice fields and other numerous crops be prepared, sown, grown, and harvested. The area in the North West of Cambodia where Global Interaction will be focused is rural areas that are home to mostly subsistence farmers. As we seek to learn more about the rural context for Khmer people, we are drawn to be looking for a home closer to where most Khmer live out of the city. Whilst our focus continues to be our cultural and language learning this requires a Siem Reap base, but we hope to partner our learning with building relationships with more rural Khmer people on the fringe of the city. We are thankful for a house-sit where we got a taste of this over the past few weeks.

GRIFFITH GLEANINGS JULY 2017

Whilst the dramas we encounter in Cambodia may not be on the scale of the famous ‘Spaghetti Western’, we have experienced more than enough drama in our June visit to Phnom Penh. An overnight health check up turned into a different cultural learning experience than we could have imagined. On the way to our morning appointment just metres from our destination a bag snatcher skilfully manoeuvred his motorcycle to grab Deb’s bag. What followed was a day of undesired adventure; the mixture of the good character of a number of locals who assisted us and some ugly and bad aspects of crime and its fruits in Phnom Penh. Between our medical appointments we inspected some 8 different police stations, tracked down the laptop using a clever phone app. and GPS signal and with the help of one hotel staff member and our Tuk Tuk driver participated in the police response that captured the culprit. After the investigation, arrest and police reporting process we not only received back the laptop, but fitted in all our days medical appointments. An additional surprise a day or two later was seeing Deb’s photo and some of her personal details feature in a newspaper article covering the incident that we thought had only been information gathered for the police evidence for the purpose of convicting the bag snatcher (there are no privacy laws in Cambodia!). The bag snatcher interestingly was described in the news article as a “handsome thief” and had been caught on 3 previous occasions over a number of years. We pray that the thief has his life turned around while serving a sentence and finds a new and better profession. Our Khmer friends back in Siem Reap were apologetic that they had not specifically warned us about the dangers of a visit to the Cambodian capital. We are thankful and humbled that we were unhurt and that we had the uncommon outcome of receiving back stolen goods. Thank you for your prayers that do make a difference to our everyday life here in Cambodia.

The team here in Cambodia valued the recent stay of Heather Coleman our General Director of Global Interaction the mission agency we serve with. Heather previously lived and served with her husband Ron in Cambodia and it was good to glean some of her insights. We also in past years were together in Blackwood Hills Baptist Church, South Australia. We are conscious that their are many who have gone before us and we have much still to learn as we listen with them. We will always be learners in Cambodia and seek to listen and be open to wisdom as we navigate bringing a blessing where we are placed here.