Dangerous Territory Read online

  So far I’m failing to fit my own story into the narrative mold: I’ve told you little of my childhood, and nothing of my conversion. You’ve seen how conflicted I am about my “calling” to missions.

  Let us see if I can do better as we go on.

  2

  Backpackers and Wanderlust

  My soul longs to feel itself more of a pilgrim and stranger here below, that nothing may divert me from pressing through the lonely desert, till I arrive at my Father’s house.

  David Brainerd

  What might it not mean for others if all of us who are seeking after a country of our own, a better Country, that is, a heavenly, lived more like pilgrims here?

  Amy Carmichael, Gold Cord

  The country director, Camille, met us at the airport with a case of bottled water and a fifteen-passenger van. Lisa and I helped each other lift our suitcases into the back, and then I slid down a sun-baked bench seat toward the window, trying to memorize everything I saw. The drive into the capital was a study in contrasts: new electronics factories on one side of the road; shacks selling bottles of Coke and Fanta on the other. Rice fields and water buffalo on my left; slender, three-story colonial buildings in pastel colors on my right. I jotted down notes for a letter home to Grandma, who didn’t have e-mail and would expect handwritten updates.

  Grandma hadn’t been thrilled that I was moving overseas. Mostly, she was worried I would end up marrying a foreigner. Her concern didn’t stop her from supporting me; along with money she gave me plenty of advice. In truth, I thought Grandma, of all people—the woman who took me to Scotland when I was fifteen, the one who regularly traveled around the world—would understand at least one of the reasons I wanted to go. I thought she also had a touch of the wanderer in her.

  Grandma liked to tell stories about her mother, Nellie, who grew up on a Colorado ranch at the turn of the century. Nellie’s parents divorced when her mother told her father, “It’s the race horse or me. Choose.” Her dad moved west, to Salt Lake City. When Nellie graduated from high school, she packed a single suitcase and hopped the first train to visit her father. Together, the two of them traveled down the west coast, from Alaska to Glendora, California, working odd jobs, living in logging camps, seeing the country.

  I say Grandma liked to tell that story, but really, I always asked for it—because in Nellie I glimpsed some genetic excuse for my wanderlust, some hereditary reason for the fact that most of my dreams involved buses, trains, and backpacks.

  Maybe it’s part of a mythical American heritage for those of us descended from immigrant and pioneer stock, those who left Europe dirt poor, the ones who never stopped searching for a new frontier. We sing about “wide open spaces” and riding off on trains “to look for America.” We believe that leaving holds some answer.

  At the age of twenty-two, I’d already lived in six cities and traveled to twelve countries. My senior thesis in college had been about this mythic ideal of wanderlust in American pop culture. When I decided to move overseas, it hadn’t felt like a sacrifice—it had felt like a rite of passage. Sure, I’d be far from my family, unable to stay up to date on movies or purchase a Frappuccino or wear a two-piece at the beach or browse in an English bookstore. But honestly, I thought people should be jealous of me, not pitying me.

  I even viewed it as a Christian virtue, this willingness to leave, to lead an uncomfortable and migratory existence. It’s what God called Abraham to do, after all—to leave his home and travel to an unknown destination. I treasured my wanderlust, seeing it as part of my desire to live a meaningful life rather than one organized around personal comfort.

  I didn’t want avoiding discomfort to become one of my life goals. I’d seen too many Americans live that way, and it ended in suburban homes with two-car garages and lots of television to mask the ennui. I wanted a less comfortable life, one where I didn’t feel poured into a snug, safe, preexisting mold.

  I got to go. I got to leave. I had found a new frontier. This was the American dream. And I got to do it in the name of God. Suddenly my fear of commitment took on a nice religious sheen. Going was the righteous thing to do.

  At the outskirts of the capital, traffic thickened and slowed. Scooters and bikes zipped around us, honking madly to announce their presence, ignoring the suggestions made by traffic lights. Women with long hair in low ponytails swept the sidewalks and stoked fires in small curbside grills, turning kabobs over the flames. Motorbike taxi drivers lounged on their stationary machines, clustered at street corners, smoking cigarettes and pulling on hats to protect against the sun. The air-conditioning in our van blew full force on my face. I reached up to close the vent, allowing myself to feel the heat.

  * * *

  All the English teachers spent five days training in the capital, beginning every day with breakfast at six. I’d come down from the shoebox of a hotel room I shared with another teacher, through the lobby that smelled of boiled eggs and perfumed cleaning fluids, to a plentiful Continental breakfast. There were bread and eggs plus all kinds of new things: rice porridge, mango juice, dragon fruit with its gorgeous pink-petaled skin and white flesh flecked with black. Instrumental versions of American pop songs from the sixties and seventies played softly over the speakers, and while we ate, Lisa, Jack, and I told each other the weird jet-lagged dreams we’d had.

  By seven o’clock we’d delve into language drills, cultural instruction, methods for teaching English, strategies for sharing and discipleship. We took turns practicing our teaching in front of the group. I caught Jack’s eye when another teacher gave a pronunciation lesson in a rich Texas accent. Overwhelmed and exhausted, we began giggling at the thought of our Asian students speaking English with a southern drawl, and we couldn’t stop.

  Another day our language coach dropped us off in the open-air market with billfolds full of strange new currency. Practicing words we’d just learned, we stepped from one stall to the next on dusty dirt paths. Freshly slaughtered pigs and chickens hung under tent ceilings. I picked up a package of instant noodles and tentatively asked, “How much is this?” I marveled when I managed to understand the answer.

  Along with language for bargaining, we were trained to respond to the most common questions natives would ask us: How old are you? Where are you from? Are you married? Do you want a native husband? (Don’t tell Grandma.)

  Near the end of training we went to the touristy part of town for a dinner that cost more than our usual fifty-cent meals. I was headachy and withdrawn as I watched the people in the restaurant, wondering if it was okay for us to spend so much on a meal—five or six dollars—when we were supposed to be ems. We never referred to ourselves as missionaries, but sometimes used the abbreviation “M.”

  By the front window I saw a couple of backpackers. She wore braids and a kerchief, while his hair was in almost-dreadlocks. Over a couple of drinks, they sat silently. He wrote a card and she studied a guidebook; after a few minutes they switched, and she read and approved his letter to be sent home.

  Watching them filled me with a weird envy. What was I doing, teaching English? I wanted the backpackers’ freedom—all my possessions on my back, no plans, no expectations or requirements, just going or staying and reading and writing and watching. I wanted to float across a continent again, as I’d done in college, when I spent a summer traveling through Europe: sleeping on thin bunk beds on rocking trains, waking as German officials shouted, “Schnell! Schnell!” and opening the train windows to smell the dewy green smells of a new country, clutching steaming paper cups of coffee and hard rolls. Showering inconsistently, hiking alone on paths marked “Wanderweg,” meeting other like-minded travelers in small coastal towns, watching the sun set from a hostel balcony. I didn’t want to have to think about how my habits of living looked to the people around me, whether or not it was okay to spend five dollars on a meal when my future students might be able to eat for a week on that much money.
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br />   At times our in-country training did have some of that backpacker feel, though; after five days in the capital we took a bus into the mountains, a remote countryside spot inhabited by a minority group of Thai descent.

  “This doesn’t look good,” Lisa remarked as our van began to snake up into the hills.

  “Do you get carsick?” I asked. She shook her head. “We’ll get there,” I assured her optimistically.

  Navy storm clouds sped across the sky, and we fishtailed on the rough dirt roads. The rain slowed us, made the ruts on the narrow roads deeper and our bounces higher.

  Jack strummed awkwardly on his guitar in the back of the bus to the fawning adoration of several female teachers. I turned my back to them, focusing instead on my novel, avoiding the view out the window of the steep drop below us.

  In the village we stayed in a house on stilts, a kind of tree house that reminded me of the Swiss Family Robinson. The structure had one open room, with thin wooden floors and woven mats on which we ate and slept, played cards and told stories. The walls boasted posters of Asian pop stars, curling with age at the edges, outdated calendars with painted scenery, straggly tinsel, and a torn world map on which familiar places bore exotic names.

  When the rain stopped, we walked outside, through rice paddies and running water, over orange dirt and green hills, among bamboo houses with straw-thatched roofs. The mist that came in with the rain draped itself across the hills and into the mountains, making the unworldly place even more magical.

  Down the road we met little girls with deep eyes and warm smiles, selling friendship bracelets they’d made. From their mothers I bought brightly colored fabric wall hangings. Later, a group of us borrowed bicycles to explore further. Some tired and turned back, but Jack and I continued, talking about Flannery O’Connor, poetry, obscure bands, our sisters. I felt the wind in my hair and realized I was smiling.

  * * *

  “I’m afraid your teaching visas still haven’t come in,” Camille told us a few days later. Lisa and I were in the living room of Camille’s house in the capital, waiting for our laundry to finish in the dryer. Most of the teachers would leave the next morning, dispersing throughout the country to begin work at their various universities. But because our university had been late with our initial paperwork, Lisa and I had entered the country on tourist visas, which were set to expire.

  “So what will we do?” Lisa asked.

  “We’re going to get you on a flight to Bangkok this week,” Camille answered. “When your teaching visas are ready, we’ll have them sent to embassy there, and then you can reenter the country. This kind of stuff just happens sometimes.” She smiled apologetically.

  Secretly, I was thrilled. Another country for my passport, more backpacking and freedom.

  A few days later, Lisa and I joined Australian backpackers, French tourists, and a family of suntanned Italians on a plane to Bangkok, where we would wait and pray for visas.

  We stayed at a Baptist guesthouse at the end of a long, dirt road. On the river behind us, the city bus-on-boat began running at six in the morning, which was still an hour and a half after the rooster started crowing. We were out the door early every day, buying milky sweet coffee in plastic bags, hot corn waffles, and fried bananas from street vendors. Lisa made a pleasant travel partner, easygoing and polite. She was about ten years older than I was, and took the lead in navigation as we explored the city. We didn’t have much in common, but she told me about Canadian hockey teams and her niece and nephew, and I told her about Charley.

  “You’re still with him?” she asked, when I said that though Charley and I had broken up the previous year, we were still sort of in a relationship.

  “Yeah.” I tried to explain. “See, while we were broken up last year, we both decided independently to move to Asia and he seemed to have changed, to have grown more mature, so . . . I don’t know, it seemed like a sign. I guess we’re back together.”

  “Hmm,” Lisa said. “I thought maybe you and Jack . . .”

  “No, I mean . . .” I blushed. “Yeah, I like him, but. Anyway. We’re not supposed to date this year.” That was our organization’s policy for first-year teachers, but since Charley and I had been together before moving to Asia, we were kind of an exception.

  “What about you?” I asked, glad to change the subject. “Is there anyone you’re interested in?”

  When our girl talk wound down, we prayed together about our visas and our future students. As the days in Bangkok lengthened and our prayers increased, my wanderlust started to fade. And I even began to doubt its value. What if my hunger for adventure, new sights, independence, and freedom was just as dangerous, in its own way, as the lust for comfort could be? Was there something unhealthy about the kind of wandering I craved? Was it symptomatic of a larger problem, of an inability to commit to places or to people? Why was I so afraid of a mortgage and a husband, of a career and a hometown, of settling down?

  I started to develop a longing to unpack my backpack, to settle into our new home and meet our students.

  3

  Expats Will Change the World

  Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in nongovernmental associations.

  Robert Woodberry, in American Political Science Review (2012)

  Finally our visas were in, and we left the bejeweled golden temples of the land of smiles, the land of Pizza Huts and night markets and cooking classes that teach white people how to shake a wok over a fire. We flew back to the capital of our host country, our bags weighed down with new purchases from Thailand: striped coffee mugs, jars of peanut butter, an acoustic guitar. A school van met us, taking us through long stretches of quiet rice fields toward our new home. The heartland of this country, like the heartland of America, is farmland, and our students would be mostly the children of farmers, hoping to support their financially struggling families with stable English teacher salaries.

  Experienced teachers had warned us not to expect much from our university-provided accommodations. We’d heard stories of cockroach infestations, dead rats, inches of grime. Lisa and I arrived on campus on a Saturday, in the hottest part of the day, mid-afternoon. School officials welcomed us awkwardly with the little English they knew, and called in male students to carry our luggage up the five flights to our rooms.

  We paused, sweating and out of breath, halfway up the 101 stairs to the fifth floor. Looking off the balcony, we could see all of campus: two long, low rows of classrooms, an auditorium, some scattered small buildings, and another five story dormitory opposite us. The dusty roads were lined with small trees, and for the moment, campus was quiet. Although classes met six days a week, including Saturdays, everything shut down for a couple hours after lunch for the campus-wide siesta.

  At the top of the smooth, yellow cement stairway, we found our rooms. Three rooms, just alike—the first for me, the second for Lisa, and the third to be our kitchen/office. My room was simple, like a nice dorm room, outfitted with a desk, a double bed, a plywood dresser, and a mini-fridge. Off the back, a toilet, shower, and sink. A bit dusty and gecko-haunted, but perfectly livable.

  This would be home base for changing the world, even if all that meant was that we helped a few teenagers learn English so they could have stable jobs in the future.

  We set to cleaning and unpacking. On the following day, we were given our teaching schedules; the day after that, we began teaching. With only two full days in our new home, barely time to unpack and figure out where to obtain food, we were flung into work, writing our own curricula, teaching groups of thirty to thirty-five undergraduates how to speak, write, read, and listen to English.

  On the first day of class I
woke at 5:30, when it was still dark and quiet outside, still feeling like the middle of the night. I flipped on my overhead lights and the electric water heater, then flopped back into bed until the water boiled, praying in disconnected phrases while I tried to wake up. By 6:00 music and announcements in a language I couldn’t understand were blaring over the campus loudspeakers, and I could hear students in the dorms across from my building calling to each other.

  After a rushed half-cup of Nescafé 3 in 1 (an instant coffee with milk and sugar), I stepped into clothes and packed my satchel. At 6:15, the sun was already bright and hot, and the campus active and loud. I crossed a couple of streets and passed dozens of students wearing their traditional dress, required every Monday. I ascended 72 steps to my classroom, and set up for the students.

  The classroom had the same floor tile pattern as my apartment, maroon and gold flowers swirling in squares. Students would sit three to a desk, on wooden benches, facing the long, green chalkboards in the front of the room. Air conditioning was only a dream in these buildings, but we occasionally got a breeze through the barred windows or the open door. When class began at 6:30, sweat was already trickling down the small of my back.

  I would teach Speaking and Listening to third-year students. The room went silent when I entered, but whispers and giggles erupted from the back corners as I unpacked my satchel and wrote my name on the blackboard. After introducing myself, I gave the students an assignment: “Turn to the person next to you. Tell her about the best teacher you ever had, and what made that teacher so good.”