5th
Making it Work
In our community, Word Made Flesh, we’ve created open spaces for relationships with some of the most vulnerable of the world’s poor.
Because of the intensity of our service environments (slums, favelas, refugee camps and red-light districts), they are not places where people should casually visit. It has taken years and years to build trust in the neighborhoods where our communities locate themselves.
So, if people are interested in becoming part of our community, we typically ask them to come and join us for a 4 month internship as a period of vocational exploration.
After 4 months, the intern and their hosting community thoughtfully and prayerfully explore whether or not the intern would be a good candidate for a staff position. If it seems right, we offer them an interview for an initial 3 year staff contract.
Since WMF was started in 1991 we’ve sent more than 1,000 people out on short-term exposure trips (Discovery Teams, Servant Teams, and Internships) as well as employed over 350 people.
Of Of those we’ve employed, the Indian, Nepali, Romanian, Sierra Leonean, and Peruvian staff have been the most committed.
When we sent out North American staff what we usually see happen is embodied in one of two postures, granted these are caricatures, but general observations on two trajectories that are most commonly observed:
1) Some people who start a 3 year contact almost immediately begin counting down till their contract renewal date, around 6 months before the end of their 3 year term. In the first days of their placement they are already stressing about whether or not they’ll renew their contract. These people also almost immediately start thinking about what they will do after their service with WMF has completed. Rather than being present in community, from the get-go some people are looking through and past their term of service. Many times, these people come to us with a great deal of enthusiasm and vision, driven to accomplish or establish a new initiative—this can be concerning… as if in 3 years they would really be able to start something new that could become sustainable and then have the audacity to leave it.
2) Other people join WMF and grapple with the issue of making their field of service a home. They move into a neighborhood and practice being a good neighbor. They make it a priority to form meaningful and lasting local relationships that become life-giving friendships. They make it a point to learn language and try as often as possible to speak in the language of their host country. They resist the tendency to resent or even ridicule the local culture and posture themselves submissively to it as a learner and a guest. They don’t look for excuses to leave their host country, but try to assimilate as much as possible. These are the people who don’t worry about 3 year contracts, but have a long-view of the possibility and potential of their presence among the poor.
I’ve been in Calcutta this week. Sarah Lance is the WMF Field Director here and was also recently appointed our WMF Asia Regional Coordinator. Sarah has made Calcutta her home. She’s surrendered her freedoms to the suffering of her friends here who are forced to prostitute. She’s become a sign and symbol of hope.
Tonight, after visiting several of her friends who live and work in one of the nearby red-light districts, we stopped to check out a little tiny flat that she’s hoping to move in to. The whole place isn’t much bigger than the average college dorm room. It’s a 3 minute walk from one of South Asia’s most notorious red-light districts. And it’s beautiful. It’s her home.
Earlier this year WMF had Amey Victoria Adkins and Leia Harper spoke at one of our monthly Beggar’s Society Meetings. Leia grew up in West Jackson, Mississippi. The inner-city. One of her neighbors was Dr. John Perkins, a civil-rights leader and community development legend.
During the Beggar’s Society Meeting she was reflecting on what it was like living in her community. I asked her, “What was it like having a bunch of white college students come visit you every spring break and summer to do ‘mission’ in your community? What was it like having them offer ‘solutions’ to your community’s poverty? What was it like when they’d only stay 7-10 days and then leave?”
Leai, gracious as always and reflecting sincere humility, softly and kindly shared that the problem wasn’t as much that people came and went, but that it was an issue of perspective, she said, “To you it’s a ‘mission field’ but to us it’s ‘home’.”
Wow.
Being here and having had the privilege of following Sarah Lance around this week I’m seeing what it takes to make a city like Calcutta “home.” I’m seeing that rather than reducing Calcutta to a “mission field” or even her friends in the commercial sex industry as a “cause,” Sarah has humanized herself by being humanized by her friends and neighbors.
She’s making it work. It’s an inspiration and a challenge, and one that points to the real and painful costs of the luxury of exposure.
