Accepting Hospitality

A normal question we encountered over and over again at the beginning of our time here in Malaysia was, "how do you find Malaysia?" It seemed every time we saw anyone from church, they would want to know how we were getting along - especially with the weather. (It's quite hot here, if you haven't heard.)

After a few weeks, the questions turned to food. No matter what time it was or what we were about to do, every time we got into the car with someone, they would promptly ask, "Have you eaten?" We never tried it, I would guess if we had ever said we were hungry, they would have put the pedal to the floor in search of acceptable food choices.

In these past few weeks together, we have been getting a different question when gathering with folks. "What will you miss the most?"

The food.
The people.

Table fellowship.

"In the beginning was the Word. It was only when human beings appeared that the Word became food on a table. We know that language allows us to understand each other and to express what we think and feel. We humans, however, are more than language. We humans are cookingage, i.e., that which allows us to prepare the food with which we can nourish not only our body, but also our spirit. It was when we started to cook our first meals and when we started to conjugate the incarnate Word that we noticed that we were human. Both table and Word humanize us. No wonder it is essential that the table on which our meals are served be conjoined with good conversation: at the table, the word is essential."  -- Forward by Joaquín Racionero Page

(From "Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist" by Angel F. Méndez Montoya, vi)

Hospitality is about more than giving. I think there's also an element of receiving in it too. Showing hospitality has been instilled in me from a young age. My mom was always hosting parties and dinners when we were growing up. It seemed no matter where we moved, one thing remained constant -- our house was a place to gather, a place to eat, and a place to have fellowship. I don't remember going to as many parties as we hosted when I was growing up. It wasn't just parties, either. We constantly had people staying at our house overnight. Later, Mom would laugh and called the house Hotel Habermehl, but I remember it vividly. No matter who it was -- grandparents or friends of friends -- everyone was welcome at our house for as long as they needed to be there.

Therefore, as I grew older, I became very good at hosting and not so great at receiving hospitality.

Okay, let me be clear: my body rejects hospitality like it rejects red meat and dairy products. I'm simply not very good at being taken care of. I'm the worst guest if you expect me to just relax and receive. I'm the kind of guest you invite over before the party so I can clean your house and help bake the pies. I'm not entirely sure what it is about receiving that grates me. It probably has to do with my perfectionist tendencies and my over- achiever work ethic. Whatever it is, I was in for a rude awakening in Malaysia.

Learning to accept hospitality and assistance has been the hardest for me this year. It has taken me nearly six months to even write about how it has affected my life. We spent the year without a car, in a foreign place, with foreign food, immersed in a different language. All of these things meant I had to learn how to accept the hospitality of others.

We had to ask people (in the beginning, they were complete strangers) to take us to the grocery store.
We had to call people to ask them what words meant in an Indian restaurant.
We went to lunch with people who ordered food for us without even knowing if we would eat it.
People drove us home from church and restaurants constantly because we had no way of transporting ourselves.
We were completely reliant on other people for things we never would have imagined before.

It was weird. It drove me insane. I fought back against it. But it changed me and formed me into a woman who can -- even if I don't really want to -- accept hospitality. And as I reflect on all the things I could miss about Malaysia, my heart keeps going back to the people, their hospitality, and especially their food. It's how they show that they care deeply for us and want us to be happy (and fed). And my goodness, is it biblical and wonderful. I miss it desperately and I can't wait to get back for more.

Hazed and Confused

The haze is getting to us.

Our morning routine typically consists of hauling ourselves out of bed around 10am (it's a rough life), grabbing a few water bottles out of the kitchen, and remarking about the weather.

"The haze looks like it lifted."
"Probably because of the rain."

"The haze is back again."
"Let's not leave the house today."

We have to go into the open-air hallway to get to the kitchen, so the weather kind of slaps us in the face as soon as we break the subpar seal of our air conditioned sanctuary of a bedroom.

We heard it was going to be bad this year. Actually, we heard that it was already bad this year. But we hadn't really noticed. Until recently.  There's a fun building we can usually see on our way to breakfast or the gym every morning. It looks like something out of Sim City and I enjoy imagining someone on their desktop computer controlling everything about Petaling Jaya and Kuala Lumpur - trading resources and building parks.  But lately we haven't been able to see the building from where we live. The haze has gotten much too terrible.

It is blowing in from Indonesia, where peat fields are burning for no real reason.  The burning and subsequent haze is even worse during dry years in Southeast Asia. This is not only harmful for the people living in haze areas (you know, me and the rest of the hundreds of millions of people here), but it is also harmful to the ozone layer. According to a report on Nature.com, "estimated carbon emissions from these 1997-98 fires were... equivalent to 13-40% of annual global fossil fuel emissions at that time."  And it's not getting any better. According to the same report, "in 2013... fires in Indonesia generated atmospheric pollution that exceeded the previous 1997-98 records over Singapore."

How is this happening, you might ask. Good question. It looks like (similar to most bad, harmful things in this world) big corporations and plantations are to blame. Peat bogs are sometimes drained in order to make room for farming and under the right (dry) circumstances, peat will burn indefinitely. Some peat fires have been burning in Indonesia since 1997. See the pretty map below.

Smoke and pollution from Indonesian fires, 1997.

Now I don't know if any of you have lived in a country with this much pollution on top of this much smoke haze, but I might be able to paint a good picture for you.

Below you will see the area where most of my readers live: Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.  While there are some places with abnormally high air quality indexes (probably because of factories), most areas hover around the 20s or 30s.  Even large cities don't have terrible ratings (around 50).

Now this picture shows where I'm living in Malaysia. This is updated from yesterday, one of the worst days we have had with haze since we have gotten here. All the numbers are above 100. Which is exactly why my eyes are burning while writing this post in an outdoor cafe. 

Curious about air quality in other places? Click here.

So let's just say the haze is getting to us. Between the phlegm, burning eyes, heavy chest, and coughing - we are about done with the dry season. The good news is that at least Indonesia has apologized for it...

This week in food

Malaysia is incredible. Marriage is awesome.

I'm still in the honeymoon stage. On both accounts.

So far, I have mostly documented my experience in terms of food. Unfortunately, I only have one exciting picture of our breakfast this morning. If you're not interested in food, you might be disappointed in this post and you can skip over it.

Monday: We arrived today and were whisked off to eat (because that's what you do here)! We had Cantonese food, which was new to me. It was a bed of rice (a theme you will see frequently) with various dishes - cabbage, bean curd, and chicken. It was all very good.

Tuesday: We went to the mall and met up with a friend from Daniel's church. She introduced us to delicious tea, an iced mocha, and the most incredible salted caramel cake. That night we were able to attend the weekly Bible study at a parishioner's house.  They graciously hosted us for dinner - rice, lamb curry, roasted chicken with vegetables, and so many good Malaysian fruits.

Wednesday: Our friend took us out to have Thai food - garlic pepper chicken, pandan chicken, vegetables, and a really spicy soup (over rice).  That was probably my favorite meal until this morning.

This morning we decided we should stop eating croissants and jelly every morning for breakfast. So instead we went down to the mamak (street side restaurant) not even a block from our house and had roti.  Roti is a similar consistency as a crepe and is served pulled apart with a curry sauce on the side. You can also get it with eggs, onions, and other things. It took us a while to figure out how to order, but everyone is really gracious to us foreigners. The best part was that our meal (2 rotis) costs 50 cents. So we will definitely be going back basically every morning. No more croissants and jelly for us!

Roti with spicy curry sauce!

Running on Fumes

I am exhausted. And I haven't even arrived in country yet. In fact, we are just now leaving Columbus. What is this life?

I am so ready for a new normal.  I don't know what that means yet (hopefully it involves naps), but I am definitely ready for it.  In the past three weeks, I haven't gotten anything close to normal.

We moved all of our belongings into storage.
We couch surfed for three days.
We temporarily moved into a mountain house with our family of twelve.
We got married (yikes).
We moved up to Ohio for a week with my parents.
We packed everything else we own into six bags.
We said goodbye.

And now we are weirdly in this in-between place again of not quite able to move forward and really really wanting to be in Malaysia already! Womp womp. That's the beautiful tragedy of airport terminals, I suppose.

The good news is that our first week of marriage has been pretty cool. We have gone to fancy restaurants, eaten a lot of good food, slept in until late, played with our wonderful dog, and played a lot of Spades with my parents.  All in all, if the rest of our marriage could continue like this (minus the whole living in my parents' house thing), we would be pretty happy.

But we are really ready for Kuala Lumpur.  We might be dreading the 36 hours it is going to take to get there, but we are really ready for the malls, the people, our own little house, a crazy year of internship, and lots of really good food.

And I, for one, am really excited for a new normal.  I am so ready to not be living out of my suitcase anymore. I am so ready to empty out onto the bathroom counter the quart size plastic bag I use to hold my makeup.  I am so ready to put my shampoo on the shower shelf for more than a week. And I am more than ready to sit down at night and say, "this is our home."  Even if it only lasts a few months.

So for now, I suppose I should nap a little bit before we get on this plane to Denver.  Because goodness knows it's only a matter of time before I start to get hangry and grumpy and altogether beat by this travel.  It's going to be a bumpy ride.

And in case you're wondering, here's our flight plan:

Columbus -> Denver -> Los Angelos -> Taipei -> Kuala Lumpur

See you on the other side of the world!

Why Malaysia?

I've gotten a lot questions lately.  They usually follow some comment I make about moving to Southeast Asia for the next year.  So here are a few of them and here are my somewhat vague answers...

So, why Malaysia?

Well, to answer "why Malaysia," we need to ask a few more questions before that.

Why are you moving at all? 

I'm in seminary and it is my third year as a Lutheran student.  In our third year (or sometimes our fourth), the Lutherans are sent out to do an internship for a year.  It is used as a learning experience so that we are able bring those experiences back to seminary for a year and mull them around in community, or go directly into a parish and use those experiences to be better pastors.  We, of course, aren't able to learn everything we need to know, but as we walk alongside a congregation who has a lot of experience forming, nurturing, and teaching future church leaders, we are hopefully a little more prepared for parish ministry.

Why did you choose Malaysia? 

I didn't choose Malaysia, to be quite honest.  No one gets to "choose" their internship.  There is a lot of planning, discerning, and praying that happens before anyone is assigned to an internship site.  We have a director for internship who works with our paperwork and his colleagues in order to place us in the best place for our specific needs and learning goals.  All of my Lutheran colleagues at Southern Seminary were given assignments within the United States- some of them in the Southeast and some of them as far away as California.

What's so special about you? 

Nothing. There is certainly nothing special about me.  I prayerfully decided (with Daniel) to apply for a different internship program that is run by the Global Mission division of the ELCA.  The application process started a few months before the domestic internship process and was a little more extensive.  There was probably ten times the amount of paperwork and an interview in Chicago with the Director of Global Mission.  I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting into at the time, but I knew I wanted to take the opportunity of internship to experience Church in a (very) different context.

Will you be doing missionary work?  Working in an orphanage and building houses? 

Not exactly. Actually, not at all.  My internship will be very similar to all of my other colleagues' internships.  I will be working in a Lutheran church with a supervising pastor.  I'll have all of the usual duties: preaching, teaching, counseling, and visiting.  I'm sure there will be some opportunities in which we might be able to go visit places outside of the city, but that is not what I will be doing regularly.

But seriously, why Malaysia? 

God is calling me to Malaysia for many reasons.  The first one being (I think), is that it isn't going to be easy. The other reasons will reveal themselves over the next year (or several).  But I believe God is at work in this unique opportunity and I could not be more excited about it.