Breaking the Silence

Hey friends, family, and supporters!

I'm so sorry for quite the prolonged silence! I'm not very good at making myself sit down and write. In the past two months, I've been busy traveling, working, and in my free time having as much fun as possible by enjoying the area!

I've done some traveling in the region, visiting some other workers in the field.

We did some research interviewing minority hill tribe farmers. All across Southeast Asia, hill tribe minorities are the most poor, most marginalized, and most exploited people. Many of the dominant ethnicities (Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodians, etc) live in the lower elevations, where farming is more productive. Hill tribe people like the Hmong, Karen, Lahu, and others remain marginalized and exploited across Southeast Asia.

We did some interviewing to gain a better understanding of what some of these communities are facing. We found numerous issues.

For one, many of the farmers have a limited elementary education and their understanding of math is minimal. Because of this, they are often exploited in market transactions and loans. For example, they are given outrageous rates of interest in their loans. These terms are bad enough, but then the interest they are actually required to pay back is even higher than the outrageous terms that they were quoted! Because they have little understanding of math, they simply accept these terms without questioning them or seeking loans elsewhere.

The agricultural economics is a complex situation in which farmers become tied to middlemen who exploit them. The middlemen act as links between the farmer and the market, buying from the farmer and selling to "retailers" in the market. Oftentimes the farmers run out of money before harvest time. They borrow money and supplies like fertilizer from the middleman who then requires them to guarantee that they will sell their crops to him at harvest time. Because the farmers are locked into this guarantee, the middleman forces them to sell to him at an unfairly low price. Because they get less money than they should, they run out of money again before the next harvest. And the whole thing repeats itself again.

Farmers also become entrapped in the use of fertilizer. They're told by educated people outside the community to use fertilizer. But they have no understanding of how it works or how to use it and therefore apply it indiscriminately. The fertilizer ultimately degrades the soil and it becomes less nutritious and therefore more in need of fertilizer.

Also, these communities are largely communities based around seasonal harvests and have very little cash, or even experience with using cash. Being used to a subsistence agricultural system, their communities are suddenly being inundated with products and the materialism that manufactured goods inevitably bring with them. Everyone wants a big, new TV or a motorbike, even though they can't afford it. They take out loans to buy it and again, end up running out of money before harvest time.

If you were to diagram all of the causes and effects of these decisions and actions, you would see a vicious cycle of choices that leads to a poverty trap that is very hard to break. There are numerous decisions that lead to poverty that further perpetuate those decisions. To break one bad habit, requires breaking another bad decision, which requires breaking another bad choice, which is probably caused by some external factor. It's a very complicated mess.

So we have been working on several curriculum which will be implemented in training sessions that the farmers are in. The goal is to equip them with the correct tools to bring themselves out of poverty, through new knowledge and new understanding. We are seeking to help them gain a better understanding of math to avoid exploitation, teach them new agricultural methods that are organic, sustainable, cheap, and productive, and teach them how to budget their income and expenditures.

The hope is to walk alongside these farmers in an effort to break this vicious cycle of poverty through attacking the agricultural, economical, and social issues that these communities are facing.

Many of them have already gone through trainings that involve changing their worldview and what it means to be a Christian, live in community, etc. These trainings have brought significant transformation to entire villages - both spiritually and physically.

Our hope and prayer is that the curriculum that we develop will add to the work already done and will continue to help transform the communities and individual lives and that through each small step at a time, the Kingdom of God would be brought to this earth through spiritual, economic, and social transformation.

Most of my workdays have consisted of me sitting at my computer working on the curriculum, so there's not many inspiring stories to tell or interesting pictures to show.

In my free time though, I have had some opportunities to enjoy what Southeast Asia has to offer! I'll put up some pictures fairly soon from some of my adventures!