The way they said his name it sounded like “Koi”. His mom told us about him through our interpreter. She sat, squatting in the dirt as they all do, with her two grandchild on either side. The grandchildren she adopted when their parents divorced. Their mom was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and their dad divorced her and left the kids in the care of his mother. Her husband sat across from me with a vacant stare. Mostly blind. Mostly deaf. Behind the grandmother was the small blue-ish-green salon where her oldest daughter worked to support the family.
We sat on a wooden table under the stilted house. The rain from that morning had turned the dirt that is the floor of their “living room”, “dining room”, and “kitchen” into soft mush that our sandals kept slipping in.
She told us of her conversion. Of how she had to sell the back part of her land to support her family. The neighbors who bought it and moved in were Christians. One day when she was over there to visit she found their hymnal. A title of a song told her that it was a song about A God Above All Other Gods. She decided she wanted that God instead of her empty traditions and a god she barely knew. That was 16 years ago.
She passed around one of her most prized possession. Two laminated photos, placed back to back. One side was her in a river, her hands clasped in front of her in prayer, and the pastor’s hand on her hands. The other side showed her oldest grandson in the same position. Their baptisms. She beamed with pride as we passed the photo around.
Then she took us back to see “Koi”. Her 33 year old son was her biggest financial struggle. You see, when her son was 16 something happened. He started to become violent and uncontrollable. As she told us the story our brains jumped to many different conclusions. Some sort of undiagnosed physical illness? Demon possession? Or a mental disability?
She walked us through the mud in the yard as she apologized for the smell. Not a smell from the yard, but from her son. I saw a wooden roof behind a screened fence. Wooden posts and white canvas separated her son from the rest of her family. At the edge of the property, snug up against the neighboring cement building was an opening. She disappeared behind it for a second, and then popped back out and encouraged us to see her son.
When it was my turn I braced myself. And there he was, just as she had described him. His home was a wooden platform with wooden poles in the corners holding up a roof. His bathroom was where he sat. His only clothing was a blanket thrown over his shoulders. His hair hung down in an unkempt fashion. His dark eyes held a blank stare, a blank stare mixed with confusion, and a touch of wildness. Around his ankle was the chain that held him to the middle of the platform.
She told us that if he is loose he will hit and attack anything in sight. People, objects, pillars, cars. This is for their protection and for his. She looked at him lovingly. She never talked about him with disgust. She chatted unconcerned about how she wished she could get someone to cut his hair. She was just as eager for us to meet him as she was eager for us to meet all of the other members of her family. We prayed for him. We prayed for her as she has HEP C and is trying to get medication, we prayed for her husband, for her grandchildren, for her daughters business.
We prayed and we left. Our feet left the gravel of her yard and hit the cement. One step. Two steps. And normal conversation started up. Three steps. Four steps. And we were discussing what house we were visiting next. Five steps. Six steps. A joke about getting tacos. Seven steps. Eight steps. . . . I broke down crying.
I am very blessed. I am blessed enough to make a joke about tacos. I am blessed enough to be able to know that soon I get to go home and have very few worries. I am blessed because I know that no matter what happens, I will never have to chain one of my own children to a wooden platform.
I did not visit any more houses that day. I had to go back to our house and digest what we had just experienced. I had to wrestle with why no miracles happened after our prayers that day. I had to wrestle with the guilt of being born to an American family and a Christian home. I had to wrestle with how life will move on. We cannot live in the despair we felt sitting at that ladies house. It felt strange to smile and make jokes that day, but in the end I cannot just sit and sulk and feel bad for that woman the rest of my life. I can remember her. I can find passion for the hurting people of our world. I can find small ways to help. But in the end God does not just want me to mourn for her suffering.
Since that day I have seen another chained. Another wooden stilt house. One room and a kitchen. A family of eight or so flitted in and out. The second oldest sister, dressed in pink, sat in the corner wearing a stare similar to Koi’s. A scrap of cloth cushioned her ankle from the rusted metal. The chain dropped down through the floor boards and was secured there. A little less wild and a little more present, but a mental illness none-the-less. The chain she wore was not to protect us, but to protect her and to keep her from wandering into a world that she could not survive in.
Every month the word “luxury” is redefined. Forget telling kids that having a cell phone and Ugg boots, and a North Face jacket is a luxury. Forget telling kids that having a car and an Xbox is a luxury. Look around you, does your house have more than two rooms? Do you have to share a bedroom with your entire family? Do you have running water and electricity? Those things are luxuries.
Toilet paper is a luxury. Use your hand. Shoes are a luxury. That is what the bottom of your feet are for. Mental health care is a luxury. Not only is there probably no mental health ward around, but even if there was a hospital to take them in, you cannot afford it, and you do not have a government that is set up to care for them either.
And what can we do? For my team we visited a house, we listened to a story, we shared our stories, we read some verses, we talked about struggle, we talked about joy, we talked about God. We prayed. Sometimes that is all we can do. I might be able to find small ways to help this lady, but when it comes to Koi and taking care of him, that is something far too big for me to handle.
So if you have room in your prayers tonight, please raise up Koi and his family, and the struggling families of Cambodia. Raise them up to the One who can handle all of the “far too big” things.
I would love to end this blog with a happy ending. I would love to tell you how we solved this woman’s problems and how we did a great thing. I would love to be able to show you that this is the good that the World Race can do. But in the end I will never know how much we impacted this woman’s life. I pray that some of the words we left her with impacted her life and will help to carry her through her hard times, but only God will know.
Whatever impact we left with her, I still believe entirely in what we are doing. Some days it might be hard to see the impact, but there is a bigger plan and a bigger picture at work here.
