Pat Answers #1 The Bah Ram Ewe Effect!

“Bah ram ewe, bah ram ewe, to your breed your fleece your clan be true! Sheep be true! Bah ram ewe.”

Coming to Thailand 20 years ago, I was sort of like Babe the Pig. I was a farang (westerner) in the far east. I really thought I had to become Thai in order to be effective. Problem was… just like Babe would never be a sheep, I could never become Thai. I didn’t even have the slightest clue about how exactly to ‘be Thai’. I thought that if I learned the language I could at least get started. I went to language school 4 hours a day for a year and a half. I learned all the consonants….

And I learned all the vowels…

And I learned how to put them together with the 5 tones so that I could read and write…

Oink.

I still didn’t know how to be Thai.

I ate the food (reluctantly at first, and always with a glass of iced water). I would attempt nonchalance as I ate some really weird foods, hoping to blend in with the locals. Sometimes I knew what I was eating. Sometimes I didn’t. Once a guy gave me a bowl of soup at church, and as I started to swish my spoon around I found little tiny heads… of pig foetuses. I didn’t eat that soup.

I could be a Canadian trying to be Thai, but I couldn’t be Thai.

Oink.

Then I swung the other direction and that’s where Babe and I differed. He persevered patiently, just being his own pig self among the sheep. Me on the other hand, I felt that if these people were going to keep laughing at my best efforts to be Thai, and if this culture was so impenetrable, then I would stubbornly dig my pig-headed Canadian heels in and all you Thai people, well, you could just fuggeddaboudit.

What did digging Canadian heels look like? Well… I started to make comparisons.

Canadian police

Royal Canadian Mounted Police, thank-you very much!

And Thai police…

Whenever I could I made a point to tell everybody how it was done in Canada… in Canada we sit on toilets, not squat. In Canada you don’t drive your motorbike on the sidewalk. You don’t drive down the wrong side of the street. In Canada we this and we that and blah blah blah.

But again, this was a futile exercise. We weren’t in Canada. We were in Thailand.

Oink.

Then, a shamefully long time later, and with a little help from my friends, I learned the Bah Ram Ewe effect; it’s a very good idea to be true to myself. It’s not photoshop or cutting certain parts of Thai culture  pasting them onto me.

Photoshopped & cut-and-pasted

It’s being myself within Thai culture.

Who was I? I was a (slightly angry -okay, very angry, and cinical) Canadian-born, tri-lingual, kartwheeler, who happened to live in Thailand.

Bah.

Living in any foreign city will contribute to the fabric of who you are. I’ve often described a cross-cultural experience like a French kiss; you can’t wipe it off, you can’t spit it out and you can’t pretend it never happened.

I guess I’ve tried to apply the Bah Ram Ewe to everything I do here too. I can share core values and principles of an organization, and I can follow certain people I respect, learn from mentors and leadership, however, if I mimic their methods then maybe it’s just cut-and-pasting. As I write it all out it sounds so simple and I feel embarrassed that it took me so long to learn this. But this is what I learned. What I do needs to come from who I am, not trying to do it like someone else. Just like my trying to be Thai, I found that trying methods of other successful leaders takes so much energy; you have to think about it all the time, like, is this what a sheep would do? is this what a sheep would say? and you have to keep going back to the book. It doesn’t come from within.

For the couple of years I got to hang out with Dave and Rebecca Gibbons in NewSong Bangkok I learned a lot. I watched the movies they had watched. I read the books they had read. I didn’t want to miss a single gathering.

Hanging out with Dave and Beka Gibbons

When they left I knew I couldn’t do things like Dave did. But I did work at allowing the core values of NewSong to be expressed from my own Bah Ram Ewe, from my own DNA.

Bah!

My Bah Ram Ewe is maternal, it’s urban, it comes from the French kiss of cross-cultural experiences in Bangkok, Paris, London, Toronto and Montreal. And the anger, well it’s still a part of it too only now I am consciously trying to direct it at injustice (and sometimes, in weak moments, my patient husband).

I’m still learning, humbly, and I don’t have all the answers down pat… tee hee… and that’s the part where I wrap this up with a clever conclusion that brings us back around to the top.

Bah Ram Ewe! To your DNA be true!

Pat Answers… Good Ideas and Bad Ideas and Things I’ve Learned Along the Way

“Can I help you?” the unsolicited question came from a security guard.

There were twelve of us DeWits, standing in a loose cluster, different shapes and sizes. We must have looked lost, or maybe speech  thought bubbles appeared over our heads, full of question marks in creative fonts, our personalized metaphysical constructs articulating our common connundrum.

We were staring up at the many signs in the underground path below Union Station,Toronto. Being a self-pronounced city girl and all, I, of course, wanted to be the one who knew exactly where to go but… at the same time I didn’t want to rush in the wrong direction, pridefully causing us all to stray far from our destination.

“We’re looking for the exit that takes us to Front Street on the south side.” I answered.

The guard gave the answer of a smart-Alec needing a bit of attention. He asked, “Do you want the hard way or the easy way?”

Sheesh.

Every city has its struggling tourist pouring over a creased map, too afraid to ask directions. I’ve been around for a while and I like to think that I’m here for a purpose; to intentionally find those who, like tourists in a city, are searching for a destiny, and to somehow help to point them in the right direction. The challenge is this: how do we know if we are sending them off in ‘the hard way’ or ‘the easy way’? How do we fight the desire to be that person who wants to look like they know the way even when they don’t, that person who seems to know all the answers?

I’m going to be posting a few blogs about What I’ve Learned when it comes to pointing people towards Destiny. Feel free to join the conversation at any time.

Love Thy Stranger

Alycia

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Having lived in Bangkok all their lives, my girls are very much aware of the real world. They see it up-close every time we go out. The prostitutes. The red-light districts. The hustlers. The bag-snatchers. The bribery and corruption. There are no illusions for them. They get the good, the bad and the ugly. Some people worry that our girls see too much. Can they really process it well? Or are they being over-exposed at a young age? Won’t it scar them?

Well, read this and you tell me…

Not that long ago, Peter and I had to attend an event that was not interesting at all to Amanda or Alycia. Amanda stayed home, but Alycia wanted to come along because we would be going to Newsong after the event and she didn’t want to miss it. We dropped her off at the Emporium mall with plans to meet up in 2 hours or so. She had a cell phone and some money to get a meal and do something fun. She wasn’t as excited to be going on her own to the mall as I would have been at her age. I, on the other hand, was feeling a bit nervous about it.

After the event, we met where we had planned. She gave me the change that was left over. With a few quick calculations I realized that there was not as much change as I had expected. I needed to find out, trying not to sound like I doubted her yet trying to see where the rest of the money went. I don’t know why I was so worried about it, it wasn’t a huge amount.

“Hey you got here right on time! Did any strangers bother you?” I asked.

With a very patient sigh she answered, “No mom. No one bothered me.”

“What did you eat?” She loves Burger King, so I thought she’d have gone there.

“I didn’t go to Burger King,” she answered, reading my mind like she often does. ” Instead I got corn in a cup. I’ve always wanted to try that. And then I got a cream puff at Beard Papa’s.”

I am mentally adding it all up.

“Nice. I love that corn. Is that all you ate? Were you still hungry?”

“Ya, that was all. It was fine.”

“What did you do for all that time?”

“I went to play a couple of games, in that arcade over by the golf store,” she answered as the irony was not wasted on me; the irony of her being old enough to go to the mall alone yet young enough to still enjoy the kid’s arcade.

“Did you run into anyone you know?”

“No.”

“So…” and I dropped the bomb, ” Is that all the money you spent? There’s not much change here.”

“No.”

Aha! I knew it. I looked at her, grinning, waiting for the rest of it.

“I stopped at the 7-11 across the street.”

We usually get a purple Fruitare Popsicle when we stop in there.

“Did you get a purple Popsicle?”

“No. I got 2 bottles of milk.”

“Well that’s a healthy thing to have,” I reasoned, and who could fault a child for wanting to buy milk, of all things?

“Did you finish it all?”

“I didn’t drink it.”

“You’re saving it?” I was getting curious about this milk purchase.

“No. It wasn’t for me. I bought it for the man with no arms on the sidewalk.”

I think my face softened visibly, maybe something like the Grinch when his heart grew and his smile changed and his eyes became warm. I think my face did that exact same thing at that moment.

I tried to picture it. Alycia will almost always want to buy something for the street beggars, and she takes time to kneel down, to talk to them, and leave some food or drink beside them. But the man with no arms? That had me baffled. I was having a hard time picturing it.

“So how could he drink the milk with no arms.”

“I put a straw in it.” she told me, as if that answered everything.

I was quiet for a while. Then I had to ask. “But I don’t understand. Did he lean over and drink from the milk bottle on the ground?”

” I sat beside him. I held it for him while he drank from the straw. Till he had enough. Then I put it down and I left.”

I had no more questions. But she had one.

“Why?”

Why indeed! I guess I’m the one who still needs help processing the real life on the streets of Bangkok. And what better person to help me do that than Alycia, as she shows me over and over what it means to love thy neighbour as well as thy stranger.