Transformations

Deaf Development Programme Tour Guides

As she starts to tell her story, she is visibly shaking. Her signing hands quiver and the words come in bursts. She shares about how she became deaf after choking on a guava leaf as a toddler. She then jumps to a past job she had. Just as quickly she moves on to another thought, completely out of any kind of chronological order. And, then signs, I am finished. Nervously swaying back and forth and looking directly at me for some kind of permission that she can sit down, her cheeks flushed and head slightly bowing down revealing how uncomfortable she is with this whole experience.

Myra was one of the women I worked with while living in Cambodia and her story came to my mind while listening to the gospel reading today about the transfiguration [Mt 17:1-9]. We all find ourselves transformed at different points in our life and just as with Jesus, we have to go down, off the mountain where that experience happened and return to every day life. If you keep reading in Matthew, immediately after this experience, Jesus is back in his life of ministry. He is healing a child and those he encounters, outside the two that went up to the mountain with him, know nothing about the transfiguration. They continue to see him as the same person but an irreversible change has occurred.

As I return from living overseas, I can relate to what that experience is like of returning to the world changed, though many around me see me as the same person. For the past 3.5 years, I lived, worked, played, and shared in the Cambodian Community, specifically the Cambodian Deaf community. People like Myra, changed my life.

Myra was one of the cleaners at the organization where I worked.Within Cambodian society, which is very hierarchical, she was an unimportant person. As a deaf woman, with a low level job, she was not supposed to be in front of a room of people. One of my roles while in Cambodia was to receive any guests that came to our project and explain to them the work we did to help deaf Cambodians to be accepted, respected and included as equals in society.

"Respect" - one of the goals in the Deaf Development Programme's mission statement

In Cambodian society, I was the educated one who could talk with other foreigners to share this story. For me, this was an uncomfortable role. Why should I tell that story when we had 20 staff members who were deaf Cambodians and had lived that reality? Because of my discomfort, I started a tour group with any deaf staff members who were interested to welcome visitors. This is their story and they have the voice to share it, even if they themselves didn't yet know how or believe it at the time. I met with them to help improve their public speaking skills and provide them with the 'numbers' they would need be our tour guides.

I insisted that the cleaners be a part of the tour guide team, if for no other reason than they had the most flexible schedules. This was not a fully altruistic action, we had visitors popping up all the time and sometime interrupting my other work. If there was a team of people that could share the responsibility of tours, I suddenly had more time to focus on other things. Plus, it meant this structure would continue after I left. Myra definitely had started to own that identity that she was not someone who should be in front of the room, even to tell her own story. A story that only she could truly tell. That became the new objective. Confidence.


As we continued our practices, Myra was one of the staff members I saw grow the most. Others would encourage her, provide support if she forgot a detail of our programs, and, possibly more importantly, the visitors from other countries, with more education, lighter skin, more 'power' who came to learn about our project were transfixed by her tale and the many challenges she had overcome. By the time I left Cambodia, about two years after I started this tour group, Myra was often the first to volunteer when groups were coming. She was always eager to tell her own story and connect, even with people who did not use the same sign language as she did.

Deaf Tour Guides introduce themselves to visitors

Transformations like this, for me, are what mission work is all about. I saw a woman who barely lived to adulthood embrace her own personal power and stand up to share her experience. She would confidently tell those who came how her father attempted to smother her after she lost her hearing because he thought she would just be a burden. Yet, she survives and strives for a better life for herself and her own daughter.


I have been incredibly blessed to meet many, many Myras in my time in Cambodia. I have gone through this amazing change seeing the resiliency of the human person and now return to the United States a different person, but the ministry does not stop there.

I think the transfiguration can be a calling to each of us. We all have moments, or witness the moments of others, or if lucky help bring about moments for others where we truly see that we are blessed and beloved children of God. While we all can't move overseas, or even live among the most isolated in our own country. We all have time, treasure, and talent we can share. What will we do when we come off that mountain?


This is an adaption of a 'church talk' presented in Pewamo, Michigan on behalf of Maryknoll Lay Missioners, the thoughts and perspectives expressed are those of Karen Bortvedt.