When
I lived in Italy, I would often tell my Italian friends that many Americans
(including myself) thought that Italian was the most beautiful sounding
language in the world. Many of those friends found my love of the Italian
language curious. Their language was simply an everyday tool to them, no more
exotic than water or oxygen.
I
have never lost my fascination with the Italian language. However, I admit that it’s not quite as shiny a
language when you are using it to pay rent, explain car problems to a mechanic,
describe one’s most recent bout of food poisoning or navigate any number of
unpoetic, real-life situations.
Italian
is known as one of the “Romance Languages.” I used to think that Romance
Languages were so called because they sounded romantic. In reality they are
called Romance Languages because
they descend from the language spoken by ancient Romans, i.e., Latin. It’s
irrelevant how velvety it feels rolling off the tongue. This takes some of the,
well, romance out of the Italian language.
I had
romanticized the Italian language, along with the life in Italy that it opened
up to me. However, the reality was that after the bright-eyed honeymoon period
wore off, I still had to do the ups and downs of daily life in an unfamiliar
place, and that was often difficult.
Before moving to
Cambodia, I was not infatuated with the Khmer language or nation. My feelings
weren’t negative, just neutral. I was sometimes a bit envious when I heard
other foreigners in Cambodia talk about how they loved the language or how they
had fallen in love with the Khmer people right away. How much easier this would
be if I had that excitement right from the start.
At this point my
pragmatic side would speak up: “Remember that crash you felt when you first
came out of the honeymoon period during your two years in Italy? Since you don’t
have a honeymoon period in Cambodia, you can’t crash as hard.” This more
realist way of looking at things suited my personality as well as my
experiences with the country.
Exploring Cambodia's romantic side
But then a funny
thing happened. When we got back to the US in April of this year for our
three-month home assignment, I gradually started to romanticize Cambodia.
Lauren and I would say to each other, “We can’t wait to get back to Cambodia so
that we can be back in our own home, see our friends, eat good mangoes” and so
on. While I never consciously articulated it this way, there were certainly
times during which I was assuming my problems would go away once I finally got
back to Cambodia.
We are very
happy to be back in Cambodia, but our problems did not go away upon arrival. Yes,
it is wonderful to be back in our own home, but we are still chasing out the
geckos and spiders that decided to “sublease” our apartment. We have enjoyed
connecting with some friends, but others moved away while we were gone, and we
never got to say a proper goodbye. Mangoes aren’t in season, so good luck
finding a sweet one. Then there’s the heat, the traffic, the different standards
of customer service and all the other little things that add up to make life in
Cambodia hard.
Shortly after we
arrived back, some of our colleagues, veteran field personnel serving in
Southeast Asia, wrote us an email that contained this line: “After talking about the
wonders of Asia over and over again on home assignment, it has sometimes been a
little strange to travel back and face some of the inconveniences
again…Re-re-entry shock?”
This sentence captured my feelings perfectly. We had a bit
of shock upon “re-entry” to the US because it was so different. But then we
come back to Cambodia, and it’s both the same as and different than we remembered
it. We created a slightly different picture than reality in the short time we
were away, and we had to experience a bit of “re-re-entry shock."
I do, and
probably always will, have some tendency to try to romanticize things. But the
reality is that every place, every language, every person is a mix of pluses
and minuses. I must strive to balance these two sides: on the one hand, helping
others see the beauty of Cambodia and the work God is doing here so that they
can have a fuller picture of the richness of the global church; on the other
hand, to be honest about the struggles that I experience by living here. And to
strike this balance, I will have to leave the romance language behind and just
let Cambodia be what it is.
