Nonviolence as spiritual engagement

"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect... " Romans 12:2

Since my involvement with the Dey Krahom community back in 2007 I have reflected on my role and identity as foreigner and outsider, as well as my attempts to reflect the Way of Jesus in a country that is predominantly Buddhist.

Nonviolence as a Sign of the Reign of God Here On Earth

Nonviolence as social change

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good."
Romans 12:21

Community Strategies Workshop in Phnom Penh, Dec 2010

Fifteen people were packed into a two-bed hotel room. Each person from Pursat province, north-west of Phnom Penh. And each one telling the same story, "The company is clearing our land. If we oppose them they come and hit us, take us to court, put us in jail, make us afraid."

Brother "Long" invited me this evening to discuss ways I might be able to support their community. I was already in Phnom Penh to co-lead a workshop and we happened to be in the capital city the same week. I sat and tried to listen and ask questions, to understand their situation and what they see are the available solutions.

"Two weeks ago we were so fed up with the company and our local authorities that we blocked the main road to Battambang to make it clear we have a complaint. Look, here are the nine demands we gave them."

I was impressed with the energy and initiatiive of this group of rural Cambodian farmers. Most of them have primary-level education and here they are taking on a well-connected and well-financed Cambodian corporation. What courage!

Big News: Endings, Beginnings and Transitions

Over the last few years Samantha and I have spent time discussing our future life and ministry. InnerCHANGE asks its staff to take a sabbatical every seventh year for spiritual rest and renewal.  Our sabbatical will begin in mid-2011 and last for six months.

After sabbatical, our current plan is for our family to move to the United States so that Sam can pursue further studies to become a nurse practitioner.  The study will begin in early 2012. We expect this study to take roughly 3 years.

Hungry for Justice

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled"

Earlier this week I spent two days with thirty community nonviolence activists from around Cambodia. In the evening of the first day I sat aside to read some Scripture. The passages I'm meditating on these days are the Sermons on the Mount, in Matthew and Luke, as well as Paul's version in Romans 12. I was surrounded by poor Cambodian farmers, fishing folk, foresters, day labourers, and villagers. Their homes, fishing grounds, forests, lakes and water ways are all under intense risk of destruction or appropriation. If anyone could be described as "poor in spirit", mourners, meek, seekers of righteousness (justice), builders of peace, and persecuted, these folk fit the bill. My eyes grew wide in awe as I sat amongst these blessed ones and watched Scripture come alive.

Explaining Kampot

Here's a almost-short (16min) discussion by Chris on our work here in Kampot, Cambodia.

Chris in Kampot from Chris Bakerevens on Vimeo.

April 2010 #2

Dear friends and family,

Once again the year races off before I've worked it out and here we are ... Easter! ... and it's my first bi-monthly update for the year. Ouch!

Without too much detail, here are some of the highlights since the beginning of the year ...

Active Nonviolence Workshops
The Master's studies that Chris completed last year led him to look at ways in which outsiders (like us) can use nonviolent techniques to support at-risk communities seeking justice. This year he is taking up a number of opportunities to train in active nonviolence with key local and international organisations. Last week, he co-led a workshop on nonviolence with a friend who works for Servants Among Asia's Urban Poor. We had 14 participants from both Cambodian and expatriate organizations. By the end of the weekend everyone was begging for more. We've decided to continue as a monthly 'community of practice' and are planning regular times for training, reflection and story-telling
He has also been invited to co-write a workshop curriculum for community leaders throughout Cambodia in strategies for confronting land rights issues non-violently.

Cambodia continues to see the powerful abuse their powers and the poor and marginalised continue to feel the brunt of that abuse. The bright side is that there have been some key signs of mature nonviolent responses. Just last week a community in Kompong Speu used active nonviolent techniques to secure the release of imprisoned community leaders, and talks with the provincial governor. They are complaining that companies in adjacent land are encroaching on their land and no-one in the corridors of power have been willing to listen. Finally, they cut down trees to block a major highway, and the provincial governor finally decided to step in. So far the results have been positive.

Finally, Chris helped organise two weeks of workshops for Quaker peace activist John McConnell, who led workshops on meditation.

Community Connection
Chris has been struggling to connect with local communities facing land rights issues in Kampot. Some of the struggle is related to pressures that these communities are under particularly from the governor of Kampot not to resist the filling of their fishing grounds. Also, at the end of last year, the police detained and interrogated a British national who is a colleague of Chris's for five hours and have kept the local NGO that he works for under threat, making it very difficult for them to work with communities in Kampot. This has made it hard to know how to proceed in supporting these communities without bringing them negative attention from the authorities. However, Chris continues to support one community leader who is wanting support for a video project and a community newsletter.

There is a short video of Chris explaining some of this community support work, and a web-link may appear in the not-too-distant future.

Dey Krahom
At the end of last month, with the financial support of a great church back in Australia, members from the former Dey Krahom community attended a 3-day trauma healing workshop with an organisation called Ragamuffin. This was a great team effort with Licadho-Canada providing the community liaison, Ragamuffin the trauma healing skills and healing center, and InnerChange as a conduit for scant financial resources.

Peppercorns
One of the main drawbacks to life in the country side is the lack of school options for English-speaking kids. Well, it turns out that Kampot has a burgeoning foreign young-family-with-small-kids population and Samantha has been instrumental in forming a pre-school for our children, called Peppercorns. There are about 6 other families, with 10 kids in all. Peppercorns Preschool officially started yesterday - April 1st- in our living room!

Study
Samantha has recommenced studies. Her goal is to study as a Nurse Practitioner in the not-too-distant future, and she is required to complete some prerequisite courses ahead of time. Biology, Nutrition, Statistics ... this is quite a logistical challenge from rural Cambodia!

London
in March, Chris and 30 other team leaders from InnerChange traveled to London for the annual Leaders' Community. The London team hosted the event and helped us understand the interesting context of Tower Hamlets, a government housing estate in the East End, that was almost entirely obliterated in the Blitz. It is now home to a multicultural community, particularly Bengali families. The East End is also home to famous folk such as Captain Cook and William Booth (of the Salvation Army). Chris found it an inspiring time of learning about other teams and was able to share his learnings from Cambodia, particularly in the area of conflict transformation. He may fly back to London later this year to train new team leaders in conflict transformation, peacebuilding and nonviolence skills.

Team
Our team continues to reshape itself. The Allan family recently left for a three-month time of discernment in the US. And all of us have plans for Sabbatical over the next several years. Hayden is first up in October. The Hims family will take a turn from the middle of next year, then our family from the beginning of 2012.

We also have some very exciting times ahead. Heap has been in contact with the local prison and we hope to start a small prison ministry soon. Heap has been trained in mediation and counseling and plans to conduct conflict resolution training with the prisoners. We also have an intern arriving in May who may teach English with them.

Hayden will complete a massive story-teller project in a few weeks. He has spent the last 100 weeks training up story-tellers from around Cambodia to use oral teaching methods for discipleship and sharing the Gospel.

Jennifer and Heap are supporting a 13-year-old boy with severely deformed legs. They have secured some surgery for his legs and will support his recovery with physical therapy, and teach his family how to continue the therapy. This is a huge undertaking of personal attention to the poor and marginalised.

Upcoming

May 4-5 Chris is conducting a training on Culture and Conflict Sensitivity with the Cheas Ponleu staff he has travelled with for the past 4 years.

May 19-22 Chris will support a nonviolence training workshop with a local NGO

The end of May Chris is planning a second-round of the recent nonviolence workshop. As well as some advanced training for the 'community of practice'.

Sometime late May or early June, Matt Coombs, an intern from the HNGR program at Wheaton college, will begin a 6 month internship with the team in Kampot.

Sam is continuing her prerequisite studies. She is also continuing to support the Sunrise HIV/AIDS project. Later this year, they will be under-taking a re-visioning process to continue adjusting the changing nature of the AIDS epidemic in Cambodia.

Patrick and Isaac continue to attend Peppercorns Preschool (which meets at our house). We've been blessed with a lovely English preschool teacher named Claire who is putting a lot of effort into loving and serving a diverse group of kids (10 kids, 7 nationalities, aged 18 months to 5 years).

Chris will continue to work on the workshop curriculum, as well as write some overdue articles for his blog The Nonviolent Story (http://thenonviolentstory.blogspot.com), collect stories of nonviolence and continue to be a support to local Kampot communities.

Peace,
Chris Baker Evens

April 2010 #1

The Last Two Weeks

What with Easter and Khmer New Year, there has been little time left for anything else. Two things that come to mind are:

April 08, Kampong Samakki (means, Solidarity Crossing village).
This is an amazing Kampot community. In June 2008 the villagers marched through the streets of Kampot to demand the return of mangrove forests given over to wealthy business persons by the authorities. Amazingly, the land was returned to the villagers - actually, the governor simply held onto the land transfer documents and never gave them over to the "new" owners. More recently, a Cambodian phone company have been sniffing around the same area asking for people interested in selling their land to the phone company. No one is quite sure why the phone company needs land in quite that location, except as a front to the businessmen trying to access ownership to the mangrove forests. It might be something like if they buy up all the land surrounding the mangroves, who's going to stop them taking the mangroves, too? I led a short excursion down to the community for a German human rights organisation primarily concerned with food security and human rights. If the community lose access to the mangrove forest, they lose their fishing grounds, too.

New Posts to Come (Promise!)

For all you faithful followers, sorry this is soooo out of date. We will attempt at updating this very soon.

September 2009

The Baker Evens jumped into their "new" 1988 blue Corolla, packed their belongings into a large moving truck, said good-bye to Phnom Penh and made the 4-hour journey to Kampot, our new home.

Looking Back

August 9 - Chris' thesis defense has been postponed until further notice. Two hours before I was to defend my thesis I received a phone call from my advisor saying that one of the defense panel had made comments regarding my paper that the rest of the panel did not understand, and that he was away at a funeral so he couldn't be asked for further clarification. So my defense is on hold. I'm pretty sad about this. I was very much looking forward to defend and celebrate with my class-mates the end of our studies. The good news is it is now tentatively planned for Oct 6.

May 2007

Dear Friends,

"Aitch-Aye!" they call. "Recycling!" They come every morning. Some have wooden carts with bicycle wheels that they push in front of them. Some just have an old rice sack slung over one shoulder. They seldom have shoes. They are the recyclers of Phnom Penh. They walk through neighborhoods digging through trash and buying recyclables from Phnom Penh housewives to resell at the trash dump for eventual export to Vietnam.

I had seen her before – a tiny woman with very dark skin from so much time in the sun walking the streets. Her clothes are faded to a non-descript brown. She is so small it is hard for me to imagine that she can push her wooden cart very far, but

we live miles from the dump, so she must. A dirty checkered cloth is strung across the cart as a makeshift hammock, but she is carrying her little son who looks about one, but is probably older. Usually I see her in the morning, but it was already late afternoon this time. She looked really tired and only had a few cans in the bottom of her cart. Something in her downcast demeanor touched me. Maybe it was because I am mother with a toddler who insists on being carried too. In any event, she wasn't calling out, so I called out to her from my front door. "Older Sister!" She didn't respond. Thinking she might not have heard me, I called again, "Sister Recycler!" She kept trudging. I caught the eye of a moto taxi driver who was closer to her and he spoke to her.

"The foreigner is calling you." he said.

"I don't have any money left to buy anything." she said without even turning her head to look at him.

"The foreigner will give it to you." he told her, so she turned and came toward me.

"Wait a minute." I told her and ran in the house. Luckily, I am not the most fastidious housekeeper, so I had quite a few bags of cans and soda bottles to give her. I also had a bag of cheap plastic toys, mostly broken, that I was getting rid of that I tossed in as well. Her eyes widened and she thanked me several times. And her otherwise listless little boy smiled when he saw the toys. My God, I thought, what depths of poverty must she know to be so grateful to be receiving my trash? "It's nothing," I told her, "In my country, I would have to pay you to take it away." I don't think she believed me.

A few days later, my next door neighbor gave me a small well-intentioned lecture. "You have a good heart, but you shouldn't give your stuff to those recyclers," she said. "They are all theives and you are encouraging them to come back. Give it to the city trash collectors instead [who are salaried and wear uniforms]." Her comments struck me. First, because she knew that we don't charge for our recyclables and it is embarassing to me to be known around the neighborhood for being generous because I don't charge one fortieth of a penny to have my trash taken away. And secondly, because I recognise her misguided attitude towards people struggling with poverty in myself as well. Whether I glamorize the poor or dismiss them as lazy, dishonest, or deserving of their fate, either way I have failed to recognize their essential individual human dignity – that spark that God made in His own image. I am grateful for small encounters that God uses to remind me of His Reality. Please pray for the recyclers of Phnom Penh, and for me too.

Grace and Peace,

Sam (for the Baker Evens)

Just Between Friends - March 2007

Dear Friends,

As I write this, we are in Australia awaiting the birth of our second son, but I want to tell you about Veasna, one of the trainers for Shining Light who has been on my mind lately.

As a known wild boy, Veasna created quite a sensation when he returned to his hometown of Battambang a changed man. Immediately, neighbours and old friends were asking what caused such a dramatic life change. Veasna went on to explain how he became a Christian and was now a pastor, and how this had lead to many radical changes in his life. Impressed, Veasna's friends and neighbours demanded to know more, and so Veasna invited them to join him each Sunday, to explore the Christian faith with him.

We made the decision to relocate Veasna from Phnom Penh to Battambang to ease his travel burdens as he was responsible for several far away provinces. Little did we realise that this young father of two would not just be close to his work, but planting a house church in his spare time, too!

Veasna seems to be the kind of person able to ignite interest and passion in those he is serving. He has been given a difficult task in that he works with two of the poorest provinces in Cambodia. These provinces have little access to outside resources of aid organisations, so the training he has brought through Shining Light has been an enormous blessing to the people in these areas.

Early last year he began training and mentoring pastors, helping them to initiate small acts of change in their community, called "Seed Projects". At one point he was able to invite several pastors from these distant provinces to attend a weekend conference on sustainable, small-scale, fish farming. Four pastors travelled with Veasna to a weekend of observing small-scale fish farms in action, as well as listening to short lectures on the theory and practice. These pastors went home excited to try out fish farming on their own land, even confident they could raise the capital needed to fund the initial process.

Quickly, the pastors realised that this was something that could be useful to many people around them. During a second training weekend, they gained more knowledge, especially in the production and use of different kinds of compost that plays an important part of the process, thus enhancing their own fish farms. Returning home, they gathered other people from their churches to teach them how to build and maintain these fish-farms.

In late December, last year, Veasna called me on my phone to tell me some exciting news. He had travelled to some of the church sites where not only are these fish farms well into their production cycles, but the pastors and church-members have been busy teaching the rest of the community about fish farming techniques, and helping them set up their land for fish-raising. Not only were Christians putting their faith in action, but they were reaching out to their non-Christian neighbors as well.

Veasna's enthusiasm has been a great encouragement to me. I look forward to the times that Veasna travels to Phnom Penh for staff meetings. He always brings news of amazing things happening in far off places: news that God's Kingdom of Peace and Hope is being built by some of the poorest people in the world.

If you pray, then keep Veasna and his family close to mind. Travelling in Cambodia is dangerous as the roads are poor, and there are many careless drivers on the road. He also spends lots of time away from his wife and two young children.

Thank you for your support of our ministry in Cambodia.

Grace and Peace, Chris