The In's and Out's of Community Overseas

One of the biggest things in life is community.  Friends, family, church, co-workers, all of those relationships help keep us strong (and sane).  Even from the beginning, God intended us for community.  One of the first things He said after creating Adam was, "It is not good for man to be alone."  Community is vital not only for our emotional health, but our spiritual health as well.  This is one of the biggest reasons why church is so important.

And often times one of the hardest things about life overseas is the lack of that community.  There are limited options for community with people from your home culture.  Community with other foreign expats can be good, but there are cultural differences and sometimes language barriers to get over.  Community with locals is vital and the goal of being here, but there are major language and cultural barriers that make it hard to have anything more than a surface level relationship with most people, at least for the first several years of living overseas. 

I've also noticed with the expat community that we often build up walls to protect ourselves.  Life here is often transient.  People come and within six months to two years most of them will leave.  In order to protect themselves, people have to be careful with relationships.  People here have to say goodbye to people back home on such a regular basis that they don't want to do it here as well.  It is just emotionally too hard.  As one of my friends put it, "You have to be here long enough for people to realize you're sticking around before they'll be friends with you.  The bad thing is, by the time that happens you've probably been without community for too long for it to do any good."

This lack of community can be compounded for some of us.  My wife is an introvert.  She has a handful of very deep relationships (most of which she's had for a long time).  She's also not big on small talk.  So, unlike her extroverted husband, she does not enjoy meeting a million people and having the same conversations about "Where are you from?" and "Do you think it will rain today?" The lack of close deep relationships can be hard for both of us, but particularly for her.

Our community here is still very much a work in progress.  God has been doing some big things with community since we came back three months ago.  Instead of having those million shallow relationships, my wife has been given relationships with a couple of girls that she's been able to go deeper with.  They come to our house once a week, share a meal and then have a beginners Bible study.  It has become one of the most fruitful things we have going on right now.  There are also a couple of moms that she has been able to establish weekly play dates with.  Sadly, those people will be moving away over the next few months (there's that transient thing again).  We're seeing God do some good things with our community here, but we've still got a long way to go.  Please join us in prayer for this and that our community here would grow rich and deep.

Local Partners

So we’re currently a little bogged down with getting the coffee business up and running overseas.  We’re making some headway, but it is a slow process.  I’m sure that no one wants to read about the fun involved in trying to get a business started in a third-world country.  Instead I thought it would be good to talk about what God has been doing with local relationships and the importance of them.

Even before coming overseas, we knew the importance of working with locals.  In many ways they can just do things better than we probably ever will.  They speak the language fluently, have deep relationships already built, understand customs, and they can walk into a village and not stand out like a six-foot-something white guy. 

Local partners are pivotal to what we’re trying to do.  Over the past few months, we’ve been able to build relationships with a few people that we’re excited about.  Our deepest ministry partner is a 29-year old guy that we’ll refer to on here as LT.  LT works part time at a church in our town.  Churches here are legal, however the government has to sign-off on them, which rarely happens out in villages.   These village churches have to meet in secret and move from house to house on a weekly basis for safety.

Every other weekend LT travels up to the villages and helps train pastors in the underground house churches.  We’ve been able to go with him a couple of times, but because of security reasons we can only go every 3 or 4 months (being a six-foot-something white guy and all).  We’ve been able to help meet some small needs like paying for motorbike gas and lunch on Sundays when he travels.  Just providing something as small as $10/week has been a huge deal for him. 

We were also able to help the village house church with their Christmas party.  It is common practice here for Christians to have a big party to celebrate Christmas.  Often the entire village is invited and there is music, a telling of the Christmas story, free food and gifts.  When there is are parties in villages where not a lot goes on, EVERYBODY shows up.  Because of your generosity, we were able to help with some of the expense of renting chairs and a tent for people to sit under during the party.  When we met with LM a few weeks ago he was excited to tell us about the success of the party.  Most of the village came out, including all of the local government officials.  The officials were so impressed that they said if the Christians in the village wanted to seek starting a church, they would support it.

As we’re continuing to pursue getting the coffee business started, we’ve realized an even bigger need for these local partners.  Please continue to pray for us as we get the business going and seek how to set up the structure and what the role of these local partners should be.  Also, please pray for continued local partners that we can trust and go into deeper relationships with.

2015

Sorry for the lack of blog posts over the past two months.  Things have been pretty busy.  In December we were all able to take breaks and go back to our home countries for Christmas.  January has been busy getting readjusted to life in Asia and also waiting to have our new website up for this post.  After you read this, please take a moment and poke around on the site.  Hopefully you'll like the shine and polish we've applied.

2014 was a great year for us here at Underground Coffee International.  In May we were able to send a family overseas to work alongside Luv-Luv.  It is great to have a team in place instead of only one person trying to do it alone.  Everyone overseas has been making big strides with learning language, building relationships and figuring out life in a foreign country.  Toward the end of the year we started supporting a local pastor who travels up to the mountains on weekends to help teach underground house church pastors.  These house churches are made-up of coffee farmers.  Most of these farmers would be considered members of unreached people groups.  Also, as an organization, we managed to finish the year with more money in the bank than when we started (which is pretty amazing since we are still short on reaching monthly support goals).  This past year was great and if we were going to try and list every way that God showed up and blessed us in 2014, we wouldn't have room for it in this post.

We are all very excited about the possibilities of 2015.  Language learning continues for everyone, which isn't glamorous or fun but it is necessary.  Relationships continue to deepen with our local friends and being able to do things like starting bible studies with people who aren't yet believers.  There are also some big, daunting goals that we honestly won't be able to accomplish unless God shows up (which we're confident that He will).  One of those is trying to get the coffee business established overseas so that we can start buying coffee from farmers to send back to everyone in the US.  The government overseas doesn't make it easy for foreigners to start businesses, but we are continually working on getting that up and going.  We also hope to buy a small plot of land later this year so that we can establish a coffee training center and start bringing farmers in for trainings.  The hope is that the farm can be used to educate the farmers both in coffee and also provide a venue for Christian trainings and maybe even some seminary type classes for village pastors.  All those things are a little ways off, but we hope to start paving the way for it in 2015.  

Once again, thanks to everyone who has bought coffee, given donations and spread the word about Underground Coffee over the past few years.  We all feel truly blessed to be doing what we're doing, and also expectant for great things to happen in 2015!