It is easy for Americans to live their lives in a bubble. A bubble that hides them from war, starvation, and poverty. In the United States, the cities are lined with sidewalks, but in the slums of Bangkok they are lined with canals of water that smells of raw sewage.  Here, most homes have running and heated water. In Bangkok they have community showers with water the temperature of the weather outside. When showering people have to purse their lips shut to avoid disease. Geckos, spiders, and mosquitoes roam the showers while they bathe. The U.S. is fighting a war overseas. In Burma thousands of people are killed because of their race. The lucky ones able to escape live in fear and self-loathing. They know people are being killed as if they were an infestation of parasites. These images are enough to pop anyone’s bubble. Now, imagine spending a summer in one of these places.
This was reality for Mesa State student Chantel Heister.
“I work with a world wide organization called Youth with a Mission,” said Heister, “But most people know it as YWAM.”
YWAM’s original headquarters were in Switzerland. It’s now in Hawaii but the base in Switzerland is still operational in addition to about 1,200 other bases around the world.
“YWAM is really focused on people’s needs, spiritual as well as physical,” said Heister. The organization tries to discover the needs of the indigenous population instead of heading in blind with nothing but a religious agenda. “It’s really hard to go into the world to people who are starving or whose families have been murdered and tell them God loves them,” Heister said.
Heister spent almost the entire last summer traveling through Thailand working with the local people, but before she left U.S. soil she had other steps to take.
“The program I was in was a DTS,” Heister said “which basically teaches you to go to a foreign country, it’s about 6 to 8 months.”
The first three months of her Discipleship Training School focused on the lecture portion of the training and the remaining time was spent in Thailand.
As she prepared to leave, she was met with a challenge. There were riots in Thailand that lasted almost until the day she was leaving the U.S.
“I think the riots ended three days before we flew out” Heister said. She also said a handful of people told her she was crazy for even going, but she held firm to what she set out to accomplish.
“The first half of the time we were there we were stayed in Bangkok,” Heister said. The group helped in many ways in Thailand but in Bangkok they had one specific mission. “One of the main things we did was working with women in slums,” Heister said. The Bangkok slums are the places where sewage replace the side walks. “Through almost all of the slums their were canals running through them and it smelled awful,” said Heister.
Aside from sanitation, the slums were filled with many other very real dangers. Heister spoke of drug dealers riding around the towns on motorcycles.
“You had to be really worried about them taking kids,” Heister said. Drug dealers would prey on children who were unattended and use them to deliver drugs. She also had to deal with the animal life that inhabited the city, which was also not so pleasant.
“It was like Indiana Jones II because the trees were so big and there were snakes everywhere,” Heister said. She was mainly refering to her time spent in the jungle but reptiles were not strangers to the city.
“I was living on the third floor and a poisonous snake was found right outside my room,” Heister said “And there was a six foot dragon lizard thing in the backyard, in the city of Bangkok!”
Despite the danger that seeped through the streets and polluted the air there was still hope in Bangkok. The group from YWAM worked with a group called Hope Cards.
“Hope Cards gave women a source of income so they wouldn’t have to resort to other methods of income,” Heister said. The women involved with this project made greeting cards by hand and then sold them as opposed to the “other methods of income” which most likely consist of dealing drugs and prostitution. Heister held up one of these cards made by these women and it was easy to see the care that went into making the details just right.
“These are hard to make,” Heister said, “those women work so hard.” YWAM was also involved a another operation similar to Hope Cards called Thai Song. Only this group did something a little different from the other.
“They make beautiful hand knitted bags hand bags out of plastic sacks,” Heister said. These women have banded together as a beacon of hope in Bangkok using what limited resources they had to make a better life for themselves, but Heister’s journey didn’t end there.
“In Bangkok we worked with some other groups too but these are the two main ones we worked with and after that we went up North,” Heister said. She and her YWAM comrades went north from Bangkok to Burma where they worked with the Karen people.
“They’re a tribal group,” Heister said “and they live in mountain tribes.” The Karen are also victims of a modern day Holocaust.
“They live in the jungle because the Burma army is trying to kill them all off by 2012,” Heister said.
Some of the Karen managed to escape the country to Thailand of were forced out, and it was these survivors YWAM worked with. They are a dislocated people who live with the constant reminder that an entire country wants their existence to be erased.
“…the biggest thing with them is they need to feel loved and important because they have been persecuted for so long,” Heister said, “so we would go to the school and bring them little gifts that we could and play games with and teach them a little English.” They also visited Karens in refugee camps and brought gifts and necessities to the little girls there.
“The Burmese army is scary but the Burmese people are beautiful,” Heister said.
What can be said about a summer that was so sobering and forced her out of her bubble?
“It’s really exciting for me to be able to get to talk to people about what I’ve seen, so many people don’t know what’s going on there,” Heister said.
The people of Thailand and Burma are just two examples of the many groups around the world who are suffering. “I never thought I would appreciate being able to brush my teeth with tap water,” said Heister. The U.S. may being facing hard times but how do they compare with that of these people? Pop.