Summer 2024 newsletter

Julie Lawler, Cambodia

At the Deaf Development Programme’s Khmer New Year Celebration, the staff, students and community enjoy a water fight called Songkran. On these special holidays, the DDP community comes together to laugh, joke and connect (photo by T.T. Hoang).

In many phases of my life, I feel that I have been blessed and have grown with specific people whom God has placed in my life for a specific time and purpose.

It is the same with the communities I am a part of. You are a part of a community by choice, by association, joining for a common cause, or by proximity to where you live. For me, community is an intentional act, fed by the desire to participate in community.

“Changing of the Guard”: The English community Catholic Mass held a blessing for the Maryknoll Sisters who departed Cambodia Jan. 27, 2024, and on that same evening we welcomed T.T. Hoang, our new Maryknoll lay missioner to Cambodia.

I was blessed with being a part of a collaborative mission community for the first three years of mission. Our Cambodian Mission Team (CMT) consisted of the Maryknoll priests and brothers, sisters, lay missioners and friends. Before I arrived in 2020, the CMT had been established as a way to gather, share ideas, concerns, voice opinions, ask for advice, share in communion through the Mass, and bond over shared stories, conversations. The team also celebrated birthdays and holidays away from family and was a safe place in a world of uncertainty.

Within any community there are some ups and downs, and there are always differing opinions and viewpoints, but for me the CMT was a safe space to gather each week and a way to live out Maryknoll Lay Missioners’ core value of community.

As much as this community was a lifeline for me in mission serving in Cambodia — especially during COVID — I was challenged with a new way to view community as the CMT dissembled in 2023. The Maryknoll Sisters left Cambodia in early 2024, the Maryknoll Society left a few years back, and we Maryknoll lay missioners still remain.

I spent a year and a half discerning this change and preparing how I could move forward. I prayed and discerned: Where is my community? Who is my community?

The existence of each individual is deeply tied to that of others:
Life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions.
—Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 66

After a DDP celebration for International Women’s Day, a group of friends from DDP’s Deaf Community invited me to join them for lunch in Phnom Penh (photo by Mano).

• Some of us in the broader CMT community (lay missioners, Maryknoll priests and friends), who have remained in Cambodia, decided to continue our gatherings and forge a path forward. It has been different, challenging but also beautiful to find a new place to grow together (through mass, meal, and fellowship).
• As I spend more time in Cambodia after my first contract, I see that a community of people formed around me, and we strive to support each other. We are brought together because we work in the same space, but we are a community of people because we strive to work for a common cause — first of all, love and compassion for each other, but also for the promotion of Cambodian Sign Language, connecting deaf people with other deaf people and hearing people who support that deaf community. We strive together to spread deaf awareness and unite to make changes for deaf education, empowering deaf community members and working to improve the human rights for people who are deaf. We are also Catholic and Buddhist, and we strive to live in harmony, learning from our differences and uniting in what brings us together.
• Our international Catholic Community has also been a special way that I have felt welcomed and supported since the CMT is no longer running. We are all called to mission in Cambodia, and even though we speak different languages and come from various cultures, we have found a home in Cambodia with the Cambodian people. There is an international lay missioner group and there are other religious communities where I find relationships that continue to be life-giving.

My community has expanded, become more open and diverse. I am embracing the challenge and growing in communion with others who desire community. It evolved over a period of a year, and knowing that the future is not going to be with my core Maryknollers anymore, I move forward.

Here’s to looking into the future and praying for God’s grace to bless each of my communities as well as each of your communities outside Cambodia. I pray for all of us for healing, strength, resilience, peace — and most of all love for each other.

Please consider supporting my mission work at the Deaf Development Programme with a donation through the link below.

I invite you to walk with me as a “COMPANION IN MISSION.” Companions in Mission are friends and generous donors who give financial gifts on a regular (usually monthly) basis. For more information, visit Become a Companion in Mission. Thank you so much for your generosity!