When I arrived I was immediately called ahjahn. I secretly loved it. I really enjoyed standing in front of the church and being told how appreciated I was. Over time I noticed that nobody ever confided in me. Also, I noticed that the original group of people had put me into a box where they assumed I couldn’t speak well, although, over the years I became fluent.<\/p>\n
Then I started meeting other groups of people. I started out our relationship being in their mental box as someone who really understood the nuances of the language. I never told them what to call me but I steered the title towards them calling me Phii. (For instance I would self-title myself saying\u00a0 “Phi Sean wants to go too.”) I found with these groups of people that they did confide in me. Over the years I noticed that aarjarns get many opportunities to preach whereas Phi’s get less. On the other hand, as a Phi I was invited to more meals and fun outings and found myself in deep spiritual conversations.
\nFor comparison about Westerners forcing their values. When I first arrived I tried to waii everyone the same and hoped that they would waii me back in a democratically equal way. This was forcing my worldview on their culture. I have learned over time to not waii the pizza delivery guy, or the doorman, or children. I do waii officials and senior pastors properly. I changed to be appropriate in the culture. But\u2026 for my title\u2026 I truly believe that my title affected my role which affected my experience and ultimately my effectiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ahjahn vs Phii When I arrived I was immediately called ahjahn. I secretly loved it. I really enjoyed standing in front of the church and being told how appreciated I was. Over time I noticed that nobody ever confided in me. Also, I noticed that the original group of people had put me into a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18,13,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homepage","category-mission-work","category-thailand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":355,"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanborns.org\/word_press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}