Molly Chadwick

Dear Sister Poe Ei, 
       Do you remember that day when we were riding our bikes back from Chiang Mai University? It was a typical Thai-land summer afternoon: unbelievably hot and humid. Steady streams of sweat flowed down our foreheads, cars honked, and motorcyclists swirled around us. At one point during our bike ride, I stood waiting for you at the stoplight. I looked back and saw that you were far behind me. You didn’t know this then, but as I watched you pedal that old red bike, I internally let out a long, drawn-out sigh of frustration. You were so slow.  
       When you finally did catch up with me, you handed me a piece of plastic and said that it had fallen from my bike. As we stood at the stoplight, I looked at that piece of plastic in your hand and ducked my head. I don’t think you noticed my attempt to avoid eye contact; at the time, I had hoped you hadn’t.   
        You were slow because you were trying to help me. You had stopped on the chaotic street while I sped ahead just to help me. And there I had waited at the red light, looking back at you, impatience clouding my vision.  
        Without saying much, I slipped the piece of plastic in my bag and we both got back on our bikes. As we rode through the intersection, I swallowed hard and blinked quickly. It wasn’t impatience that clouded my vision anymore.  
       There are so many things I wish I could have told you during those six short weeks we were companions, Sister Poe Ei. We were both still learning Thai, and I’m sure you’ll remember how long it took for us to convey even the simplest of sentences to each other, how many times we tried to use Google Translate as our intermediary, how many conversations I cut off with a short, “Never mind!” as I just gave up and moved on.  
        There was something I didn’t explain to you then, Sister Poe Ei, and not just because of the language barrier. I couldn’t explain it then because I am only understanding it now. What I wish I could have told you is that when we were companions,  I was caught in the middle of a battle. It was a civil war, really. Molly versus Molly: an ugly fight between the person I had always believed myself to be versus the person I was beginning to see in the mirror.  
       I wasn’t the only one caught in the middle of a battle. War was part of your story, too. But your war was a real war, a war that started only a few months prior when an armed coup seized power in your home country, Myanmar. It’ll be hard to forget the night you told me, while I was sauteing garlic on the stove, about your war, the real war, where you and your friends would gather in the streets to protest, hoping you wouldn’t be the next person to be hit by a bullet. The real war, where the military insurgents would set off bombs in towns and villages with no warning. The real war, where people would get shot, and you’d walk past and see them lying cold in the street.  
       And I had stood there at the stove that night, listening wide-eyed, as you told me about your war. You even smiled as you talked. At the time, I wondered how you could have smiled. I knew your smile didn’t mean you were happy with the horrific things that were happening in your country, and I knew your smile wasn’t a culturally-learned response to pain. So why did you smile? After all, Sister Poe Ei, battle-hardened people aren’t supposed to smile.  
       You probably also smiled that day when I asked you if your life was hard. After you answered, I definitely wasn’t smiling, in fact my mouth was probably wide open, my brows furrowed in confusion. You had said, “No.” It doesn’t add up, Sister Poe Ei. How could you say no, when just a few months prior, during the thick of COVID-19 shortages, you would line up and wait at 2:00 a.m. for food and medication that you turned around and gave to your friends? How could you—whose father died of cancer only a few years ago, whose country was being actively torn apart while the rest of the world doesn’t seem to notice— smile and tell me that your life wasn’t hard?  
       Later, you told me what your name means in Burmese: soft silk. I don’t wonder anymore why you had smiled. Sister Poe Ei, that night, when the smell of garlic and hot oil filled our tiny apartment and you told me about the war and smiled, you were your name. You hadn’t let yourself become hardened. You had become the opposite, in fact. And seeing your smile as you shared things that should’ve made you cry was beautiful, far more beautiful than all the finest silks that Southeast Asia can offer. 
       I didn’t tell you this at the time, but one day I wrote, “for Sister Poe Ei, serving others is like breathing: she serves without having to think first.” I know if I had told you this then you would have brushed the comment aside, but Sister Poe Ei, I was being completely honest when I wrote that.     
       Do you remember the time when Sister Jones had to come and stay with us? I was so annoyed by her. She acted like such a child. Her face was in a constant, long frown; I’m embarrassed when I remember the time I asked her once if it was physically possible for her face to form a smile. She had wanted to go home early, and I had figured that that didn’t sound like too bad of an idea.
       And then, do you remember when I walked into the kitchen and you were cutting notches into little carrot slices? You made them look like flowers. I asked you what you were doing, and you said, “Sister Jones is a baby and won’t eat it if it’s not cute.”  
       I’ve been trying to remember, but my memory’s fading— did my jaw drop after you said that? Do you know what I would have said to Sister Jones? “Cut your own carrots.”  
       It’s not that you weren’t exasperated with Sister Jones; when she was out of earshot, we shared our frustrations about her. But when my response was annoyance, yours was tenderness. When I only saw her as a burden, you saw her as your friend, your sister. While I was brusque and cold with her, you filled her plate with flowers.  
       You probably didn’t know this at the time, but I took a picture of you at our little table, cutting up those carrots. I wanted to remember what charity looks like.  
       Another thing I never told you, Sister Poe Ei, was how meaningful it was to hear you pray for me and my family when we knelt down each evening to pray. The first night I was with you, you said the prayer, and I was surprised when I heard my name. And you prayed for my family, too. The thought had never crossed my mind to pray for my companion by name—after all, I always had an unending list of my own troubles that required a lot of thought and attention each night as I knelt down on the tile floor. After I had prayed for everything on my list, I didn’t have time for anyone else’s. But you always prayed for me.  
       Sister Poe Ei, do you remember the train ride to Lopburi? We were both so exhausted. After riding another train through the previous night, and then being met with our work and responsibilities in Bangkok, the previous day or two had left me not just tired, but weary. Weary to my very core. Do you remember that morning as we sat on the train bound for Lopburi, I (out of nowhere) reached out and held your hand? At the time, I was so grateful that you just let me hold your hand in silence and didn’t make a big deal out of the gesture. I didn’t try to explain then why I reached for your hand; even if I had tried, you wouldn’t have understood.  
       When I grabbed your hand on that train, I imagine it would have felt no different than if I had been drowning and I was reaching, grasping, clawing, even, for someone’s hand to pull me to safety. The Molly Before Thailand was never much of a touchy-feely person; she didn’t initiate hugs, and she definitely wouldn’t have reached out to hold someone’s hand. But the past months had brought Molly on the Train to Lopburi to a new place, one she had never known much about and one she’d never really wanted to go to before.  
       What she didn’t, what I couldn’t tell you then, was that while I was apparently on the Lord’s errand, I really just missed my family. Sometimes the homesickness I felt was so overwhelming it physically hurt. Miracles were promised to the faithful, but it was like I’d heard the word faith so many times that it started to sound unfamiliar. Much of my headspace was spent either internally fuming with frustration that things weren’t going the way I thought they should, throwing myself a pity party, or pleading with God to give me enough strength to just endure the next hour. At the time, I recognized you were not the problem—you were angelic, and I knew it then just as well as I know now.  
       So, when my internal battle was channeled into frustration and impatience towards you, the one who had been nothing but kind, I never could entirely suppress the feelings of disappointment and disgust I felt towards myself. I had never felt so completely and utterly alone. My inability to understand what was being said around me, and the blank stares that followed many of my attempts to communicate, was beginning to chip away at something deeper. No one, I thought, understood me, and not just because I couldn’t speak Thai. I didn’t even understand myself anymore. So, while sitting on that train to Lopburi, with the wind from the open window trying to blow through our sweat-dampened hair and the lime-green rice fields speeding by, it was all becoming so suffocating, so crushing. I had never felt like that before. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, and that scared me.  
        That’s why. That’s why I, out of nowhere, reached out and held your hand. There was, I felt, nothing left to hold on to.   
        After we got off the train in Lopburi, you probably remember the hassle that ensued as we tried to get from the train station to the other sisters’ house. We were in a town new to us with virtually no public transportation and a headstrong sister who, for some reason, refused to simply just send us their location. On top of that, there were monkeys. Everywhere. The kind that would bite you and steal your belongings and probably had rabies. We ended up walking along the shoulder of the busy highway, sweating—no, melting—in the indescribable heat and humidity of a central-Thailand afternoon, dragging our suitcases behind us on the uneven, gravel-dusted pavement. As we set out on our trek, I was fuming inside, but grateful still for the long walk we had ahead of us. I, ironically, needed a moment to cool down before we found the other sisters, and a long walk in silence, no matter the temperature, would hopefully do the trick. I wasn’t the only one who was frustrated, though. You said to me, as we walked down that highway, “My heart is not good right now.” 
       Sister Poe Ei, as I am sitting here writing this, I am trying to figure out why that sentence is seared into my memory, while other conversations and experiences have faded. Could it be that with those few words, I realized that you and I weren’t all that different from each other? You were angry with that stubborn sister, too. You probably missed your family sometimes so much it hurt, too, didn’t you? You probably felt lonely and misunderstood at least as much as I did, didn’t you?
       Something to know about me, Sister Poe Ei, is that for so much of my life, I relied on my words to make an impact. I knew all the answers in Sunday School. I spoke of Christ, and I felt like I was pretty good at it. If I gave a talk in church, people would cry and thank me for the things I had said. But while I was smugly blurting out answers in seminary, you were bringing offerings to a Buddhist temple a world away. While I prided myself for an impressive scripture study streak, you met with the missionaries and read the Book of Mormon for the first time. A few months later when we were companions, you’d still never even read the Doctrine and Covenants or Preach My Gospel in a language you understood. While I had grown up “sacrificing” twice a year to travel two-and-a-half hours to the nearest temple, you, as my companion, could only dream about going there someday.  
       And then, when I came to Thailand as a missionary, I became dumb, overnight. I had no more words to rely on, no more reputation to precede me. I felt exposed. It was so painful, Sister Poe Ei.   
       The self-portrait I had painted over the years was now unrecognizable to me as I, for what may have been the first time in my life, saw my heart in technicolor. It wasn’t as beautiful as I had always thought it was, and that realization stung. It was during this time of painful self-reflection that we became companions.  
        In the years to come, I’m not even sure if you’ll remember me, or any of the experiences we had together. But I want to remember. In fact, I’m terrified that my mind will remember, but my heart will forget. I think, in all honesty, this fear is what motivates me to write you this letter in the first place.  
       One thing is for sure, though, Sister Poe Ei, and that’s that I’m going to tell my kids about you. I’m going to tell them about the time you stopped on the busy road to pick up a piece of plastic for me. I’m going to tell them about the time you cut little carrot-flowers for Sister Jones, and I’m going to tell them about the time we rode the train to Lopburi and you let me hold your hand. And do you know how I’m going to end each story I tell my kids about you? I’m going to say, “Sister Poe Ei, when we were companions, honestly didn’t know as much as you and I do about Christ. And the language barrier prevented her from being able to say everything she wanted to, as you and I can right now. But during the few weeks we spent together as companions, I watched Sister Poe Ei, and I watched her closely. And you know what? As I watched her, I watched Him.”  

Love,  
ซิสเตอร์แซนด์วิช