A joint initiative of Mennonite Central Committee and Mennonite World Conference, the Young Anabaptist Mennonite Exchange Network (YAMEN) is a year-long Christian service opportunity for young adults from outside the U.S. and Canada. This cross cultural exchange sends young adults between developing countries, where they live with a local host family, attend a local church, and engage in service with a local organization.

During the pandemic, we have worked hard to keep the YAMEN program in Cambodia active. We were one of the only country programs to continue receiving YAMEN and SALT participants in the 2020-2021 season. It has been more challenging to send YAMEN participants out due to COVID-19 visa restrictions; few countries have managed to remain as open to new arrivals as Cambodia has.

For the 2021-2022 season, we only have one outward YAMEN participant from Cambodia. Jenny Keang is currently serving in India. It has been an incredible experience for her so far. There are many negative stereotypes about India in Cambodia and Jenny was also concerned about the COVID-19 situation there and about persecution of Christians by the Hindu majority.

On arrival, Jenny immediately reported that the negative stereotypes that she’d heard in Cambodia were being dispelled by the warm welcome and hospitality of the MCC India office. This continued with a great host family experience, making wonderful Indian friends, and serving at a MCC partner in India.

Jenny almost had a different story.

Originally, Jenny had been accepted for a YAMEN position with the MCC Ukraine office. We spent months working diligently resolve COVID-19 related challenges and get her her visa so she could travel to her placement. We were told again and again that we had to send Jenny for an in-person interview at the Ukrainian embassy in Hanoi, which is responsible for Cambodia, despite Vietnam being completely closed at the time. Finally, the MCC Ukraine staff were able to connect with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and convince them to let us apply through the Bangkok embassy in Thailand. This seemed like it was going to work but then it all fell apart again. I won’t go into all the details, because it’s complicated and political, but in end we couldn’t make it work.

MCC India still had a position open and offered it to Jenny, but we were skeptical since a YAMEN participant from Indonesia had been waiting over two months for a visa. Jenny received hers within a few weeks and was able to arrive in India on time for her assignment.

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In 2019, MCC Cambodia sent Monika Chan to Ukraine as a YAMEN participant. She lived with a Ukrainian host family and grew close to them during the uncertain early days of the pandemic. I want to share two recent Facebook posts from her.

I believe that the SALT and YAMEN programs are, fundamentally, some of MCC’s most important peacework. We don’t often talk about them as peacework, instead we focus on whatever service the participant is doing, but on the ground level they change harmful narratives to positive ones, promote multiculturalism, build relationships that encircle the world with God’s love, and reinforce our common humanity. All of us, no matter our ethnic background or nation of origin, were fearfully and wonderfully made.

Today, there are so many forces promoting narratives that divide us, convince us to deny our common humanity and fall back into tribalism.

Therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household.

Ephesians 2:19 

In 2020, we discovered that there was an active advertisement campaign on social media in Cambodia publicizing Africans as drug dealers. Our YAMEN participants from Africa faced this new discrimination as they came – not to deal drugs – but to serve. One shared that he went to a local Doctor for a check-up and was told to go away because “there are no drugs here for you.” We have had partners and host families who were afraid to have Africans placed with them. The greatest challenge for us has been to convince them to take the ‘risk’; to let an African into their workplaces and family. The transformative power of relationships does it’s work after that.

In reverse, we had a YAMENer from Africa who told us that his friends had been terrified when they heard he was placed in Asia. They warned him not to go – telling him that Asians would drink his blood and perform witchcraft on him. He was frightened – this was the first time he had left his country – but decided to trust in God and come anyway. It was a transformative experience and he now counts his Christian host siblings as his brothers.

There’s a transformative power in leaving one’s homeland to serve in the name of Christ as a foreigner in a foreign land.

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As antiwar protests and vigils for peace spread across the world, please remember that brave souls in Russia are doing the same. The vast majority of people around the world, including in Russia, long for peace.