Category: Family Life

That’s not a complaint. It’s a structural description, and it’s the single most important fact about how my family makes decisions.

Living on missionary support means exactly that: all of it, with no second job, no side stream, and nothing underneath to catch anything. Every dollar that arrives in our account arrived because a person or a church chose, again, this month, to send it.

Most months that works. In a bad year for everybody else, it works less.

Nobody Did Anything Wrong

I want this part at the top, because if you read the rest of it without this it turns into a different and much worse article.

Our support went down over the last couple of years. Some sponsors reduced what they give and some stopped, and in every case I know about the reason was the same: their own situation got harder. Costs went up where they live too. Their income moved. Their church’s giving moved.

Nobody was careless with us. Nobody quietly decided we weren’t worth it. People who had been generous for years hit a stretch where they couldn’t be, which is a thing that happens to households and it happened to theirs.

There is no villain in this. There’s just an economy, and we’re downstream of it in a way most families aren’t.

Living on Missionary Support Means Two Numbers, Not One

The part people don’t see is that it isn’t one number. It’s two, and they can both move against you at once.

The first is how much comes in. That’s the sponsorship, and that’s what dropped.

The second is what it’s worth when it lands. Our support is raised in Korean won. We live in Cambodia, which effectively prices in US dollars. So there’s a currency conversion sitting between what somebody generously gives and what actually buys groceries here, and I don’t control it and neither do they.

The won was around 1,240 to the dollar in early 2024. It went to roughly 1,534. Nothing about anyone’s generosity changed during that stretch — the same faithful gift simply arrived about a fifth smaller.

Stack the two together and, at the bottom of it, we were down about thirty percent in real terms.

Thirty percent is the kind of number that would trigger a serious conversation in any household that had a salary to point at. We didn’t have a conversation, because there was nothing to negotiate with. You can’t ask the exchange rate for a review, and you can’t ask a family whose own costs went up to make up the difference.

The Relief That Isn’t Relief

The rate has come back. It’s running near 1,340 now, which is meaningfully better than 1,534 and meaningfully worse than 1,240.

So a bit under two-thirds of the currency damage has reversed. That’s real and I’m grateful for it.

But notice what that sentence doesn’t say. It doesn’t say we’re back. One of the two things that hit us has partly eased and the other one hasn’t moved at all. The sponsorship is still where it went.

This is the part I never see written down, because the crisis version of this story is easy to tell and this version isn’t. There’s no moment. Nothing collapses. A number improves and you’re still smaller than you were, and you go on making slightly narrower decisions than you made in 2024 without ever having a conversation about it.

What It Changes Is Which Doors Are Open

Thirty percent is an abstraction until it turns into a specific thing you don’t do.

Here’s ours. Our boys were at a school in Phnom Penh that cost three hundred dollars a month per child — nearly a thousand a month across them. It was one of the cheaper options available to us at the time, and it wasn’t the right fit for other reasons, so I’m not telling you we were driven out of a school we loved.

I’m telling you something narrower and more permanent: that tier of school is no longer a decision I get to make. It isn’t a thing I’m weighing and declining on principle. The door is shut, and it shut without anybody doing anything to us.

That’s what a support drop actually is, day to day. Not hunger. Not drama. A quiet reduction in the number of options that are yours to consider.

The Second Income Question Is Being Asked Wrong

Here’s one thing I’d like to see my own tradition think about again.

For Korean missionaries — and for plenty sent from elsewhere — a second income is quietly disapproved of. It is never written down anywhere. Nobody hands you a document. But the expectation is understood: your support is your provision, and going and earning money looks like a lack of faith, or a distraction, or a quiet insult to the people funding you.

That expectation was built for a different set of conditions than the ones I’m living in.

None of this is new, incidentally. Paul made tents. The practice even has a name — tentmaking — and it describes something the church understood for most of its history. We’ve grown more cautious about it fairly recently, and I don’t think the reasons have been examined much lately.

I’m not arguing that every missionary should go get a job. I’m arguing that the question the church is asking is the wrong one. It keeps asking may I, which is a question about permission and suspicion. The useful question is how should I — what does honest, non-exploitative work on the field actually look like, what safeguards does it need, how does it get reported, how does it stay from becoming the tail that wags the ministry.

That’s a harder conversation, but it produces something a family can actually use. The question as it’s currently framed mostly leaves households with a single point of failure and no sanctioned way to build a second.

And I’d ask one question rather than make an accusation, because I don’t think anyone designed it this way on purpose: when the taboo holds and the numbers move, who ends up absorbing it? I’m not sure we’ve looked at that squarely.

Why I’m Writing This Down

I want to be extremely clear about what this is not.

This is not an appeal. Nothing here is a request, and if you support us and you’re reading this with a slightly guilty feeling, that’s the opposite of what I intended and you should let it go. The people who reduced their giving did it for reasons I respect, and I’d have done the same in their position.

I’m writing it because it’s the honest financial shape of this life and almost nobody describes it. The version that gets published is either a triumphant one — God provided, isn’t he faithful — or a desperate one. Both are real. Neither is what most months look like.

Most months look like arithmetic. Two variables, neither of them yours, multiplied together, and a family adjusting what it considers possible without much ceremony.

God has provided, incidentally. We are fine. My kids are in school, we run a car, nobody has gone without. That’s not a rhetorical flourish, it’s just true, and it’s true at the same time as everything else in this article. Both things fit.

What I’d Tell Another Family Living On This

Two things, and they’re both unglamorous.

Know your two numbers separately. Not “support is tight” — how much came in, and what the exchange rate did to it. They fail independently and they need watching independently, and I went a while treating them as one thing and misreading which one was actually hurting us.

And don’t build your family’s assumptions at the top of the range. This is the mistake I actually made. Living on missionary support for years without a bad stretch had quietly taught me to treat the good rate as the normal one, and everything I planned sat on top of that assumption. The version of our life that worked at 1,240 was not a version I should have treated as the baseline, because I don’t control the rate and neither does anyone who loves us. Build at the bottom of the range and a good year is a surplus instead of a correction.

A hundred percent of our income is somebody else’s decision. That’s not a grievance. It’s just the shape of the thing, and the shape doesn’t change because I’d prefer a different one.

Both halves of that are true and I’ve stopped trying to reconcile them.

Family devotions happen at our house before bed. That’s the arrangement, that’s what we tell people, and it is genuinely what we aim at. It also doesn’t happen every night. Some nights it’s late and everyone is finished. Some nights the wheels come off between dinner and pajamas and the honest choice is between a rushed devotion and four children in bed at a reasonable hour, and I take the beds.

I’m a pastor. Running family devotions with kids is, on paper, the one thing in this house I should be professionally equipped for. It’s also the least consistent system we have, and I’ve written articles here about chore charts that run better.

That gap bothered me for a long time. It doesn’t much anymore, and this is the article about why.

What It Actually Is

Before anything else, the shape of it, because people imagine something more elaborate than it is.

We sing a worship song. We read a passage. Everyone says one thing they were thankful for that day. Then we pray.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Four beats, no lesson plan, no discussion questions, nothing that needs preparing. The thankful round is the part the little ones can actually do — a two-year-old can’t follow a passage but he can tell you he liked the dog — and it’s usually the part that turns it from a recital into a conversation.

The Slot Is the Part That Fails

Every system I’ve built for this family works because it’s load-bearing. The morning has a workload attached. Bedtime has a sequence. The chore chart has consequences.

The devotion slot has none of that, and it sits at the exact worst hour of the day — the end, when the adults are spent and the children are past their best and the whole house is running on whatever’s left.

So it’s fragile by construction. On a good night we get through it properly. On a bad night we get four verses in and Number 4 has climbed onto the back of the sofa and the moment is gone.

And it’s competing with a bedtime that already has its own sequence and its own momentum — teeth, pajamas, the monster hunt, lights out at a defensible hour. Every one of those has a natural consequence attached if you skip it. The devotion is the only piece of the evening where nothing visibly breaks when it doesn’t happen, which is exactly why it’s the piece that goes.

For years I read that failure rate as a verdict on our family. I’d hear about households where this runs like clockwork and quietly conclude something was wrong with ours.

What Doesn’t Fail Is the Frame

Here’s what I eventually noticed, and it reorganized the whole thing for me.

The formal devotion is the part that breaks. The rest of it never turns off.

When we talk about effort — why you finish the thing you started, why you don’t quit because it got hard — that conversation runs through what Jesus did. When we talk about how you treat your brother after he’s wronged you, same. When one of them asks why we live here instead of Korea, same. Morals, relationships, work, fairness, all of it comes back to how Jesus handled it and what he told us to do.

Take those three in turn, because they’re where it actually shows up.

Effort: they get told to finish what they started, and the reason given isn’t that quitters are losers. It’s that we follow someone who finished something considerably harder while it was costing him everything.

Morals: when one of them has done something to a brother, the question isn’t only what the rule was. It’s what Jesus said about the person you’ve wronged and what he did about people who wronged him, which is a much less comfortable conversation and a much more useful one.

Relationships: how you treat somebody who can’t do anything for you, why you don’t rank people, why the smallest kid in the room gets a say. All of that has a source and my sons know what it is.

That isn’t a curriculum and there’s no slot for it. It’s just the frame every other conversation happens inside — and it’s why family devotions with kids, in our house, is the smaller half of the faith we’re actually passing on.

Jesus is in all the pictures. And the boys know it.

That sentence is the actual state of faith in my house, and it’s more accurate than any answer I could give about our devotional consistency.

The Older Model Was Never the Slot Anyway

There’s a passage that Jewish and Christian households have organized this around for a very long time — the instruction in Deuteronomy that sits at the center of the Shema: teach these things to your children, talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise.

Read that as a schedule and it’s four appointments. Read it as it’s written and it’s the opposite of a schedule. It’s a description of a day. Sitting, walking, lying down, getting up — that’s not a devotional slot, that’s every waking hour, and the instruction is that the conversation is available in all of them.

I’m not using that to excuse the nights we miss. I’d rather we didn’t miss them. But it did stop me measuring my family against a standard that the text itself doesn’t set.

The Evidence Isn’t the Devotion

If you want to know whether any of this is landing, don’t look at attendance. Look at what comes out of them when nobody set it up.

At dinner once, my wife asked the boys the standard question about what they want to be when they grow up. Number 1 said he wanted to help people like his parents do — and then, seriously, asked whether he could be a missionary and still study the things he actually loves. He wasn’t performing. He was trying to work out whether the two halves of his life were allowed in the same sentence.

Another time, a snack-time dispute between two of his brothers was about to go properly wrong, and Number 3 — five at the time — got up, walked over, and handed his entire snack to the angry one. Asked afterward why, he said fighting is bad. Every child in the world has been told that a thousand times. He’s the one who did something about it while it was happening.

And when I was working seven days a week, it was Number 1 — then still working out who Jesus was and what salvation even meant — who asked my wife whether Dad was going to his own house, because the pattern in front of him didn’t match the words around him.

None of those three came out of a devotion. They came out of boys who have been living inside the frame long enough that it’s how they reason.

Family Devotions With Kids Shouldn’t Feel Like a Class

The occupational hazard here is real. I do this for a living. I can prepare and deliver a lesson, and if I let myself, family devotion becomes a small congregation of four with terrible attendance and one member in diapers.

The trouble is that the second it feels like a class, I stop being their father in the room and become the person delivering material — and children can tell the difference instantly. I’d be teaching a lesson to an audience obligated to sit through it, which is a fairly bleak thing to do to your own kids at bedtime.

So it stays small. Short, unimpressive, sometimes barely a thing at all. That’s on purpose now, rather than a failure I’m apologizing for.

The Two-Year-Old Contributes Nothing

I should be honest about the operating conditions.

Number 4 is two. He does not participate in family devotions. He participates in the room in which family devotions are occurring, which is a different activity with different objectives, mostly involving climbing.

This is fine. He’s absorbing that this is a thing his family does, which is the entire assignment at his age, and nobody is grading him. His brothers manage to concentrate around a small heckler, which is probably its own spiritual discipline.

What I’d Say to a Parent Who Feels Behind

I’d have found this article useful ten years ago, so here’s the short version.

The nightly slot is worth having and worth defending, and you will still miss it a lot. Missing it is not the scoreboard.

The scoreboard is whether your children can tell, from the way you talk about ordinary things — money, effort, a brother who took something — that there’s a person at the center of how your family decides what to do. That part doesn’t require an evening slot. It requires you to actually think that way, out loud, at the times things come up, which is harder than a devotion and can’t be scheduled.

We try most nights. We fail a decent share of them. And in between, on the drive to school and at the table and in the middle of a fight over a snack, the conversation keeps going.

Jesus is in all the pictures. The boys know it. That’s the part I’d defend if I could only keep one.

We flew to Korea together, Number 3 and I, both of us there for the same reason. He has chronic ear trouble and his tubes needed looking at. I’d lost the hearing in my right ear to an infection and my wife had finally told me to stop ignoring it and go get it checked properly.

His appointment took half a day.

Mine took three months, and for most of it my wife was in Cambodia running our family and a relief operation at the same time, by herself. This is an article about solo parenting, and I’m not the one who did it.

The Ear I’d Been Putting Off Since I Was Eight

I’ve had bad ears my whole life. My first surgery was at eight years old, which is the age Number 1 is now, and that arithmetic sits oddly with me every time I do it.

The infection that took the hearing on my right side was the one I couldn’t outlast. I still put off going, the way you do when leaving means somebody else absorbs everything you were carrying. My wife made the call for me. She usually does, on the ones I’m avoiding.

The doctors in Korea found I needed my eardrum rebuilt — a tympanoplasty, which is a real operation and not the tidy outpatient thing I’d been telling myself it would be. Afterward I was grounded. No flying until it healed. They estimated two months.

It ran to three.

Three Months, and Only the First Weeks Were About Healing

Here’s the part I want to be honest about, because “I was recovering for three months” is a more flattering sentence than the true one.

The first stretch was genuine incapacity. Weeks of it, flat, waiting for scars to close properly, no lifting, nothing.

But after that I was fine. Not fine enough to fly — that took the full three months — but fine enough to move around Korea, and so I did. I traveled. I helped with work there. I was useful again, in the wrong country, while my wife did every single thing in the right one.

That’s the shape of it. I was not laid up for three months. I was absent for three months, and only the first part of that was my body’s fault.

Solo Parenting Was Not a Choice She Made

She had Numbers 1, 2 and 4 — an eight-year-old, a seven-year-old, and a toddler — in Battambang, with no partner and no backup.

The detail that tells you the most: she hadn’t driven in a long while. Her confidence behind the wheel was gone, properly gone, the kind of gone where you arrange your whole life to avoid the thing.

And it stopped mattering immediately, because there was nobody else to do it. So she drove. School runs, market, everything, in Cambodian traffic, starting from a standing start of I-don’t-do-this-anymore.

That’s what solo parenting actually looks like when it isn’t a scheduling arrangement. It’s not one parent covering a business trip. It’s every fallback being removed at once and the person left standing having to become someone slightly different by Tuesday.

Meals, bedtime, school, sick days, the whole machine — three months, alone, in a country that isn’t hers, with the one adult who normally shares it reachable only by phone in a different time zone.

She Didn’t Just Hold the Line

If the story ended there it would already be more than I’d have managed. It doesn’t end there.

That same season, our church and ministry network were working across four displacement camps near us — food, hygiene supplies, going back week after week, learning families’ names rather than doing a single drop-off. I’d been part of that until I got on the plane.

She kept going without me. Solo-parenting three boys and still making the visits.

And it was on one of those visits that she and Number 1 found out that fifty or sixty children at that camp, kids his own age, had nothing for school. No notebooks, no pencils, no uniforms. Children who’d been in classrooms a few months earlier with no way back into one.

So she raised what she could from our network and put together a supply run — pencils, notebooks, sharpeners, erasers, uniforms, enough for every child there who needed a set. She and Number 1 went and handed them out.

I want to be precise about the sequencing, because it’s the part that gets me. She was already at capacity. She was doing my job and hers. And from inside that, she took on something extra that nobody would have asked of her, that had no deadline forcing it, and that she could have declined with the cleanest conscience in the world.

The Parent Who Could Actually Talk to Cambodia Was the One Still There

There’s a piece of luck buried in this that I’ve thought about a lot since.

My wife speaks fluent Khmer. I don’t. In any conversation with a teacher, a neighbor, a vendor, a family at a camp, she is the one who is actually there and I am the one standing nearby waiting to be told what happened.

So when my body took me off the roster, the parent who could speak to the country my children live in was the one who stayed. If it had gone the other way around — if she’d been the one grounded in Korea for three months and I’d been left in Battambang with three boys and my handful of Khmer — that is a genuinely worse version of this story, and I don’t think it’s close.

I didn’t plan that. Nobody builds a family around which parent it would be less catastrophic to lose for a season. But it’s worth naming, because a lot of what looks like resilience in a family is really just which gaps happened to get covered.

I Heard About the Best Moment Secondhand

Number 1 didn’t hide behind his mother at that camp. He crouched down and put the bags into other children’s hands himself — close enough in age to the kids receiving them that the only real difference between the boy giving and the boy taking was circumstance.

That’s the moment I’d point to if you asked me when I first saw the shape of who my oldest son is going to be.

I wasn’t there. I got it afterward, from other people, in a country where my ear was healing.

I don’t have a redemptive line for that. It’s just the bill. You don’t get to be the person who holds everything together and also the person who never misses anything — and when your body picks the timing, it doesn’t consult you about which season it takes.

The Schedule Is Not the System

I write a lot here about systems. Morning routines, chore structures, a daily schedule that survives contact with four children. I believe in all of it and I’d defend every piece.

But that three months settled something for me that no amount of chart-building had.

The schedule isn’t the system. The other adult is the system. Everything I design is a convenience layered on top of one actual load-bearing fact, which is whether the person you built this with will stand up when the structure loses a leg with no notice.

Mine did. For three months, at a standing start, while also driving to camps she didn’t have to go to.

She behaves, day to day, like she relies on me for a great deal. I now have three months of evidence that this is a generous fiction and she is entirely capable without me. That should probably bruise something. It doesn’t. It’s the most reassuring thing I know about my own family.

What I Came Back With

I got my hearing back. That was the point of the trip and it worked, and I don’t take it lightly — it’s the ear I’d been neglecting since I was a kid.

I also came back to a house that had not needed me to keep functioning, which is a strange and good thing to walk into.

Number 3 and I had flown out together for the same problem. His took half a day. Mine took three months, and what it actually cost was not the surgery.

It was a season where the best thing that happened in my family happened without me in the room — and the reason the rest of it held is that I’m married to someone who drove the van anyway.

Number 1 can read a Korean book. So can Number 2. Number 3 is nearly there — slow, sounding things out, but getting there. Nobody enrolled them anywhere to make that happen. It happened at our kitchen table, in the morning, between Math problems.

Those same boys have spent about two years in an English-medium international school, and they cannot hold a conversation in English.

I’ve been turning that over for months. It is the single most useful thing I’ve learned about learning English at school, and it cost me two years and a tuition bill to learn it.

They Know Words. They Can’t Build a Sentence.

I want to be precise about what the failure actually looks like, because “their English isn’t good” is too vague to be useful to anybody.

They have vocabulary. Ask them what a word means and you’ll often get it. They can pick individual words off a page. What they can’t do is assemble any of it — take the words they know and put them in an order that becomes a sentence, out loud, in real time, to a person who is waiting for an answer.

Reading is the same story. Decoding happens. Comprehension mostly doesn’t. There’s a difference between a child who can produce the sounds on a page and a child who knows what just happened in the paragraph, and my sons are on the wrong side of that line after two years of being taught in the language.

So it isn’t that nothing went in. Things went in. Nothing assembled.

That distinction is easy to miss from the outside, and it’s why learning English at school can look like it’s working for a long time before anybody checks. A child who knows two hundred words can pass a vocabulary quiz, hand in a worksheet, and go a whole term without ever being made to produce a sentence of his own. The report card measures the words. Nobody measures the assembly.

Meanwhile, Nobody Taught Them Korean

Here’s the part that made me rethink all of it.

Korean is the language our house runs on. The boys have never had a Korean class, never had a Korean tutor, never sat in a Korean classroom. They play in it, argue in it, and tattle on each other in it, all day.

And in the mornings, before school, they sit at the table and do their work — Math, and Korean Language Arts. That’s it. That’s the entire program.

Numbers 1 and 2 came out of it reading fluently. Number 3 is close behind.

I did not out-teach a school. I am not a better educator than their teachers, and I’d like that on the record. The difference isn’t the quality of instruction. It’s that one of these languages was unavoidable and the other one was optional, and everything else follows from that.

The System Is the Workload, Not the Clock

One correction to how I used to describe our mornings, because I had it wrong in my own head for a while.

The morning block isn’t a length of time. I don’t set twenty minutes and let them run out the clock. They have a designated daily workload, and the morning ends when the work is done.

That distinction turns out to matter more than almost anything else in the system. A timed session teaches a child to wait. Give a seven-year-old twenty minutes and a reason not to want them, and he will spend eighteen of them sharpening a pencil with real commitment. An assignment can’t be waited out. The only exit is through it.

It also means a good morning is short. Finish quickly, go play. That’s the deal, and they take it.

Learning English at School Assumes the School Is Where the Pressure Is

The theory behind an English-medium school is language immersion: put the child in the language for seven hours a day and the language happens. It is a real thing that really works, which is why learning English at school sounds so obviously correct that most parents never inspect it — I didn’t.

That theory needs one thing to be true. Something inside those seven hours has to actually require English.

At my sons’ school, nothing does. Most of the teachers aren’t fluent themselves, so instruction drifts. Every child in the building shares Khmer, so the second the bell goes, break is in Khmer. English is a subject on a timetable, not the medium anybody is living in.

Which means my sons spent two years in an English school with a working exit from English available at every moment of the day. And a child with an exit takes it, every time, because taking it isn’t a decision — it’s just the conversation continuing.

That’s the same trap I fell into with Russian for ten years, and I’d argue it’s the more expensive version, because at least nobody billed my parents monthly for mine.

I Don’t Get to Blame the School Either

Here’s the part I can’t put on anyone else.

English is my best language. I write in it, I think in it, I’m more articulate in it than I am in Korean. That resource has been sitting in the house the entire time, and my sons still don’t speak English with me.

So the school had seven hours a day and no pressure, and I had a fluent native speaker at the dinner table and no pressure, and we produced exactly the same result. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the whole finding. Exposure is not the input. Necessity is.

Korean didn’t work because we ran it well. Korean worked because there was no version of the day where a boy could get what he wanted without it.

So What Do You Actually Do

I’m wary of turning this into advice, because I’m reporting a failure, not a method. But two things follow from it that I’d stand behind.

First: stop reading the tuition line as if it buys the language. It buys hours of exposure. Whether those hours require anything is a separate question, and it’s the only question that matters. Go find out what actually happens at break.

Second: whatever language you’ve decided your family is going to have, put it where it can’t be avoided. Not a class. A workload, a chore, a conversation your child has to complete in order to get something they want. Ours ended up in a morning slot between Math problems mostly by accident, and the accident is what worked.

We’re moving the boys to a Khmer-language school, which sounds like the wrong response to this article and isn’t. English will keep. It’s everywhere, the materials are endless, and an adult who wants it can get it. What can’t be got later is the language of the country you’re actually living in, which is the thing I know most precisely, because I’m the man who left Uzbekistan without Russian.

By My Own Argument, the Khmer School Should Work

If I’m right about all this, then I owe you the test of it, because the same logic makes a prediction about where we’re going next.

A Khmer-language school should work on my sons in a way the English one didn’t — not because it’s a better school, but because there’s no exit inside it. Every child in that building already shares Khmer. At break, in the corridor, in the arguments over whatever boys argue about, Khmer is the only thing that gets you anything. The pressure I couldn’t manufacture at an English school is simply lying around at a Khmer one.

That’s the bet. It’s the same bet that Korean already won at my kitchen table.

And if it fails, the theory in this article fails with it, and I’ll write that one too. I’d rather put the prediction in writing now than quietly adjust the story in two years.

Number 4 Is Running All Three at Once

The two-year-old is not part of any of this yet, and he’s my favorite evidence.

He is assembling Korean, English and Khmer simultaneously, with no idea they’re separate systems, and sometimes a single sentence comes out with all three in it. It’s very funny and completely incoherent and nobody is correcting it.

He’ll sort them out. They all do. And when he does, it won’t be because of a curriculum — it’ll be because of which of the three he couldn’t get through a day without.

That’s the whole finding, standing in my kitchen in a yellow shirt, making no sense at all.

Number 1 will read a Korean book tonight. Nobody made him fluent. We just never gave him another option.

I repeated kindergarten. Not because of anything anyone would put in a file — I was six, we had just landed in Uzbekistan, and by the end of that first year it was obvious I didn’t have enough language under me to sit in Grade 1. So I did kindergarten again. That was the whole diagnosis. Not slow, not struggling, just short a language.

That is the first thing I remember about learning the local language, and it should have been the last word on the subject. It wasn’t. Ten years later I left Uzbekistan at sixteen with a Russian accent people still compliment and a Russian vocabulary that runs out the moment a conversation gets interesting.

I’ve been trying to work out how both of those are true at once, because my sons are about to be handed the same problem in a different country, and I’d rather they didn’t get my version of the answer.

Learning the Local Language Is Not the Same as Living in It

Six to sixteen. A decade in one place, in the nineties, a few years after the Soviet Union came apart, when Russian was still what everybody actually spoke. Not a semester abroad. Not a gap year. The whole shape of my childhood happened in that language, and I still can’t sit down with a Russian friend and talk about anything that matters.

People hear the arithmetic and assume something went wrong — bad schooling, isolation, some expat bubble with a wall around it. None of that is what happened. I wasn’t sealed off. I had the years, I had the street, I had the exposure everybody says is the thing you need.

What I had instead of fluency was a way out.

The Escape Hatch Was Korean

My parents taught Korean. That was a real part of what they did, and it worked — the young men and women who came through their classes ended up speaking decent Korean. Which meant that the people I spent the most time around had two languages available to them, and so did I.

So conversations went like this. We’d start in Russian. They’d try, I’d try, both of us reaching. And then somewhere in the middle it would get too hard, and we’d switch to Korean, and the conversation would keep going.

Nothing broke. Nothing failed. I never once stood in a room and could not communicate. Every conversation I ever needed to have, I had.

That’s the whole reason I never learned Russian properly. Not that it was too hard — that it was never necessary. There was always a floor under me, and I never fell far enough to find out what learning actually costs.

I didn’t start formally studying Russian until seventh grade. Six years in, with a decade’s head start already half spent — six years of learning the local language by accident and none of it on purpose. Before that it was pure survival linguistics: enough to buy things, enough to be polite, enough to get through the parts of a day that don’t require you to say anything complicated. It was sufficient. Sufficient is a trap.

My Accent Is the Best Thing About My Russian

Here’s the strange inheritance of learning a language by ear as a child instead of studying it as a student: the sound is perfect and the substance isn’t.

My pronunciation is nearly local. On the phone, people don’t hear a foreigner. I can do a Russian accent well enough to make friends laugh. Everything about the surface of my Russian says fluent.

And then people answer me the way you answer a native speaker — fast, half-swallowed, no accommodation — because why would they slow down for someone who sounds like that?

My Russian sounds good. My hearing doesn’t.

I can get around. I can be polite. I can handle a transaction and be pleasant at a table and give the impression, for about ninety seconds, of a man at ease in two languages. What I have never once been able to do is have a conversation with any depth in it. Not a real disagreement, not a long story, not the kind of talk where somebody tells you something true about their life.

That’s the gap. It does not close on its own. It has not closed in twenty years.

The Clinic Where I Was Useful

The summer after my freshman year of college, back in Korea, I volunteered a few hours at the International Clinic at Seoul National University Hospital. It’s the wing for foreign patients — a VIP setup, in practice, for people who had flown a long way and could pay for the privilege of being understood. Wealthy patients from everywhere. Arab families, Indian families, Americans, Russians.

I translated for most of them. That was the job and I was decent at it.

Russian was the hardest one, and the reason is worth saying precisely, because it’s the whole diagnosis: with the Russian patients I was doing half the conversation in English and half in Russian. Not translating between two languages. Patching between three, using English to carry whatever my Russian dropped.

Nobody in that room would have said I was failing. The patients got what they needed. It worked.

It worked the same way it had always worked, which is exactly the problem.

The Nurse Who Told Me to Go

There was a nurse there who spoke fluent Russian. He was 고려인 (kor-yo-in) — Koryo-saram, from the Korean families who moved north into Russia under Japanese rule and ended up scattered across the Soviet Union, generations deep, a long way from where they started.

He loved my pronunciation. He kept coming back to it. And then he told me what everybody who hears my accent eventually tells me: go to Russia. One year, maybe two. That’s all it would take. You’d come back fluent, and with fluent Russian you could do all kinds of things right here.

He wasn’t being polite. He was a man who knew exactly what a language is worth to a family, and he was handing me a specific instruction with a specific timeline.

I knew what the hospital paid. It was good money. It just wasn’t a life I wanted, and underneath that was something smaller and worse:

I thought I was satisfied with the level I had.

I said no to one to two years, at an age when I had them to spend, because the version of Russian I already owned had never once let me down badly enough to make me want more.

I’ve thought about that conversation more in the last five years than I did in the ten before it.

What It Actually Cost

Not a career. I’m not writing this from inside some alternate life where I became a translator and got rich. That’s not the loss.

The loss is that there are people I have known and liked whom I have never actually talked to. I stopped at pleasant with them. I have been a nice, funny, easy man with a good accent in Russian, and I have never been a friend in it, because friendship happens past the point where my Russian stops.

My mother still speaks Russian to me on the phone so I don’t lose the rest of it. She and my father are in Ukraine, still doing the work, and she is quietly running a rescue operation on the last of her son’s second language, one call at a time.

I don’t blame my parents for a second of this. They put me in the best school we could have hoped for and one they could actually afford, with American and British missionary teachers, in a country where the alternative was a local school my parents pulled us out of once they saw what was in it. They made the right call with what was in front of them. The gap isn’t a thing they did to me. It’s a thing I didn’t do, for ten years, because I never had to.

Why My Sons Are Changing Schools

This is the part I actually sat down to write.

We’re moving our boys out of their English-medium school and into a Khmer one. It costs the same, it isn’t a step up in prestige, and it’s going to be hard on them for a while. Number 1 is going to want the whole plan explained before he can sleep.

I’ve given a few reasons for that decision and they’re all true. Here’s the one underneath them.

What stops a child from learning the local language isn’t difficulty. It’s an exit. If a child can always fall back into a language that works, they will, every single time, because there’s no reason on earth not to — and the falling back feels like nothing. It doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like the conversation continuing.

My exit was Korean. My sons’ exit is English, and it’s a much wider door than mine ever was, because English will get you further in the world than Korean got me in Tashkent. Right now they can be at that school all day and go home having spoken almost no Khmer, and nothing will have gone wrong, and that is precisely the condition that produced me.

I’m not making them learn Khmer. I’m removing the way out. Those are different projects and only one of them works.

And I should say plainly that I don’t know if it lands. I’m doing this partly on the strength of my own regret, which is not the same thing as evidence, and there’s a version of this where I put three boys through a hard year and end up with kids who have functional Khmer and resent how they got it. I’ve weighed that. I still think the exit is the thing that has to go. But I’m not going to pretend I’m operating from anything sturdier than a strong hunch and a twenty-year-old mistake.

The other thing I want for them is the part I can’t engineer, which is the friendship on the far side of the language — the same reason their English is a fight worth having and not just a school subject. I want them to be able to have a real conversation with someone whose whole life is in Khmer. Not order food in it. Not be charming in it for ninety seconds. Actually know somebody.

The Kindergarten Year, Again

I keep coming back to that first year, because everyone in it was right.

The school was right that I wasn’t ready. My parents were right to let them hold me back. Six-year-old me was right that it was unfair, in the way six-year-olds are right about things.

And then the system did its job, I caught up enough to sit in Grade 1, and the caught-up-enough held for the next ten years, and nobody ever made me go past it. That’s the year that actually decided this. Not the one where I was held back — the one right after, where I got to just-enough and discovered that just-enough is a place you’re allowed to stay.

My boys are going to have their own version of that year. It’s coming, and it’s going to be rough, and I’m the one signing them up for it.

Learning the local language is going to cost them a year of being the slow kid in the room. I’d just rather they get stuck on the hard side of it than the easy side. I’ve seen how long you can live on the easy side. Twenty years, and my mother still calls in Russian.

The needle would start climbing whenever we stopped moving.

Sitting at a light in Battambang, four boys in the back, air conditioning working as hard as it knows how, and the temperature gauge on my 2012 Sienna would begin its slow walk to the right. Get moving again and it settled. Stop again and up it went. I checked the coolant, because that’s the one thing a man knows to check, and the coolant was fine. It was always fine. In two years that reservoir never dropped a visible millimeter, which I took as good news for an embarrassingly long time.

It took two years and a Korean missionary with a socket set to explain to me what was actually happening. And the explanation had almost nothing to do with the coolant, and everything to do with what buying a car in Cambodia really means.

In Korea, I Barely Noticed I Owned One

You have to understand what I’m comparing this to.

In Korea, a car is a convenience. If it breaks, the day continues. There’s a subway that runs to the minute, buses that arrive when the sign says they will, and a taxi you can summon from your phone at midnight in the rain. A dead car in Seoul is a phone call and a mild annoyance. The system absorbs it and you get where you were going anyway.

I never once thought of my car as infrastructure, because it wasn’t. It was one option out of four.

Then we moved, and I found out what it’s like to be the only option.

Here, I Am the Bus

Four boys, taken to school and brought back, every day. Church. The market. The clinic. The road trips that are their own separate crisis.

Then the other half of it. The work is with the local community, and a fair amount of that community is not in town. Deliveries out to rural areas. Going to see a situation for myself instead of hearing about it. Sitting down with people who live a long way down a road that a motorbike and I would both regret. None of that is optional and none of it happens on a bus.

There is no municipal system standing quietly behind me. There is a van, there is me, and there is whether the van starts.

So when it doesn’t, it isn’t a car problem. Family stops and missions stops, on the same morning, for the same reason. It’s a school problem, a ministry problem, and — the part that actually stings — a my wife is now home with four boys and no way to leave problem. This entire household’s range is whatever one aging Toyota says it is that day.

Which is why the vehicle was never a lifestyle question for us. It’s a non-negotiable, and I bought it like one. That’s the thing I’d tell any dad considering a move somewhere like this: where the transport is good, your car is a possession. Where it isn’t, it’s a utility, like water. You don’t feel the difference until the day it’s off.

Buying a Car in Cambodia Is a Budget Problem With Exactly Two Options

Southeast Asia is notorious for vehicle import taxes, and Cambodia is not the gentle end of that. New or used, it doesn’t matter — the tax comes for both, and it’s tiered by engine size, which is its own quiet joke on families. The bigger the engine, the harder the bracket. A van that seats six is a big-engine vehicle by definition. The exact vehicle a family of four kids actually needs is the one the tax code is least interested in helping you buy.

Which leaves you two doors. New, at forty thousand dollars and up. Or used, at anything under that.

Our budget was limited, the way most missionary budgets are limited, and four kids meant a sedan was never on the table. So in 2024 I went to Khmer24 — which is essentially the Craigslist of Cambodia — and bought a 2012 Toyota Sienna for $21,500.

I know. Twenty-one thousand five hundred dollars for a twelve-year-old minivan is not a good deal anywhere on earth. It was, however, a real deal in Cambodia in 2024, which is a different sentence entirely. Buying a car in Cambodia is not shopping. It’s picking the least bad door available to you on the day you need a vehicle.

One thing did go right. The man selling it ran a garage, and his family had been in the business for forty years. Skills and credit, both, in a country where you cannot look either of those up. That was the biggest green flag I had, and I took it.

The Pipeline: Scan at Toyota, Fix at the Garage

Once the registration and the paperwork were done, the first thing we did was drive it to an official Toyota dealership — yes, those exist here — and pay for a deep diagnostic scan.

Forty-nine dollars. They handed me a list.

Then I took the list to a local garage, where a man read it and went treasure hunting for decent replacement parts.

That is the standard pipeline here, and it isn’t a corner being cut — it’s the good version. Scan where the equipment is honest, repair where the labor is affordable.

The reason is arithmetic again. In a country where essentially everything is imported, and imports are taxed at close to double, a part lands somewhere between two and three times what you’d pay for it elsewhere. Dealership labor is priced to match.

Having Toyota do the work on that list would have run four to six thousand dollars, minimum. The local garage did it for eight hundred.

Forty-nine dollars to find out what was wrong. Six thousand to have it fixed properly. Eight hundred to have it fixed. Every foreigner here eventually stands in front of that third number and takes it, because the second number is most of a used car.

I took it too, and at that point it was the right call. But “fixed” in that sentence is doing an enormous amount of work, and I didn’t find out how much until the bills started repeating.

What This Climate Actually Does to a Vehicle

The ordinary problems are all still here. But a year-round hot and rainy country adds its own list, and two of the three were obvious to me.

The air conditioning, first, and not as a comfort item. In the dry season it runs 38 to 45 degrees Celsius here — call it 100 to 113 Fahrenheit — and at those numbers the A/C is not a feature of the vehicle. It’s the reason the vehicle is habitable.

We went a month without it once.

There are exactly two ways to drive four boys across town at 42 degrees with no air conditioning, and I tried both of them. Windows down means dust off unsurfaced road and exhaust out of vehicles older than mine, delivered directly into the back seat for the length of the trip. Windows up means a dry sauna with seatbelts in it.

The boys were devastated. I don’t mean that as a joke at their expense — it’s the one failure in the whole vehicle that they can actually feel. A worn shock absorber is an adult’s problem; they don’t know it exists. The A/C is theirs, and they serve the entire sentence in the back row, where the air arrives last and least.

So it is never off, which makes it the hardest-worked system in the van. Whatever a sensible service interval is where you come from, it is not that here.

The air filters, obviously. Dust in the dry season, everything else the rest of the year.

The rubber — not obvious to me at all. Seals, hoses, bushings, boots, all the unglamorous black parts nobody thinks about. For the first stretch I saw nothing. Then, right around the two-year mark, wear and tear turned up everywhere at once, like the whole vehicle had agreed on a date.

Add the roads. Once you’re outside Phnom Penh, a great deal of road is not properly surfaced, and the suspension pays that bill. I replaced the shock absorbers on all four wheels.

None of that is a scandal. It’s the operating cost of driving a family around this country, and I’d budget for it from day one if I were doing it again.

The Year of the Cylinder

Then there are the problems that don’t resolve.

In July 2025 I had a cylinder issue. It was fixed last month.

I want to let that sit for a second, because the number is the story: a year. Not one long repair — a loop. They diagnose it. They open it up. They change something out. They tell you it’s fine. You drive away, and some number of days later the engine light comes back on. Then you go again.

This isn’t everybody’s experience, and I’m not interested in running down men working hard with what they have. But live here long enough and you meet the ceiling: for anything genuinely complicated there often isn’t a trained professional in reach, and the process becomes elimination by attempt. Slow, expensive by increments, and the specific hurdle almost every foreigner here eventually hits.

The Korean Mechanic

What finally broke the loop was a connection — a professional mechanic from Korea, here doing Business as Missions — running a real trade as the ministry itself, which is a step past the older tentmaking idea of working a job to fund the work.

He opened the hood and was visibly shocked.

Inside of a week he had it fixed. Most of it, anyway. He stopped partway through and came to find me, because he’d hit so many sketchy leftovers from previous repairs that he didn’t want to keep going without my consent.

The wiring especially. Cut wires. Mixed wires. Things spliced to other things for reasons no longer recoverable. Whole systems in that van had simply not been running, and I had been driving it every day without knowing which ones.

He told me the van would not pass an inspection in that condition, because technically it was only half a car.

I have owned this vehicle since 2024. I have driven my entire family in it, on those roads, for two years.

The Thermostat

Then he told me my engine didn’t have a thermostat.

Not broken. Not stuck. Not there.

I asked how that happens, and got the most Cambodia answer I have ever received: mechanics here often just leave it out. Thermostats fail, and a failed one has to be replaced, and a part that needs replacing on a schedule is a recurring problem nobody wants. Remove it and the problem goes away. So it gets removed, nobody mentions it, and the car drives off.

In a country this hot, that means an engine running with no temperature regulation at all.

I didn’t take that on one man’s word. I went and asked, and got the same answer back from mechanics here in their own words — not defensively, either. It is not a secret and it is not treated as a scandal. It’s just how it’s done, and the owner of the car is simply not part of the conversation.

And there, finally, was my two-year mystery. The coolant that never went down. The needle that climbed every time we stopped moving and settled every time we started again. I’d had a symptom the whole time and no idea it was pointing at an absence rather than a fault.

You cannot diagnose a missing part by looking for a broken one.

Three Doors, and Every One of Them Costs You Something

Buying a car in Cambodia gets you two doors. Owning one gets you three — and this is the decision every missionary and expat with a car here is actually making, whether or not they’ve said it out loud.

Door one is the cheap, unreliable fix. Local garage, treasure-hunted parts, eight hundred dollars instead of six thousand. It is why anybody here can afford to drive at all, and sometimes it is genuinely the right call.

I assumed the catch was reliability and that the money was the part I was winning. That is exactly backwards, and I have the receipts.

By the time I gave up on door one, I had put roughly five thousand dollars into this van. Not in one bill. In a stack of them — each individually reasonable, each one a return trip, each one ending with somebody telling me it was fine. Door two cost me two thousand, once, and it held.

So the cheap door was the expensive door. It just billed me in installments, and it took a year of installments before I could see the total.

Door two is the pricier fix that actually holds. New parts, ordered and waited for, installed by somebody who knows what he’s looking at. The van sits in a garage while a box crosses an ocean, which is a real cost when the van is the family’s transportation. What you buy for that money is not really the repair. It’s the near-certainty that you are not coming back for the same thing. Buy the new part and wait for it. That was the Korean mechanic’s advice and it’s the single most useful sentence anybody has said to me about this car.

Door three is buying new and maintaining it properly from day one. Forty thousand dollars and up, taxes included, and in exchange you start with a vehicle that has no hidden history at all — nothing spliced, nothing quietly removed, no previous life you’ll spend two years reverse-engineering. Over ten years that may well be the cheapest door of the three. It is also, for most missionary families I know, not a door. It’s a window you look through.

I took door one because it was the only one open to me in 2024. I’m on door two now, which is how it usually goes — you don’t choose door two. You get promoted to it by door one, and door one hands you the tuition bill on the way out.

Five thousand, then two thousand. If I’d had the second number available to me first, I’d have paid it first. That’s the whole lesson and it cost seven.

The other thing I’d change is cheaper than any of it. I’d stop treating the forty-nine dollar scan as a formality at purchase and start treating it as an annual physical. Actually, I went one better — I bought a portable OBD2 reader and I scan the van myself now, regularly, not because I can fix what it finds but because I would like to know. In a country where the standard answer is that it’s fine, owning your own opinion about your own engine turns out to be worth about thirty dollars.

“Good Enough” Is the Standard Here

The honest current state, because I don’t want to end on a triumph this van hasn’t earned.

The check engine light still comes on. Some of that is permanent error codes stored from old repairs, and they’ll sit there forever. But the difference that matters is this: now that the wiring has been put back the way it was meant to be, the codes actually mean something. The van tells me the truth. For two years it was a machine full of severed nerves, reporting nothing, or reporting something else.

There’s still work outstanding on the PCM. The Korean mechanic walked me through it, looked at where we were, and told me it could wait — not devastating, not a practical problem, more of an aesthetic one. Come back when you can.

Three of the seats have a broken handle. Three have a broken frame. None of that stops the van from doing the only job I need it to do, which is carry six people to a place and back.

And that’s the thing I finally understood, two years in. Here, the standard of a pass is “good enough.” Not perfect, not restored, not the way it left the factory in 2012 — running, safe in the ways that matter, and honest with you about what’s still wrong.

I’d heard that said about this country several times. I’d nodded at it. It didn’t land until a mechanic told me my van was technically half a car and then, a week later, handed it back to me working, with a list of things he had deliberately not done.

Why This Is a Parenting Article

I have never once heard a parenting talk mention a thermostat.

But a large share of what I actually do as a father here is logistics. Get four boys where they need to be, on the day they need to be there, in a climate actively working to dissolve the machine that takes them. When it works, nobody notices — which is correct. Children are supposed to experience transportation as a fact of nature, like weather.

Cambodia has slowed me down in ways I’m grateful for. This is not one of them. This is the bill that comes attached to the good parts, and I pay it in a garage. Buying a car in Cambodia was one afternoon on Khmer24. Keeping it running has been two years.

So I keep this van running the same way I keep the daily schedule running. Not because I enjoy it, and not because I’m good at it. Because four people shorter than me depend completely on a system they don’t know exists.

These days when we stop at a light, I still look at the needle.

It doesn’t move. That took two years, a family garage, an official dealership, a year of cylinder appointments, a Korean missionary, and a part somebody removed on purpose before I ever owned the thing.

Nobody in that van but me has any idea. That’s the job.