Just An Ordinary Day (And It´s All Your State of Mind)

So I’ve written about highs and lows, anecdotes and full-blown stories, the theological and the political, vacations and retreats, but I realized recently I’ve never just given you all an idea of what I do on a normal day. Now granted, I have a lot of different versions of “normal days” seeing as I’m currently working in three different places, but I’ll do my best to describe “just an ordinary day” link (last Thursday, actually) working in the Compassion Program at the IEP Collique.

My alarm goes off at 7:00 AM. I snooze it, wrestle with it, and eventually manage to turn it off – consequently I oversleep until 8:00. My roommate and next-door-neighbors from last year (Hi Bizz, Sarah, and Abby!), who probably still have nightmares about my alarm going off every 5 minutes in college, may note that there are some things about me that just never change.

I reluctantly get out of bed and try to motivate myself to do some sort of devotional. I’ve tried several different strategies for personal devotionals since I arrived in Peru and have had a hard time finding one that clicks. I’ve tried reading through the Book of Acts (felt irrelevant to what I’m doing here), daily journaling (kept falling asleep), selecting random passages from Scripture (felt aimless and unfocused), an Advent journaling devotional from the PCUSA(was awesome, but ran out at the end of Advent), reading from a book of John Bell sermons (excellent devotional material, but book only lasted me 12 days), following devotional tracks in The Green Bible that Andy gave me for Christmas (wonderful material that I will definitely use for devotionals in the future, but didn’t provide the personal comfort and encouragement I’ve been needing recently), etc. My most recent attempt is re-reading Henri Nouwen’s link travel journal from his time in Peru and Bolivia, Gracias, and reflecting on what he has to say in light of my experience in living here nearly 7 months. It seems to be working pretty well…relevant, lots of material…I’ve got a good feeling about this one!

I make my way to the bathroom for my bi-weekly shower before work. As the heat of summer set in, I abandoned my old bucket shower using boiled water and now just take a straight-up cold shower. I still haven’t gotten used to it, but it’s much quicker and helps me face the heat of the day.

I make myself a quick breakfast - a roll of bread that is standard breakfast food here, sometimes with some cheese or jam. Eduardo has already left for work, but Flor hears me awake and comes out to talk with me for a few minutes over breakfast before going back to take care of Fabián. I brush my teeth, gather my things, and head out the door to work.

To get to work I first catch a colectivo, a taxi that goes to a specific location and fills up with as many people as possible, who only have to each pay part of the fare. I get out, cross the street and take a little blue combi, a variation on the Volkswagen-hippie-van that my brother wants to drive one day, the rest of the way to the church where I am greeted by shouts of “Hermana Ginna” (Sister Ginna), the title used for pretty much everyone within the churches here. It originally made me feel like I was either a nun or part of some cult, but I’ve gotten used to it by this point. It also makes life TREMENDOUSLY easier when you can’t remember someone’s name…you can just greet them as Hermana (sister) or Hermano (brother). I can’t tell you how many times that has rescued me in an awkward church situation!

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I alternate between all different ages and levels, but on Thursdays like today only the youngest level, the 3-to-6-year-olds, come in for the whole day, so I’m always with them. This makes Thursday the most cuteness-filled and also the most exhausting day of work. There are about 10 to 15 kids in the morning and then a different group of about the same number in the afternoon!

Walking into the room of kids is always one of my favorite parts. They all stop what they’re doing, yell “Hermana Ginna!” and run as fast as they can to hug and kiss me. I honestly don’t know what I’ve done to warrant that kind of love…is it just because I look different? Talk funny? Am only with them on certain days? I don’t deserve their affection nearly as much as the other teachers there who run the classes and work so much harder than I do. But it’s love, and I’ll gladly receive it, especially in a culture where hugs are rare and showing emotion can be taboo. There’s something incredibly beautiful and refreshing about kids this age.

They start the day playing among themselves, and then eventually the teacher rounds them up for some singing (I feebly try to help with this part), a little bit of Jesus-talk (considering the great differences between my theology and that of the teacher, I try to keep quiet for the most part in this, not wanting to confuse the kids by arguing theology and ethics with the other teacher. It’s hard…as most of you know, I’m not very good at keeping quiet!) and some sort of education time – today it’s reviewing different symptoms of different sicknesses, how to take care of ourselves, and when we should ask our parents to take us to the doctor. I can always get excited about some good public health education. And the pictures they use to demonstrate the sicknesses are straight up hilarious!

Diarrhea. In case you couldn´t figure that out...

After this we join hands and walk to the park several blocks away. It’s a pretty humble park – a slide, some monkey-bars, and a set of seesaws, only one of which actually works the way it was intended – but the kids love it! Today I’ve got monkey-bar-duty: I hold the kids up as one by one they make their way across the monkey bars…I can only hope it’s a good arm workout!

When we get back from the park, it’s time for lunch, so we get the kids seated, say a prayer, and I start passing out the food while the other teacher leads them in a resounding chorus of a song called “Los Alimentos”, basically explaining how we eat. It’s become out of my favorites.

The kids eat (and so do we, between some combination of refilling cups, cleaning up spilled drinks, feeding the kids when they’re being picky eaters, and dolling out toothpaste when they’re done) A flurry of cheek kisses and they’re gone, leaving us with a little peace and quiet and time to clean everything up before the afternoon group arrives.

Often the afternoon group has the same activities as the morning group, but not today. After a LONG lunch (these kids don’t want to eat today…I think I end up having to feed at least 5 of them their lunches. However, it is canned tuna…so can I really blame them?), the kids play among themselves for a bit and the teacher informs me she’s leaving to go talk with one of the parents but will be back in a few minutes. This sentence always puts a little dread in my heart as 1.) It’s hard to control 15 kids period, especially when I’m operating in my second language and 2.) “A few minutes” or “A little bit” in Peru usually means anywhere from half an hour to an hour.

So we carry on for awhile, until Pierro, who I love and adore but has some anger issues, gets upset about something and starts throwing chairs around the room (honestly, this is really a weekly occurrence with him). I finally get to him and wrestle him into a chair (one of the ones he was throwing, ironically enough) and tell him that we’re just going to sit there for 5 minutes until he calms down and has had some time to think about what he’s doing. Time out is not used her as a punishment, but the kids have learned to expect it from me…it’s really one of the only ways I know how to discipline these kids. I am not comfortable administering physical punishment, they don’t take me very seriously when I talk to them because I will inevitably make some language mistake that discredits me in their mind (at this age they don’t really understand the concept that I speak another language and had to learn Spanish, they just think I’m stupid), so time out it is. Pierro’s pretty resistant today, continues trying to struggle out of the chair, and eventually bites me, but gives up on that when I don’t react. My pain tolerance has definitely increased since coming here. While I’m still trying to sit with Pierro, the other teacher comes back, I explain what’s going on, and she takes him over to talk with her. After literally one minute, he comes over in tears and apologizes. She’s got a magic touch with those kids that I can only admire and try to learn from.

Pierro, pretending to be a lion, about an hour before he bit me. I should have seen it coming...

A little later, we turn on some music and a few of the girls who were in a “choreography” (can’t use the word “dancing”) workshop over the summer do their dances to the music. They’re super cute, and honestly at the age of 5 are better dancers than I will ever be. We dance until they finally get tired, when the teacher rounds them up and sends them over to the tables to finish the day with a craft.

To my surprise, even though the class is both boys and girls, we’re making bracelets. But the boys don’t seem at all phased by this – they’ve got soccer balls and Indian beads for their bracelets, so all is well. Much to my relief, no chairs are thrown this time.

The kids finish their bracelets, their parents come to pick them up, and after another round of clean-up, the teacher and I are free to go. I take the combi most of the way home, but stop at an internet café to check emails (mostly copy and paste them to my USB drive so I can read them when I get home!) and, inevitably, g-chat with the other YAVs. As much as we laugh about it, it really is good for us to be able to be there to support one another and share crazy stories of the day (today I am super excited to share the story of getting bitten!).

The afternoon girls doing their dance

I leave the cabina and walk about 20 blocks or so to my house. I always love this walk – it gives me some time to clear my head, get some exercise, people watch, etc. When I get home, Flor and Fabián are there, but Eduardo still hasn’t made it back from work (his new job with the Presbytery has him working pretty far way), so I greet them and then head to my room to actually read those emails I picked up at the internet café and relax by myself for a little bit. Later, when Eduardo gets home, Flor calls us in to dinner where we chat some and watch “Al Fondo Hay Sitio”, the hit Peruvian prime-time soap opera (and INCREDIBLY popular song of the same name), on the small kitchen TV.

After dinner I wash the dishes (this has become my dinner chore since we all know me cooking is a bad idea…), kick the soccer ball around in the living room with Fabián for a little bit (not sure that’s really a good idea either), and we head to our separate rooms. I listen to music, read, do more emails, and sometimes watch a movie before falling into an exhausted sleep, often still dressed and with the light on.

I’m startled out of my sleep by the alarm going off at 7 AM. I immediately reach to snooze it, and we start all over again!

Just a Curbside Prophet

Today, my car broke down.

Not that this is really groundbreaking news. Or even news worthy of posting on my blog. I mean, granted, you are presumably reading this blog because you care about me, so maybe this news warrants a sympathetic shoulder-pat or a knowing nod of solidarity. But 3 hours and $100 dollars later, my car and I returned home just fine. A blow to my time and resources, yes, but nothing that will really change my life. But the story continues...

Today, my car broke down, and I was mad.

Mad because I was all the way out in Mechanicsville when this happened. Mad because I had a neatly-organized schedule for the day that quickly fell to pieces. Mad because I was sitting outside and it was nearing 100 degrees. But mostly mad because I had been deprived of something to which I felt "entitled." I expected a safe, easy, and relatively cool trip home and lunch. I got intense heat, a car that could barely even hold a charge once it was jumped, and no lunch.

It's a funny thing, this American sense of entitlement. I would say it's a negative by-product of the individualistic, capitalist society in which we live. (Please excuse me for speaking in generalizations -- I know this is not the case for every American and that there are many outside of Western culture that also feel this sense of entitlement. These are just the reflections that have been floating through my head.) We believe that if we want something and work hard enough for it, we will eventually have it. More so, we deserve to have it. And when, for one reason or another, we don't get what we "deserve," we become, as I became today, filled with this sense of "righteous anger."

However, I must remember that I don't necessarily "deserve" an easy trip home. On a global level, I am one of the fortunate few with personal access to a nice, well-functioning car. And who am I to complain about missing a meal when 13% of the world population is hungry or malnourished? Why am I so set on getting my car back in working order when I know that the gases it emits are contributing to the crisis of Global Warming that, unless a radical change is made in the next 10 years, will seriously hinder the well-being of future generations?

I'll step down from the soapbox, as there are other things I want to address in this post as well, but I'll leave you with this thought: I feel very personally convicted to try to free myself from my sense of entitlement and also from the things to which I feel entitled. There are so many other ways in which my "righteous anger" could be put to better use. I encourage you, if you feel so called, to do the same. As the keynote speakers at the Montreat Youth Conference told us, "Find something worth being angry at." As a Christian living in a broken world, I have much more to be concerned about than a car that won't start.

There's a bit more to my story.

Today, my car broke down, and I was mad, so I set on the curb for an hour finishing Henri Nouwen's book ¡Gracias!

(Now we get to the title of this post. It's from the song "Curbside Prophet" by Jason Mraz, a singer/songwriter from, ironically enough, Mechanicsville, VA! Small world.)

I mentioned this book in my first post, but to recap, it's a journal of Nouwen's thoughts and experiences throughout the six months he spends in Bolivia and Peru. I enjoyed the book more than I had initially expected to - it turns out Nouwen worked with liberation theology more than I had expected and was fortunate enough to have several instances of personal contact with Gustavo Gutierrez himself. Having written an honors thesis (read it online!) about liberation theology at the College of William and Mary, it was very enlightening and affirming to read the personal journal of someone who experienced personally much of what I spent the last year researching.

What struck me today, however, was Nouwen's journal entry from March 5, 1982, about why people go into mission service. Nouwen writes:

"Why do people become missioners?...This question has no simple answer. A desire to serve Christ unconditionally, an urge to help the poor, an intellectual interest in another culture, the attraction of adventure, a need to break away from family, a critical insight into the predicament of one's own country, a search for self-affirmation -- all of these and many other motives can be part of the making of a missioner...[However], the two most damaging motives in the makeup of missioners seem to be guilt and the desire to save. Both form the extremes of a long continuum, both make life in the mission extremely painful" (Nouwen, 161).

With less than three weeks until I leave the country, the question of "why?" is extremely relevant and feels very pressing. Several of Nouwen's motives hit home, others, I feel, don't apply to me as much. The best answer I know to the question of "why" is "How could I possibly do anything else?" In a broken and unjust world, how can I dedicate my life to anything less than love and justice? When it feels like God is light years away, how can I do anything but offer up my self as a place where God can come near to others? With a passion for social justice, young people, Latin America, and liberation theology, what other path could I take right now? I suppose this is a glimpse of what we in the church like to call a "calling." And let me just say, from my own experience, that calling is a lot messier, more confusing, and sometimes more troubling than most like to admit.

I am struck also by what Nouwen calls the "most damaging motives of missioners": guilt and the desire to save. He goes on to say that no "missioner" (I don't particularly like that word...it's awkward) is ever free from either of these, they are both natural human responses to brokenness, but that we must continually strive to let God replace these motives with others that are more pure and constructive.

I certainly agree with Nouwen that guilt and a desire to save propel many people into service, and I certainly recognize that both can be damaging and distract from the main purpose of serving God through serving others. However, I am reluctant to let go of either of them. While guilt can surely weigh you down, I feel like a certain amount of guilt for my current extravagant lifestyle will help me honor my commitment to live simply. And while a desire to save and "play God" in a situation will lead to harmful pride, egoism, potentially bigotry, and disappointment when we inevitably fail at our "saving" mission, I think that converted into a desire to do everything possible to empty myself and serve others, this also can be a very helpful and Christ-like motivation to service.

Who knows? Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps in a few months, I will know all too well what Henri Nouwen meant when he said these motives were damaging. Or perhaps we disagree about the morality and usefulness of these two motives. Only time will tell. For now, all I can say is that I am embarking on a year of mission service in Peru because there is nothing else I can see myself doing. I am wholly called to the year to come.

Today, my car broke down. Who knows what it will be tomorrow. Maybe one day, I'll get out of bed and have the spiritual strength to walk.