Tidbits, to suffice for my lack of blogging=)

As I type this, Ashley and I are sitting at Dunkin Donuts working on school stuff. It is eerily similar to evenings at Panera or Barnes & Noble or Spencer’s during university, except this time I am grading and not studying. Things are very different on this end of the education world—my respect for teachers has increased exponentially in the last two months. Planning lessons, writing quizzes, determining how to grade those quizzes, wanting so bad for all of your students to understand everything, but having to accept that not all students are willing to do their share in order to do well… it’s a tough job! But teaching vale la pena (meaning, it’s worth it!).

It has been entirely too long since my last blog post. Here we are. I thought I would share a few tidbits of life here. Some are entertaining, others are more like prayer requests.

~Tidbit Number One~ I teach a dance class at the Hogar on Wednesdays, and I have now taught absolutely every dance that I know to these girls. They keep asking me for a new one, so, on our day-off from school last week, I spent about three hours in my room watching “High School Musical Dance Along” on YouTube in order to learn the dance to We’re All in This Together! (Unfortunately I don’t remember all of it from my BCM days, haha).

~Tidbit Number Two~ Last night we went to a wedding reception, and Vanessa, one of the girls from Misericordia, who has Down’s Syndrome, was a bridesmaid. She looked like a princess! Half-way through the reception, I saw her standing outside, arms crossed, looking very angry. I asked her what was wrong and she just shook her head. One of the staff from the Hogar told me, “Emily, she is jealous.” I said, “Jealous? Why?” The staff member motioned her head towards the window, and inside the reception, Vanessa’s groomsman partner (a teenage boy who also has a mental disability) was dancing with another girl. I looked at Vanessa and asked her if she wanted to dance with me. She grinned and nodded her head yes, so we went inside. Within two minutes Vanessa had left me, cut in on the other couple, and was dancing happily with her groomsman. PRECIOUS.

~Tidbit Number Three~ (Necessary background information: the mascot of Comayagua is the Burro, or Donkey. People from Comayagua are sometimes called “Little Donkeys”. YES.) At school on Thursday we had a Honduran Culture Night. All day at school, the students had been preparing and decorating and practicing. The last period of the day, as I was monitoring the chaos, the gate opened and a donkey was brought in and tied to a post in the courtyard. Random, I thought, but I was assured that it was part of the culture night. In the evening, the students came dressed in traditional clothing and each grade performed a traditional dance. We ate traditional food from all the different departments (or states) in Honduras. Unfortunately, we had quite the rain storm in the middle of the fiesta, and everything had to be moved inside. In between some of the dances, Ashley and I walked outside and the donkey was still there, this time tied to a soccer goal. Reading this it does not sound that funny… but it was a donkey, inside our school, supposed to be a representation of Honduran, and specifically, Comayaguan culture. And all it did was stand there tied to a soccer goal in the middle of a rainstorm. It was funny to me. And then I found five lempira.

~Tidbit Number Four~ (The serious one) Things have been … complex … lately. I have found myself really questioning what missions are supposed to be. What does it really mean to care for orphans and widows, or the poor? What if someone doesn’t want help? Or doesn’t believe that they need help, but we know they need help? Or what if they want so much help that they don’t want to do their part? Do we “give to all who ask of [us]” if it is just crippling that person? Is it mine to decide what is crippling someone and what is helping them? Should I believe any and every story of need? Where does our giving intersect with being good stewards? Another subject… How do we determine God’s will? I knew, my parents knew, Ashley knew, that we were supposed to “go”; that we were supposed to be here in Honduras. But what now? If I was “called” here for one thing, is it possible that God would change that thing now that I am here? How does His will for us progress? Or is it more that we are slow to understand His will and that he is gradually opening our eyes to see? Complex, right? Basically, how do we obey God in the gray areas of life?

I wish I had the answers to that mess of questions. All I have is this (the passage from church this morning): Habakkuk 3:17-19.

Though the fig tree does not budand there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop failsand the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls,

yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

he enables me to go on the heights.

I praise God for his word and how he speaks to us. For Habbakuk, (which, fun fact, in Spanish is pronounced "a-ba-COOOK"), everything was failing. When things are failing, when we are failing, it is easy to question our purpose. A farmer with no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls probably wonders why on earth God called him to be a farmer. And YET we rejoice in the Lord. He is still our Savior, he is still sovereign, and he is still our strength. =) =) =)

Things I never thought to be thankful for...

I have been processing through a lot of situations lately... life situations that are somewhat normal down here. Sometimes when I try to put myself in someone else´s situation, it gets overwhelming. The best way to put it, I guess, is that I never thought to be thankful for things that I thought were a given in life. For example...

I never thought to be thankful that I didn´t have to raise my own siblings. I never thought to be thankful that I didn´t have to root through garbage (in fact, I was strongly discouraged from rooting through the garbage=). I never thought to be thankful that someone took care of me when I was sick.

The background to these situations? Well,

Last week INFAH told my parents about a 16-year old girl. She and her 1-year old brother had been abandoned by their mother. So, the girl found a man to live with, to take care of her and her brother. When INFAH called, the man had abandoned them as well, and the girl is pregnant and caring for her little brother. INFAH wanted to know if there was room for them to live in Buen Pastor. Her story hit me hard, because I don´t think I would ever imagine such a story. It never occurred to me, when I was 16, that I should be thankful that my parents raised us--it seemed like a given.

We have a woman here in Misericordia named Maita, and she is often a highlight to my day. I am not sure what her "diagnosis" is, but she always asks the same questions... "Will you play jacks with me?" and "When are we going to my house?" She also laughs very hard every time she sees me, which makes me laugh (I try not to get offended;). Anyway, if Maita gets outside the gate, she immediately starts looking through trash. It is her instinct. Tonight we took the Misericordia and Buen Pastor girls to dinner, and Maita made a comment about how "pretty" her empty soda bottle was (for trash, plastic bottles are a good find). I just think, really? In the U.S., we even train our pets not to get into the trash, and yet here, this precious woman, who can´t remember one conversation to the next without repetition, instinctively goes to trash to look for plastic bottles. I never thought to be thankful that I was someone throwing trash out, instead of being someone bringing it in to find my family´s next meal.

The reason we took everyone to dinner tonight is because Yoly (age 18) passed her 6th grade final exam. In Honduras, this is a big deal because now she is eligible to get a job and she can go into high school. So we celebrated, hoping to also encourage the other girls to keep working hard. Unfortunately, Yoly has been having some health issues lately, and the food didn´t go well with her. When my parents and I got back later, Javier (the four-year old) came to our door telling us to come help Yoly. I went down to her room, and she was on the floor of the bathroom throwing up. I squeezed in (she was kinda blocking the door) and, because I am no nurse, held her hair out of her face and rubbed her back. That is what my mom always did for me whenever I was sick. Standing there, I thought how lonely it must have been to be there on the floor, hurting, and unable to control your body. I think I always assumed that it was my parents´responsibility, their job, to be there with me when I was sick. I don´t think I was ever thankful for the comfort of knowing that someone cared that I was hurting, and that someone wanted me to get better.

Needless to say, I was thanking and praising God as I cleaned up that bathroom, washed the mop, and told the girls "Good night" tonight.

I was thinking about the verse in Matthew, where Jesus says to the righteous, "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." I have heard this verse plenty of times, even read entire books based on this verse, but still, I think I always took it figuratively. You know, I thought we were just supposed to do nice things for other people. But lately I have been thinking, No, there really are Hungry people, and Thirsty people, and Sick people. There really are people who need clothes, who need to be welcomed in, and who need someone to visit them, even if it means visiting them in prison. Jesus is not using figurative language to speak about abstract needs, but rather these are real conditions, and in much of the world, normal conditions. Jesus said, "And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’" I pray that God will constantly remind me that these people are His, and no matter how humbling the task, I am working for Him.

Most of all, I pray that the 16-year old girl would know that she has a Heavenly Father who will never abandon her. That Maita, every time she is given food, will know that God is her Provider. And that Yoly, though she may be sick and suffering some tough things, would know God as her Great Healer and Refuge.