Test Run

Saturday afternoon we put all of those last minute planning skills that we have perfected in Eastern Washington to good use, running a one day VBS that we had learned about the night before.

“It will just be a dry run for you.” The American lady who was our boss for the first two days assured us. “Bring enough stuff for 30-50 kids.”

So, after a brief powwow and some prayer, we yanked open the suitcases (that the boys had more or less separated into “VBS supplies” and “non-VBS supplies” while the girls were having a brief cultural orientation from an experienced short termer who happened to be on the compound), grabbed enough snack and craft for 100 kids – just in case – built pharaoh’s beard out of duct tape and construction paper, picked out a few props, and made a poster of the Red Sea for the Israelites to cross.

15 minutes active prep time, tops. 

We piled back into the vans from the day before and bounced up a dirt and rock road for 45 minutes to a mountain village called Thoman (Toe-ma) where HCM has recently started working.

With approximately 0.5 seconds to orient themselves, the song team jumped right in, and…experienced the ever popular phenomena known as “watch, slightly puzzled, while the Americans attempt to sing in Creole.” Which, was not quite the reception they were hoping for.

But, they pulled it off valiantly and segued into the story team (who got their first ever experience of working with a translator…we like active learning around here, apparently!). The Israelites escaped. The Red Sea swallowed the Egyptians. And, all of the children stood on tip toes, craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Pharaoh’s dead army laying on the ground. 

As we went, the children continued to trickle into the church and trickle into the church, until we hit a head count of well over the hundred we had prepared for.

Half of the many children stayed inside to work on a coloring sheet and the other half went to games. Somehow, two of our kids managed to convey Sharks and Minnows with very few words (and, occasionally without a translator!), another set explained relay races, and we managed to not permanently injure anyone . And, we learned some of our first non-greeting Creole words: copy, go, quickly, and sit.

Largely, it became a game of ‘watch the blanc (white person) and do what they do.’

There is, however, no way of magically turning 100 coloring sheets into 150 (200?), so, at the rotation, we found ourselves on the concrete floor of the church, using a pocket knife to cut the Red Sea into enough pieces for everyone to draw on something. Okay. Not what we were expecting. But we can handle that. We’ll just have to be a little more creative on Monday, when we run this same story in a different village, seeing as we no longer have any blue butcher paper. No big deal.

Then, snack passing out time hit, and all of our plans for an orderly line out the door dissipated as a torrential downpour broke loose and the inside of the church turned to twilight.

Nearly two hundred children + a snack team that is beyond jet lagged and on emotional, sensory, and cultural overload = a complete inability to recall which children have or have not gotten a peanut butter cracker.

Over the roar of rain on a tin roof, the children were standing up, trying to get our attention, “Blanc! Blanc!” The mamas were doing their level best to make sure that all of their children got a snack, and the most commonly heard word from the Americans and translators was, “Chita!” (she-tah). “Sit!”

Most of our team did exactly what their survival instincts were telling them to do in a situation where what looks like a mob of people (even if they are smaller than you) are in an enclosed space, yelling things at you that you don’t understand, and pinching and biting you; they huddled in the back of the church, slightly out of the press, trying, without realizing it, to be invisible.

Had I been fifteen, never out of America before, and in the same situation, I would have done the same thing.

Our “dry run” ended with a very abrupt wet run through the downpour (and out through a very dysregulated crowd of children) when our leader abruptly realized that this rain might be the sort to wash the road away.
Meh. We got the “run” part right.