Remembering

Game prior to Ryan sharing about his trip

This week, one of the high school leaders shared about his recent trip to Haiti. The last time that I saw this group of kids listen that attentively... we were IN Haiti - and the group was about a quarter of this size. I'm not sure that they were all breathing, that's how quiet it was in the room. The kids who haven't been to Haiti yet were listening carefully. (And, yes, that is a yet. Quite a few of them are already talking about going next year.) The kids who have been were listening - and remembering - with their whole bodies.

I could have walked into the room mid talk and, without hearing anything or seeing what was on the screen, told you what part of the trip was being discussed. That was how perfectly their body language while hearing/remembering mirrored their body language the first time that they lived it out.

Before we left Haiti, we talked about the way that their brain was probably going to be processing what they had seen and felt, how it probably was processing already. We talked about the fight or flight response that was full on in the process of throwing them for a loop, about why their insides were responding to, "Can you wait five minutes to do that?" as if it were a threat to life and limb. We also talked about how Haiti memories were going to feel different than their memories of last year's math class, about how the human brain stores trauma - things that register as "holy-crud-what-do-I-do with this!?" - as emotion and sensory input (sound, heat, color) rather than normal picture memories. We talked about nightmares and about trauma memories making things feel like they were happening again.

Then, we came back. And, for a few weeks, they lived all of that out hardcore. They were up at night and awake early in the morning. No matter what they were doing, you could read Haiti in their eyes. The entire country had slipped in there and taken up residence.

After a couple of weeks, it started to fade into the normalness of the rest of their lives - even if it was a distinctly new normal.

Two and a half months after getting back, those memories are still so raw and just under the surface that the flash backs come out, not only through their eyes or their faces like a normal ministry trip might, but through every muscle in their bodies. And, yet, these are the kids who stand around afterwards for as long as Ryan will let them, wanting to know more, tell more, remember more, because they miss it, and they want to go back. These are the kids who, before we had gotten all the way home, before they had caught up on sleep or recovered from colds, were already talking about "next year...go[ing] somewhere hard."

Pardon me while I pick my jaw up off of the floor.

Have I mentioned that these kids amaze me?