Duct Tape is Like the Force

Sunday.

School starts this week. A new youth pastor is coming. (Did I mention that they hired a new youth pastor while we were in Haiti? Or, that their heads and their hearts are spinning a million miles an hour at the thought of it?) We're signing kids up for clusters. And, the whole lot of them have that just under the surface energy that means change is in the air.

Senior boys spark with the challenge of small groups breaking apart to duct tape someone to a wall. John Day kids tell their stories, just as Haiti kids spent last week telling theirs. Microphone in hand. A thousand things left unsaid. Speaking truth. But, not quite the entire truth.

Trusting that there will be future. An entire year to tell these stories. And, then, new trips to jar them loose and send them spilling from our lips and hearts again.

Because, we do healing in layers around here. Debriefing Royal Family under a hot Haitian sun, cross legged in these long skirts and curled close into this tiny strip of shade. Kids' camp under a sheet of stars. Old trips in the midst of new ones.

And, this summer has given us plenty to talk about.

Stories about fires and rainstorms and fear and hope that crowd for space behind their eyes, jostle with wishes and worries for the soon coming school year.

We pull in a little tighter on this type of day, whether they realize that we are doing it or not, crowded in tight around the red dot rug where we go over the schedule, far too many bodies for the "toes on the edge" habit that one of our graduated seniors worked so hard to instigate. Slowly mixing and shifting clumps of humanity, as we move back to being a youth group rather than these ministry trip teams. Closer together than the space requires us to be.

We talk and pray and sing and count heads. We duct tape children to walls.

Gently.

Somehow, that is the truest word that I have to describe our kids tonight. They are gentle.

They function together in a smooth mix of classes, the freshmen watching and mimicking the things that they see the upperclassmen doing. Seniors splitting from their friends to join younger groups for prayer. Stepping out into the parking lot to cut duct tape off of willing victims. Gathering around to watch as the last team finishes, names falling from their lips like quiet talismans. "Oh, this is so-and-so's group? They're going to figure out how to do it."

We're figuring out how to do it. Loose inside this transition as we always are, peering at the unknown edges of a new year, curious. But, also, perfectly content to draw close and stay right here.

To pray quietly for our schools in these circles where freshman and senior mirror each other's body language so perfectly that another leader simply nods when I point out the symmetry. Fully convinced, as only a youth leader could be, of the precious power within the lives of these kids.

If souls could have twins, these two would be cut from the same cloth.

Our freshmen mirror our seniors, the mass of sophomores and scattering of juniors settling comfortably into the space in between. They are gentle. They are wise. They have tasted some bitter fruit this summer and still held to the conclusion that God is Good.

God is Grace. God is Mercy. God is Love.

In the midst of fire and drought and fear and want and heartache: God is.

In the midst of goofy games and everyday life: God is.

It is going to be a good year.

But the wisdom that comes from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality or hypocrisy.

James 3:17

(If youth groups were birds, this would be how we do transitions.)

The Stuff of Stars and Dirt With Eyes to See

If you follow Route 8 east out of Port au Prince, past Fond Parisien, almost to Mallepasse and the Dominican border, there is a little town called Fonds Baillard and a school house full of people who don't exist. Refugees, deportees from the DR, who are living here until classes start again in the beginning of September.

And, they very much exist.

Their kids join 150 others in a dirt floored church building where workmen mix concrete as we sing and teach, smoothing a new floor onto the half of the room not currently filled with children. They play games outside or stand to talk with us, listlessly befuddled when we suggest running during a game, as if, surely, even the crazy blanc yo understand that it is too hot to think about running in the middle of a drought.

Water is precious here, and the parents scold that the children shouldn't play games right now. So, we talk instead, in a wild mixture of Creole and English and Spanish that is differently accented than anything that I have ever heard before. Names and ages, families and favorite colors and anything else that we can manage in this mix of children who haven't come with labels identifying their primary language.

A young teen in pink alternates bites of popsicle between the four year old running around at her feet and the baby perched on her hip. 

"You can take the baby." She offers the American staff member who is standing beside me. "Her mama is dead, and her papa is gone."

The gesture is off towards the Dominican, and I am reminded of the complications to every bit of this situation. Because, it is entirely possible that Dad is Haitian, living and working in the Dominican, while these Dominicans are living in tents and empty school houses in Haiti.

How foolish we must look sometimes to the Divine, othering each other and sniping over bits of paperwork when there are mouths to be fed and bodies to be housed and hearts to be loved.

The half finished church, this refuge with its haphazard roof and drying floor and chalkboards that double as doors, rings with the persistent squawks of two hundred paper cup roosters, damp sponges scraping down cotton yarn in the sort of absolute cacophony that seems to be an international source of childhood pleasure.

Snack and water, and the adults whose names are on the refugee list filter back into the church as the kids clear out. Silent. Waiting. Familiar with the routine, certainly wishing that, in this tiny camp, there was an alternate way to feed their families. Crisis means relief work, and relief work is what they have found themselves a part of. Sit down and listen as the indomitable Ms. Betty gives a short sermon, and we arrange ourselves with the interpreters in quiet whispers. This is only the second food distribution for our team, but, already, our habit creating students have settled into roles.

These ones pull the food from the bags. Those ones hand it in careful stacks to the translators to distribute. These ones stay up on the stage with duct tape and extra baggies in hand to repair rips and salvage anything that might be left in the bottoms of the sacks. And, always, always, if we can help it, the food goes from Haitian hands to Haitian hands.

We may be an excuse to be at these churches this week, the way that we used short term teams in Kenya as an excuse for building desks or running clinics. But, an Excuse is a far cry from a Savior, and our kids are astute enough to try to keep it that way. Confident enough in their relationship building to realize, without being told, that simply being fully present is far more important than a job description on a piece of paper could ever be.

So, the next morning, they slip their feet into sturdier shoes for hiking, and we, once again, load the bus with rice and beans, oil, water, snack, and a light, easily transportable craft that was surely Grace preparing a way for us long before we set foot in Haiti.

West, towards Port au Prince, for just a few minutes, and then south down 102, up into the mountains. Past Village of Faith and the vista of the empty river bed. Turns and switchbacks until the blue of the lake no longer watches over us with it's steady eye. Past the cluster of elaborate voodoo graves and into the town of Thoman, where we park the bus and unload into a cluster of bodies.

Part of the congregation has come down to help carry, and forty sets of hands - and one set of hooves - make light work of a twenty minute hike further up the mountain, while our bad back, back knee, bad hip, bad ankle, bad toes collection does their level best to keep up with the crowd. Through empty fields and under a papaya tree, past workmen filling in the worn away bits with fist sized chunks of limestone and up the steep parts that could almost be stairs. We're still eyeing the top of the mountain, uncertain of how much further we have to go, when music breaks out around the corner, and, instantly, we have arrived.

Arrived to middle school aged hands that jump in to pass gallon bags out rice out of American back packs into this tiny church that will surely not hold this many people, already full to overflowing, as more and more littles arrive to be squeezed in the front door while the adults ooze out the back.

And, our kids who don't fit into the building barely offer a word of question, let alone complaint. Simply get down to work holding babies and making friends.

There is good soil here, rocky but rich brown, and, for the past two years, too dry to allow anything to grow. So, the fields stand empty, hundreds of kids and adults joining hands to play Kopye and Hot Potato, to laugh and talk and tease and practice stupid human tricks in places that ought to be covered with beans and corn.

Not all of these kids can read or write their name, but their eyes light up with creativity and curiosity, with compassion for each other, and it is clear that there is a richness here that goes deeper than the soil. Children in Bertrand are highly valued, and they value one another highly in return. Snacks and water never touch adult hands, and kiddos break open cookie packets to share with those who were in the back of the church and didn't get their own.

Older kids find us again and again for simple, repetitive jokes that are the best our broken language skills have to offer. Little ones instinctively curl in when the wind whips up clouds of heavy, gritty dust-that-is-really-soil, well accustomed to bigger hands that shield and protect. And, mama's stay close, to keep a watchful and yet trusting eye on their babies.

Generations have built roots deep into this mountain.

There is poverty, sure, mud walled construction and broken benches, simple homes and oversized, well worn shoes. But, there is also a wealth that would spend hours simply talking and playing with these visitors, even long after any hope of food is gone. That would have us collecting our kids from around every possible corner when it finally comes time to leave, would bring them down the mountain still busy with the act of holding hands and memorizing faces, would fill their heads and hearts with memories of bright colors and gorgeous landscapes and let them feel so very at home in a place so different from any that they have ever seen before.

Beauty.

When they are wide eyed and searching for beauty, they can be at home anywhere. In Fonds Baillard,  Fond Parisien, Thoman, Bertrand. The places don't matter so much as the people, these walking, talking, breathing glimpses of Glory. Stardust indued with the breath of God.

Someday, eternity will stretch long before us, and we will see the temporal ends to each of these stories. But, for now, it is enough to see stardust and rich soil, clear blue lakes and the pale cut of limestone. Enough to wonder at these carefully formed images of Divinity that laugh and cry and bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.

Enough to have eyes to see.

The Shadow Proves the Sunshine

26.

When we counted off this year, one voice chasing after another in a careful accounting of bodies present, we got up to twenty-six. Higher if the interpreters joined into the count, as they often did, Annie or James or Junior grinning as they claimed whichever number came next.

Twenty students. Six leaders.

Fifteen girls. Five boys.

And, this impossible to explain sense that they truly enjoy one another. Love each other with a raw and steady courage that seems determined to glue this team together in a way that nothing can pull apart.

This is love. Grace made present. The Church as it should be.

Five boys, going into their senior year of high school, who sit for an easy hour, listening and absorbing the stories and realities of these girls who are circled up on this rooftop with them, sitting and laying on a loose clump of mattresses, letting the stars catch their words. #YesAllWomen, tonight, is truth spoken without a hashtag. Less than, or perhaps so much more than, a social movement or a response to an event, these are friends who simply sit and listen, without the faintest breath of anything that sounds like #N*tAllMen.

This is love.

Kids who gather in the living room to sing worship songs and RFKC songs, their voices bouncing across the tiled and concrete acoustics of the room. Sing on the rooftop, where the night wind whips away the sound, and on a bouncing bus as fine clouds of dust drift in through open windows. In the early part of the week, we sing, process through music, find answers in familiar words that feel a little as if they were memorized just for this moment.

Sing and sing and sing, until the week wears on and their hearts and minds and schedules are too dangerously close to overflowing to leave space for the vulnerability of the habit. Because, we're asking some pretty incredible things out of them. Asking them to pour out everything that they have into these 200-300 kids who attend VBS each day, to learn names and ages and personalities, to stretch their Creole beyond its limits and to find ways to build relationships regardless.

To carefully make sure that each child gets a packet of cookies and a bag of water on the way out the door, knowing that many of them will be made to give the food to older family members instead in a tangle of stories that we haven't begun to be here nearly long enough to unravel. To tell hungry children "no" when they beg through church windows for rice and hold out empty hands to adults when the food runs out a dozen families too soon, and our kids are forced into the reality that handouts are a stopgap, not a solution.

And, then, like so many who have gone before them and will continue to go after them, they wake up the next morning, square their shoulders to load the bus with yet another round of carefully portioned rice and beans and cooking oil, and set off to do it all again.

This is love.

This space that they carve out for each other to talk about every possible aspect of life, the dance parties in bedrooms and on the roof when there are too many feels and not nearly enough words to express it all, the almost wordless way that they gather tools and divide into teams to separate rice and beans into carefully sealed and counted Ziplock bags, the pools of hand held light as they scatter for quiet times under the early darkness of an equatorial dusk.

This is love.

The worried puddle of girls waiting near the couches for news on the night that basketball turns into unpleasant variations on dehydration for two of the boys and the overlapping of twenty voices as we hold hands in this circle and pray out the worries that are coiled tightly around the sweetness of homemade cake, because, somewhere, in this whirlwind of an evening, there was also celebration and rejoicing and words that come spilling out as we debrief in the never silent darkness.

Boys who wake up in the morning, roll an IV stand out into the hallway, and head back down to the courts to help with a coaches' clinic, after breakfast under the watchful eyes of teammates who come back to me with pinpoint accurate assessments.

This is courage. This is love.

Language classes, both formal and informal. Basketball tournaments. History museums. Campus tours. Church services. Soccer games. Opportunities to preach. Countless hours spent with Haitian and American friends.

There was not a challenge thrown down that they did not meet with outstanding love.

Love made real as they gathered water bottles to bleach and clean, hunted high and low through bedrooms and finally picked the unsalted cashews out of tiny bags of trail mix so that the girl with detergent burns in her mouth could have something to eat while we waited for plantains from Port au Prince, and hauled each other's mattresses in and out of bedrooms every morning and night. Because, Haiti, for these kids, means late night talks and falling asleep under a brilliant curtain of stars.

It wasn't an easy trip. Simple to lead. Complicated to experience. Up and down and world turned sideways, like the Eternal had dumped us into a bottle of Italian dressing that needed to be mixed thoroughly before it could be poured out on the salad.

The kid who let his heart get ripped to shreds day in and day out, along with the rest of the team, got stung by a bee while preparing for the last day's VBS; spent a solid chunk of time hemmed in by those of us carrying epi pens, pretending like his external calm was an actual reflection of what was going on with his insides; and still hopped into the bus with the rest of us, loopy on antihistamines, to teach the story of Lazarus to a tent full of eager littles.

Nothing about that is easy. But, it probably isn't the first story that he would tell you if you asked him about Haiti. In fact, I have heard him share, and I know that it isn't.

There were shadows, dark spots, hard things. As the walking pharmacy and regulator of both bedtimes and early morning wake ups, I can tell you that these kids had every right to be sick, sweaty, miserable, tired bundles of raw and anxious nerves.

But, when the world is lit by this kind of quiet, steady, courageous Love, the shadows only prove the sunshine.

The Mountains are Calling and I Must Go

Somewhere up in these mountains there are a thousand stories, a hundred thousand moments of unfailing Grace, but teasing them out, one by one, feels a little like trying to pluck the center strand from a cotton ball without destroying the entire thing.

When we spent twelve days awash with new faces and places every time that we turned to take a breath, how do I begin to know which stories to center?

I could tell you about a twelve year old named Pascal, who shruggingly suggested that I could be the mom to his eleven year old best friend, because Benito's mother was dead, two sets of dark eyes watching me with a careful mixture of truth and mischief, folded coloring pages tucked into plastic baggies and clasped in quick fingers, each of them leaning one hip on the small table by the bathrooms where we are talking, tilted towards each other the way that best friends do. I could tell you about the rumble of the engine pushing us back towards the vehicle or bright cloth against smooth skin or the always divided attention of being a leader and a team member at the same time. I could stay with them for a month and tell you every bit of every moment.

But, even that would leave so much out of the story. It would leave out the drought hunger of this place, but also the glimpses of hope, of life.

The crates of empty pop bottles stacked behind a small, half wall, waiting to be returned for a deposit, exchanged for full cases to start the cycle again. Because, Fond Verrette is still a town where people buy and sell. Where mama hens are moved carefully from one spot of shade to another as the sun crawls across the sky, her chicks huddled safely under her wings in the one moment and slipping down her back feathers like a giant slide the next. Where we walk out the door to a little boy chasing a donkey down the road, the dusty rope just inches in front of his running feet.

A church so new that the scent of fresh cut roof timbers still lingers in the air as we tumble out of a rented tap tap and brush off our very dusty selves. Plastic chairs not yet cracked with use and straight lines of desks still in proud possession of clean varnish and tightened screws.

Sassy, laughing conversations marked by that very pull-your-leg style of Haitian humor, as if we are somehow laughing at and with each other and saving face at the exact same time. Dancing with the tension of a people hungry enough to ask for help but proud enough to do it with heads held high and fire in their eyes. These are kings and queens. Mountain people. All too aware of the stereotypes that come with pale skin and blond hair.

So they tease us about the best way to sneak their babies onto an airplane when we go home. Determine exactly how long we are going to be staying and if we are coming again. Laugh in surprise when they ask for skirts straight off of bodies and our kids sass back the way that they have been taught.

"Give me."

"You give me."

We grin, but there is a discomfort to being the ones who show up with food, to sending people to talk with pastor, already knowing that there will not be enough. A discomfort, as there should be, to coming in as benefactor. To not being able to shrink back unnoticed, invisible, as we pass these bags of rice to pastor to distribute to his Church and to those waiting still outside.

Because, these mountains seem to have been tasked with teaching us just how much we do not know.

Less than two miles from the Dominican border as the crow flies, the Creole is differently accented here, the kids buoyed by the presence of crops and running water.

"I'd forgotten that babies did that."

The high schoolers compare notes as we bounce back down the mountain, two hours to cover almost sixteen miles of roughly unpaved roads, past riverbeds bright with the laundry of dozens of different families, towns, graves, quarries, trucks that lumber along, and the pastor's motorbike that zips along behind us for an easy mile as he grins and waves goodbye.

This is only the fourth out of seven sites where we will run VBS. But, our kids, our drawn to littles like magnets, always with a tiny in arms kids, have already forgotten that babies coo, babble, kick their feet, play with their shoes.

But, here, babies do.

Because, today, the mountains are teaching us never to assume that we know what waits around the next corner.

Which, ironically enough, seems to be one of the lessons that life itself is working to pound into our heads. Never assume. Keep your face towards the mountains. And, stand, wide eyed, watching, as you are covered, time and again, by Amazing Grace.