Anniversary Showing

Two years ago we were rolling out plastic flooring in a church gym for the first showing of SOLD, not sure if it would ever go any farther or even if people would show up.

Today we can pull into the local community college with almost a dozen seasoned volunteers on our "travel team" list, people who can come together to lead this thing in any city where we could think to send them.

We can laugh at the quirks of it all, the memories of where that green bubble wrap came from or why we do it this way now instead of that way. Go slow and deliberate and still set it up or tear it down in two and a half hours instead of the once upon a three or four. Tease each other and laugh about the days when we used to walk on egg shells, uncertain of what we were getting ourselves into.

And, it's good.

Good to be able to step back far enough to see which site volunteers can take on more responsibility. Good to be able to hand them a procedure notebook and a pile of bins and set them loose on the decorating. Because, yes, we have procedure notebooks now. Careful lists and pictures to document every step of the process.

Good to stand around in the trailer and talk about the future that is coming faster than any of us could have ever anticipated.

An East Coast/ Mid West college tour with the Live Love Movement that will take us farther than we we've ever been before. A month of sending teams back and forth across the country to set this thing up and tear it down as many times as we can get away with.

A partnership with Hope Outfitters and their brand new t-shirt design for the months of May and June.

A constant stream of emails and cost estimates and purchase orders.

Because, it's not just my baby anymore. Not just a random collection of sketches in the back of a notebook. Not just an innocent question to my dad of, "Can we build this? Will it stand up?"

And, it seems so strange to think of the post-Haiti conversations that led us here. The quiet moments on a back porch with the youth pastor's wife, sipping from glasses of kombucha while she processed through a response to the things that we had seen and heard. The offhand challenge just before a meeting with the outreach pastor of, "We should see if there is some kind of an anti-trafficking exhibit we could bring in."

The long internet searches and the impossibly small budget that we set to build one ourselves. Piles of lumber in a borrowed barn and friends and family huddled around to examine donated blueprints in the biting cold.

The moving walls and moving walls and moving walls again. Countless volunteer hours and vacation days. Until somehow we have gotten here. Here where it isn't mine anymore and hasn't been for a long time. Here where this thing has taken on a life of its own.

Whirlwind

13.

"Thirteen days of justice."

We start with a prayer meeting on Thursday night. Two showings of a documentary Friday and Saturday. Minor sex trafficking in Cambodia.

Saturday morning is a "Run for Rice." The afternoon is set-up for SOLD, tweaking things as we come full circle back to the church that funded the exhibit to begin with.

Sunday is a video testimony. Monday a seminar on shame and forgiveness and the opening of SOLD. 

SOLD Monday through Sunday. Spoken word Thursday night. Poetry slam twice on Friday. Faith Justice Network meeting. The start of a high school fundraiser. Kids bring ten dollars to spend the night and raise money for water filters for a village in Haiti.

Lights out a little before 3:00 and up again a little before 7:00. Car wash from 9:00 to 1:00, where a couple dozen high school students raise over $900 for clean water.

Lunch with speakers from Cambodia. An evening of spoken word, worship, and art.

Spoken word and a sermon on justice Sunday morning. Anti-trafficking training in the afternoon and a tear down of SOLD that evening. Part two of the training Monday night. Women's brunch Tuesday morning with one of the trainers.

And, a deep breath as we all fall into our pillows.

(Somewhere on Sunday there was also 4th grade Sunday school; middle school game, farewell to the 8th graders, and more donuts; Haiti training, Intersect, and a welcome to the freshmen.)

SOLD

This time last year, we were still in a barn, painting and scheming and trying to square up an exhibit that seemed to refuse to be square.

Now, we have a trailer and an experience that has made it to California and back with another California trip on the way. We've had three showings in town and two within a few hours drive. Hundreds and hundreds of people have gone through and come out the other side without anything falling on their heads.

It still seems to be standing up, and, about the time that we thought that we were going to be through with it, it still seems to be picking up steam, gaining a life of its own despite our lack of any grand canvasing efforts.

Being the type that is prone to "believing six impossible things before breakfast," it all seems very simple in my head. We set out to build an exhibit, so, of course the end result was an exhibit.

What doesn't tend to stay so well is the reality of the sheer number of hours that have been poured into this exhibit. As if too many growing up years of Shoeboxes and Nutcracker have normalized the pouring of every waking moment into a project in brief spurts of intensity, this too seems like just another thing to do.

Of course, it isn't.

Not all families sit around the dinner table and discuss procurement, budgeting, and scheduling for a traveling anti-trafficking experience. Not all trips to the store include cap guns to make South Sudan smell like gunpowder or apple spray for Washington.

Not all families build their schedules around set-up and tear-down dates. But, in this part of the desert, at least four families do.

We pass things back and forth between showings as if we were passing off a baby. "Make sure you..." "Don't forget to..." "Be careful about..."

Because, there are quirks, little things that each person knows, about the way that the trailer hauls, or the walls go up, or the curtains drape, and we all fight the feeling that no one else will do it quite right - even if we aren't sure what "right" is ourselves.

But, it always comes out right in the end.

Even when soap is late or the router doesn't work or the eighty-eight year old woman can't figure out where her audio is coming from. Even when we don't think that we have the volunteers that we need or  the trailer gets scratched or stacks of lumber slip sideways. Eventually, things come together.

Just like we have audio now, even though it seemed, a year ago, like it would never be finished. Just like the walls were eventually painted and we finally figured out how to make the scents strong enough to mask the smell of gym. Just like the t-shirts did come and the website does have everything that we need.

If we'd gotten it all right the first time, there would have been no adventure.

SOLD in Sunnyside

The SOLD exhibit made it's second appearance this weekend in conjunction with Sunnyside's Promise and Oasis Community Church.

We were able to come alongside organizations and individuals who have their hands in deep on issues of trafficking in their area and give them another tool for building awareness. They provided wonderful volunteers, strong backs, and eager hearts, and managed to get even their mayor to go through the exhibit.

Our amazing audio guys remixed the narrative track for this showing - with even more improvements on the way, including a public school friendly version. The high school youth group at Bethel gave up time on a Sunday night to create more Red Hand petitions for the Yemen room. My parents volunteered their weekend to serve at the exhibit. And, folks in Sunnyside put in countless hours rounding up volunteers and making sure that the word got out.

Set up and tear down went smoothly thanks to a largely teenaged work crew, and volunteers from VISTA and elsewhere in the valley helped two eight hour days to go by without a glitch.

Now, we just need to find out where we're going next!

Next Stop

This is the next place that we are taking the SOLD exhibit. We'll be in Sunnyside in July, partnering with Sunnyside's Promise.

We are very excited! Our little exhibit is growing up and leaving town. *sniff*

SOLD responses

If a picture speaks a thousand words, does a picture of words speak ten thousand?

SOLD

The exhibit is up in the gym and, so far, drawing a pretty steady crowd. We've sent over 300 people through since our official opening on Friday evening.

The volunteers have been amazingly flexible and willing to do whatever is needed whenever it is needed - everything from their actual job, to painting red hands and sitting around waiting for the next wave of attendees to arrive.

If you haven't checked out the site yet, soldexperience.org is up and running, and it looks great.

We're open until next Sunday, so, if you're in Tri-town, come and visit us! (If you're anywhere else on the west coast, book the exhibit on the site, and we'll come visit you!

Bullet Point Post

Life is moving along out here in the desert. We're working on justice things in every possible direction; kids are signing up for this year's Haiti VBS trip - including my baby sister, who I get to go on a ministry trip with for the first time ever! And, the end of the school year is creeping ever so slowly closer.

So many little things, but nothing that would fill an entire blog post:

• The fifth graders at both of my schools sang in a choral fest and did an amazing job.
• Fifth grade lunch has been split into a two day affair rather than a one day, and I have been reprimanded by several third graders since the switch for not being on the playground as often as I used to be.
• Our reading portable was completely rearranged for spring testing, and you could practically watch my second graders' head's spin as they tried to make sense of the change. Change is not their friend, and it tends to bring out some rather unique behaviors that really could be an entire post. 
• I managed to survive my first observation (fifth grade reading group) without passing out in front of the observers. 
• Spring Break is a wonderful, wonderful invention.
• The SOLD exhibit opens in almost exactly a month!!
• We've been using Signed Exact English with the cluster to work on memory verses, and some of the girls are amazingly good at picking it up. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that, when they sign the verse, they look fluent. 
• The high schoolers that I get to work with really are amazing.
• The fifth graders in my Sunday school group are typically far lower anxiety than last years' crew, but the about-to-move-up-to-middle-school nerves are ratcheting up steadily every week. 
• Kony 2012 blew in full force. 
• The exhibit is creeping closer to completion. 
• Did I mention that the SOLD exhibit opens in a month?! Because, that is kind of a big deal around here right now. 

SOLD - Construction Day

 "Sawdust flew around members of Bethel Church on Thursday as they gathered in an empty horse barn in Kennewick. They lugged and lifted sheets of plywood and nailed them together in what in about six months will become modules for an exhibit on the human slave trade.

Members of the church are working to raise awareness about human trafficking and how it affects lives in the Tri-Cities and around the globe.The exhibit, planned to be unveiled in May during a "Justice Weekend" at the Richland church, will tell the story of different facets of the human trafficking trade.

Each module will represent a different country and a different human trafficking issue facing that country's citizens -- sex trafficking in the United States, for example, or children being forced to serve as soldiers in war-torn African or Asian nations."

Via the Tri-City Herald: read the full story HERE. We had some great reporters come out who were well informed as to what else is happening in the area to combat human trafficking. We also had some great volunteers who came, built, let us use their barn, fed us, and didn't complain about the fact that we were building in an unheated stable at the end of December.

ARES Engineering donated work hours to put together our blueprints and Home Depot donated most of the delivery costs for the wood.

Now... we get to turn our giant wooden maze into an international experience. (More construction pictures HERE.)

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2011/12/30/1768994/church-building-human-trafficking.html#storylink=misearch#storylink=cpy

KNDU - SOLD: The Human Trafficking Experience

Thanks to our incredible media liaison, KNDU came by while we were just getting started this morning and filmed a story on the human trafficking exhibit. Actually, she got KVEW and the Tri City Herald there as well, just because she's amazing like that.