Debrief

"It kind of feels like a dream," the girls admit during debrief, "like maybe it didn't really happen."

"I'm not really sure what I learned."

"I think that I got more out of Bridgetown."

"Coming back was a lot easier than I expected."

They mean it. As much as they can be certain this soon after the trip, they mean it. This isn't our first team who came back with Haiti haunting their sleep and waking them up at 4:00 every morning. It isn't our second team who came back with a village in their eyes. This is our third team, and the new girls have made it very clear that they don't like being compared.

So, they were this team, the team that pushed so far beyond even their own expectations of themselves that it doesn't seem real. The team that went expecting to come back with sad stories of impoverished children but never got them.

Instead, they came back with Haiti as just another country. Full of people. Who like some of the same music. Who serve the same God. Who work on the same team. Who have history and struggle and joy. Who dance and sweat and make life work.

Smiles and laughter and playing with kids makes for good pictures, but it's harder to condense into a story. Harder to explain the quiet voices that want to know when you are coming back, the recognition exploding in shy smiles across faces that you never dreamed of seeing again.

You see, there's a strange thing about ministry trips, where you're supposed to come back with gritty stories about poverty and inequality and courage, a quiet whisper of white man's burden that no amount of training can silence; and something in them tells them that they don't fit that mold.

No one was the rescuer, not from Haiti or Curacao, not from the Pacific Northwest or the deep South, and humans aren't quite sure how to tell stories that don't have an us and a them. So they tell it differently here than they do with other people, a little more raw. Both versions are true, but I wonder if this one isn't a little truer.

Can we tell a different truth here and there and still have both be honest? How do we tell the right story, the way that it really happened?

"I think that this year was more about the team than anything else," they start to vocalize it, this thing that they've been sitting on since we got off of that final plane, "more about what God did between us than about coming back with sad stories."

More about smiles and laughter and tears; more about piggy back rides and bandages on bloody knees and feet and shoulders; more about late nights and quiet mornings; more about The Church in all of its grace and messiness.

More about people.