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.