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.
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