War

We have mice in our house. How do I know this? It stood on my foot. I was at the sink in our kitchen. It was furry, that little devil.

They declared war tonight.

Hi Nathan.

Casa

So I'm home. I've been home for 2 days now. Its a mixed bag of feelings. Sadness and loneliness for leaving, but joy and excitement for the year to come, and all the feelings in between those. Its a rather tough transition back to life in the states. One thing I learned from leaving was that when you have 60 people that you love a lot, its hard to say goodbye to them all at one time. The unfortunate thing is that good byes are not something you can start like a week before to get some out of the way, so it has to be done all at one time. Bien feo. Eh o well.

In other news, in case you were concerned, my rats ended up being a piece of mettle blown by a fan clinking against the wall. That makes me glad I didn't punch a whole through anything.

Salire

So lightning hit our little internet thinger here at the home and we haven't had internet for a while. Its been a while since I've updated and there is a lot to so and I don't have much time or desire to write it out right now. Entonces, I'm going to give you this little nugget: I leave in less than a week. And I'm not ready. And I'm going to cry. Maybe. Probably.

Honestly it seems like I just got here and now its coming time for it to end. It feels like I'm really just now hitting my stride with the kids and beginning to understand them and their little idiosyncracies and all the small things one can only notice after being in one place for a while but shape and make the experience of said place. Waking up to 400 kids going to school right outside my window. The way the buildings have a weird multicolored line painted on the bottom of them. The unevenness of every single sidewalk or street. Praise and worship music playing in a church right behind my room 24/7. The way I smell (bad) after a little kid reads on my lap. The sum of all these things has made my experience here and when none of the things are bad, then the experience is incredible. This is what God's done this summer.

There's all the nugget I got.

Ok here's another one: I recently moved into a new room temporarily. In this room there is a bed that I sleep on. Right by this bed there is a wall that holds up the house. Inside this wall there is a rat that I hate. Everynight this rat makes noise only when I'm trying to go to bed. It sounds like he has a spoon that he's banging against piping in the wall. He's a jerk and I hate him. Last night I slept with my headphones on. Tonight I'm thining I may just punch through the wall. ...which means tomorrows blog will probably be about a dead rat, a broken hand and a well rested boy.

Piensa

So tonight was a special night. We had a worship night for the kids that involved singing, guitars, and me speaking words. It just so happened that the Lord had given me some words to speak and it just so happened that those words had to be in Spanish. The idea was to have a night where the kids could chill and worship a little bit and then a fellow intern, Jessica, spoke on how to worship and I gave a bit of my testimony. For whatever reason I felt the need write it and translate it myself in Spanish. I thought it would be more meaningful and I could use my expert voice inflections to transcend my linguistic inadequacies. The testimony itself turned out to be two and a half pages typed which I then translated with the sweat and blood from my own hands. It turned out to be quite an endeavor. I had our fearless leaders Kendon and Lee help me with refining it. It wasn’t translated badly. But it wasn’t good. Feo was the word I used to describe it in Spanish.

Nonetheless, I delivered it tonight. Read the whole thing in Spanish, expert voice inflections and all. I used my testimony as a spring board of growing up in a Christian home as a segue into the need for the ability to translate what you know in your mind to become real in your life. And this, I argued, was life’s purpose: The translation of thought to experience and in so doing enhancing perception of reality which allows for more vibrant thought and the pattern to recycle. Life allows what you think about to become what you experience which in turn makes the about more like the experience. Then, thinks I, if we can find the greatest possible thing to think about it should follow that the greatest possible use of time would be to experience the about and so enhance it. What greater thing is there than God? How easy is it to stop at thinking about God? We read our Bibles, pray, go to church, answer questions, use words that only fellow thinker-abouters understand. Its when the things we know of God are translated into real life that we can make progress. Obedience. Turning what we say into what we do. And in doing we are experiencing, and in experiencing we are refining our perception. New perception repaints who we are to add layer upon layer of coloring to the picture of our world that we thought we understood long ago. This is where true growth comes from and this is what I would call the Christian walk. Pretty soon we take a step back and find that, in the picture of Jesus we are showing to the world, the coloring of our life matches the shade of His hair or the hue of His eye or the texture of His cheek. And we find that we are one perfectly placed brush stroke in the masterpiece of our Lord.

Yeh, so I didn’t quite say it like that. In Spanish it more sounded like, “Jesus love me and I like God. We need obey. Want it purpose of God.” But that was mas o menos it (athought I’d say more menos than mas).

I ask that you pray for how this message fell with the kids. I have a tendency to think really big when I speak and so pray that they understood what they needed to. Pray that God would show them how to live life.

Revelation: I realized what my love language was today. Acts of valor. Killing dragons or orcs, flying, being able to wield a hammer really well and rights of passage into manhood fall under this category. This explains why I like Lord of the Rings. This also explains my lack of girlfriend.

Matematicas

I've got a story for you (Ags...(and not ags)).

I've started helping some of the kids here with math homework because I happen to be a has-been math major. Perfect! There is a kid in particular, Solomon by name, that I have been spending a particularly large amount of time with in pursuit of mathematical glory. And by that I mean that he's 15, probably ADD, behind in school and has trouble conceptualizing abstract mathematical processes. Imagine that. When I started working with him two weeks ago he was convinced he couldn't do math and was just stupid. I banned the words 'no le puedo' (I can't do it) and 'pero es dificil' (but its hard (said in a really whiny voice)) from coming out of his mouth. We would work for almost two and a half to three hours each day, most of that time being spent on making him focus on me and what I was saying. It doesn't help that I'm having to speak Spanish, a language I can hardly use, to teach math, a subject that is hard to teach, to a kid that can hardly focus. It got a little frustrating because we spent a lot of time and got very little results.

But recently things have started changing. He's speaking about himself more positively; his rhetoric is changing; he's acting more susceptible to what I'm trying to say. I haven't heard him say he can't do math. Woot. What encourages me about this is that it seems to be more of a reflection of changes going on internally. Like a lot of our kids here, Solomon has hurts that run far beneath the surface and deals with situations he can hardly imagine being otherwise. It seems that the time spent with him has, if nothing else, helped whatever junk is lieing beneath the surface. Or so I hope.

Is he any better at math right now? Eh, probably not much. But does he display potential far beyond what he thinks he has, to not only do math but do life in the way God's calling him to? H yes. So please, please pray for Solomon, for his mind, his learning and his focus.

Gotta love the healing power of math. Bless the good Lord for giving it to us....yup.

Factoid: I played in a soccer tournament at the home today against a bunch of loco Guatemaltecans. We had a team of white people. We lost our first game 10-1. But that 1? Mine. Then we played the team with kids from the home. We lost 7-4 but I think only because they felt sorry for us.

O and I've been doing handstands again, but don't tell my mom. Or my roommates.

Deseparecidos

I wrote this a while back. It's weird. I didn't know if I'd use it on the blog. Welp, here it is:

The abuse of power is not unfamiliar to this world. Those that have regularly oppress those that have not, or even those that have less. This is not political. This is not propaganda. This is a statement. A statement about what exists. A statement about abuse. Abuse that stands as a monument of the human condition, both past and present. Who do we find at the heart of abuse but man himself; man too consumed with his own desire, his own will, his own ability, his own power, to see beyond the only perception he knows: his own. Here we find selfishness.

Recently my fellow interns and I went to an art exhibit in Antigua dedicated to those that have disappeared during the political turmoil of Latin America for the last half century. The Deseparecidos they are called. Here I found my tribute to abuse, my monument to the human condition.

Enter the first room to find a movie playing of a giant head, singing praises to God for delivering him and his brother through a massacre that occurred in his village. It plays on a loop, going on and on, forever singing praises, forever singing hope into what seems hopeless. The next room features a succession of pictures then mirrors, pictures then mirrors. The pictures are of women and men. Women who were pregnant at the time of disappearance and the men that loved them, also disappeared. As you walk from picture to picture reading about the children that should have been born or the lives that should have been lived, you catch glimpses of yourself in the mirrors. But now the reflection is not just of yourself, it’s of a life that has been lived, a person that is still here. Your reflection begs the question, “you’ve read about the lives that were not, so now what do you do with your life that is”. Moving into the next room you find paintings, sculptures, and various pieces of art all crying out silently against the evils of abuse. On a wall there is a mural of faces etched out of stone. Scattered in between the faces are victim’s accounts of torture, of different body parts they had burned or severed, of different ways they suffered. In another room there is a row of seemingly normal pictures. Below each picture is a seemingly normal sentence. It’s not until you put the picture and sentence together that you feel the revulsion of the violent message it portrays. There is a picture of a necklace wrapped around a dirty finger, below it reads, “Her fragrance lingered on”. You read the sentence, “time became a razor”, and look up to see a brick wall smeared in blood.

The exhibit goes on with more pictures that are hard to look at, more stories that are hard to read. At the end, after having made it through the show, I couldn’t help but think what has to happen next. Do I continue to look at my reflection in the mirror and can I still see myself the same? What about the life that is now? How can it not remember the lives that were not? Do I let the depictions of torture numb me? Can I help but feel cynical? Everything’s going to crap, governments suck, people suck. No, cynicism is easy. Will time be a razor for me? Well my life's pretty easy, how about an anesthetic, slowly numbing me to pain in this life? Or could my life possibly be like that song, forever playing on a loop, over and over, despite the wars raging around me or the world going to crap, still singing praises to God for his faithfulness, his love, and his hope?

At the heart of abuse we find man. At the heart of man we find selfishness. And as the only answer to selfishness, we find God.

That’s my song.