Love, Joy, and Sunsets

Welp, it’s mid October now, and that means there’s a lot of movement going on down here at the Finca. The school year is wrapping up, a group of volunteers are getting ready to leave, and a new group of missionaries have just showed up. All of the volunteers that came at the beginning of 2012 (myself a little later in April of 2012), will be heading home in December. I decided a little while back, though, to go ahead and stick around for a third year. At the beginning of this year, I started the discernment process of whether to stay or to go, and decided to go ahead and stay. Basically for two reasons. The first is more logical, tangible. There’s a big push in our organization to strengthen the vocational program for our kids, and since I’m the volunteer in charge of this and have a lot of passion for it, I’ve really latched on to it. I knew if I was only going to be here for one year under this position, nothing sustainable would happen, so I decided to hang around for another year.

Photo by Father Mark. Angel David making tortillas.

 

The other reason is a little more lofty. The first year here was one of the hardest years of my life. It was that way for a lot of different reasons, but one of them was because of my relationship with the kids. I came to the Finca expecting to form deep, lasting, loving relationships with the youth, filled with meaningful conversations and a lot of fun. But it didn’t feel that way very much at all the first year. Often the older boys would scowl when I walked by their house, for seemingly no reason at all. I would try to start a conversation with them and they would answer with one word or just walk off. That certainly didn’t give me the feeling of a deep connection, that was for sure. It felt like more of a battle a lot of the time. And the more I began to understand the Finca and the lives of the kids, the more I began to understand why they reacted the way they did. These kids have a lot of reasons to be angry. Their family might have left them or abused them, they were taken from their homes, maybe passed around the Honduran system for a little while, or maybe came directly to the Finca. They got here, lived in houses with nice caretakers or house parents, and met the volunteers and the nuns. But every year or two the house parents and volunteers left and new ones came, and the cycle continued year in and year out. This affects a child. I grew up with loving parents, constantly supporting me and helping me, and there were still plenty of rough times. These kids had everything taken from them. Their home, their family, and their freedom. They get here, and it’s a nice place, but people come, and people go. And that leaves them with the feeling that they’re pretty alone in the world. That no one really loves them enough to stick around. And that can make them pretty bitter. Pretty unsure how to love others, and unsure how to accept love. They make bad decisions, hurt others, and hurt themselves. It’s a very different environment than anything I’ve experienced before. But I think God brought me here specifically to see that. To learn what it means to love a very beat down, broken population. And learn how to accept love from them. And as I sat there thinking about whether or not I should stay for a third year, I felt like I still had a lot more to learn about love. That God still had a lot more to teach me; That he wasn’t done with me here yet, and that I was gonna need a little more time. That this experience in the Finca is very unique one, and one that could teach me things about love that I couldn’t necessarily learn in other places. So here I am, learning a little more, day by day, until December of 2014.

I made that decision to stay a third year, during my vacation back to the states this past March. And after a

Independence Day Parade.

little time to reflect, I came back to Honduras refreshed and ready to get back to work. Part of that work includes fifth grade English class. The fifth grade class in our esteemed Saint Peter Catholic School, has a little bit of a reputation. They’re known to be a little wild, wreck a little havoc, and take teachers to the end of their rope. As much as I’d like to say I’m a young, hip, inspiring teacher who can harness their energy in positive directions and get them excited about and engaged in the English language, that wouldn’t really be true at all. I have to admit I’ve raised my voice more than once or twice in class this year… And the wildest, loudest, can’t stay in his desk, and blatantly disrespectful one of them all, we’re going to call Pedro, has been the target of my glaring looks and raised voice more than most. Pedro’s a small, wiry, wild-haired kid with the energy of a monkey trapped in a barrel. And as soon as I got back from vacation, my first day back in the classroom, Pedro was bouncing off the walls as usual. I probably yelled at him a bit, and made him stay a few minutes after class. I walked into class the next day, though, and I’m embarrassed to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see Pedro’s seat empty. I let out a little sigh of relief, and went to the chalkboard to start writing, but I couldn’t find any chalk. The class eagerly told me the chalk was in the cupboard, surprising me that they were even somewhat excited to see what I was going to write on the board. I walked over to the cupboard, opened the door, and, well, didn’t see any chalk. What I did see, however, was my little friend Pedro, curled up in the second shelf of the cupboard, laughing his head off, thoroughly enjoying that he had duped me again. As short and wiry as this kid is, and as many wild and crazy things as he has done, even I was surprised that he could twist his body into that small crevice in the cabinet. But this time, I didn’t yell at him, and I don’t even think I made him stay five minutes after class. This time I think I laughed actually. He’s a real wild child and normally just makes me mad, but that was pretty funny.

Our community of volunteers is a big group of readers, so there’s always a couple of good books being passed around. One that has been passed around for a few years now, is a book called Awareness, written by a Jesuit priest from India named Anthony De Mello. It’s not incredibly well known, and not very long, but very provocative, and makes you question a lot of your commonly held beliefs. At one point he talks about the Kingdom of God, and how if we stopped worrying about what heaven will be like, and started worrying more about how we can bring His kingdom here to earth, we would do a lot more good in the world. Later he talks about being aware of and really taking in the joys of life. The beauty of a flower, the song of a bird, the taste of good wine, a good conversation with a friend. That if we could take in the full extent of the sight of a beautiful flower, the joy we would pull from that would bring the kingdom of heaven into our lives. A few weeks after reading this, I was sitting on the porch of one of the houses watching Yadira, our pudgy two and a half year old, youngest member of the Finca community play with a coloring book. She was scribbling on it as usual and having a grand old time. At first I thought she was just making a mess of the book, but then I began to watch her a bit more closely. She would take a crayon, strike it on the page making a short mark, stare at it inquisitively, and then burst into uncontrollable laughter. Every subsequent mark was followed by ten second of laughing and screaming for joy. Just the mere act of being able to create color, and put it on a sheet of paper, brought her the most intense joy, the most intense laughter. When Jesus said we must be like a child if we are to inherit the kingdom of God, maybe this is what He meant. If I could look at a color, the beauty of a single color, and my ability to take part in the creation of it, and let it beauty fill me with uncontrollable laughter, maybe then I would be able to feel the joy of the kingdom of heaven here on Earth. Maybe if we all saw the world a little more like Yadira did, we would all understand a little more what the kingdom of heaven on earth could mean.

For the end of this blog post, I’d like to leave you with a few stanzas of one of my favorite poems. It’s called The Invitation, written by Oriah. 

It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.

Here’s to one more year at the Finca. One more year to learn about love. And one more year to see the world as three year old would.

Kevin and I took the older boys camping on top of the tallest mountain outside of Trujillo. This is a view from the top. Pretty nice sunset...

And one more thing. A group of high schoolers came down this summer to spend some time with us, and one put together an incredible video about life at the Finca. Check it out, it describes us pretty well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVb4lPHYAas&feature=youtu.be