Sometimes A Light Suprises

Sometimes A Light Surprises

It is an amazing thing to feel love. From your friends, from your family, or from a person who you knew one week out of your entire life. It keeps me in awe to think of the effect it can have on someone. How through love, a year or two, or three, or twenty, can pass and a person can so vividly remember you, and pray for you...

I am learning alot here in Ecuador. Alot about Latin culture; what it would mean to spend my life working in a school or a poor community here; what it feels to be in a different culture, with even less people who can understand you (emotionally and lingually) *i am not sure if "lingually" is actually a word*. I am learning about the kind of person I want to be and the kind of person I want to spend the rest of my life with. I am learning about perseverence, and suffering, and meeting people who resemble the kind of life I have always pictured for myself....

I have been trying to write this blog for the past four days and I just never had time to complete my thought. I was going to go into about how much I have been learning about grace, and how the truth of the gospel applies to our life. But instead, tonight I have a story.

I left yesterday afternoon on a bus to Milagro. A town about an hour or so from Guayaquil. When I arrived I met some very nice Ecuadorians at the church where I was going to give two english classes at. My roomate back in L.A. has an older brother named Carlos, and that is who's class I came to teach. They were night classes; one at 6 the last at 9:15. There was a man in the 9:15 class named Rudolph. One of the most genuinly sweet old men I have ever met. I found out later that night that he is a very talented teacher and works with 6-8 years-olds. He is around 65 years old, and lives completely alone. He has children and an ex-wife but none of them come around. They have become enslaved into a world of drugs, amongst other things. Rudolph has been a christian for about 5 years and wants to become a missionary. That is whwy he is trying to learn english now. That is not the story I wanted to tell though. Last night I spent the night at a girl named Sarita's house. She is ecuadorian and works at the church. She has 11 brothers and sisters, and lives with her nephew and sister-in-law as well. She has two brothers living in New York. Her family lives in the house of their in-laws, and her brothers send money every month to make sure the family can buy food, and have electricty and water. It was about 11:00pm when we arrived to her house, and I was exhausted. On top of that, I could only communicate in spanish. I met the family, and as any good gringa would do, I agreed to sit with them all and watch one of their favorite Novelas on the television. The story line was similar to that of any novela (two girls with too much make up and in very short skirts fighting, crying, embracing half dressed latino men, while someone is dieing in the hospital; and the best-friend and/or mother is trying to steal the money and/or boyfriend/husband/lover...). After this I went up onto the roof with Sarita (we were trailed by her 5 year-old nephew Michael (Mee-ky-el). He kept asking me about going into this dark cement house-looking thing and would not leave the issue alone...so I began to explain how there are many animals inside (listing all the animals that i knew in Spanish) and how they are very large and have huge teeth; and that they like to eat people who want to go look at them; I went on and told him that they are only there at night and that is why he has probably never seen them before, but I know they are there and I dont want to go, but i told him he could go if he wanted....He quickly told me that he no longer wanted to go. He soon got over his fear as he announced his true identity as being "hombre araNja" or in english, "spiderman". Then he went on to explain to me how rabbits like to eat carrots, and I told him I liked to eat carrots as well. He agreed with me on this point and also added that he enjoyed eating rabbit very much as well. I then revealed to him that my true identity was Mujer araNja (spiderwoman), and that i was hungry and needed to find a rabbit to eat. He laughed and told me that there are no rabbits right now. Our conversation quickly ended when I said that if I couldnt find a rabbit soon I may have to eat him...(He just laughed and dramatically left the roof, making sure I knew he was leaving...I think secretly he was waiting for me to beckon for him to come back. But I was pretty sure his Aunt was tired of my half hour conversation with this 5 year-old in my broken spanish.) Sarita and I ended up talking for a few more hours about our lives, and families, and desires for the future. It eventually become to cold to stand and we retreated to the soft beds under the mosquito nets. I had never slept under a mosquito net before; it had a rather odd smell and I kept imaginging that it had been sprayed down with DDT that when I would wake up in the morning I might not be able to see anymore. Other than that, it was rather romantic...the DDT and all.

This morning I took a freezing cold shower, ate some baked Platain (or Maduro Asado) con queso and learned a complicated, but beautiful, Spanish worship song. Sarita and I walked through town to the church, and Carlos and I then took off to buy some medicine for Hermana Veronica. This is where the story begins.

We approached a very rural part of down (meaning the roads are not really paved, there is trash and overgrown plants everywhere, barefoot kids and scraggegly dogs running around as well) and I see a very old woman bent over and focused on the broken hinge of her gate. She introduces herself as Veronica and welcomes us into her house. A week or so ago as she was hanging her laundry out to dry, she took a step, and an old nail went straight through her foot. Carlos and I picked up some Tetanis Medicine and he handed me the syringe asking if I had ever given a shot before. I laughed and then realized he was really asking me to give Veronica a Tetanis shot for her injury. We quickly tracked down a neighbor who commonly gives people injections and she took care of it for us. Veronica had been getting some fevers and has not been feeling well so when Carlos called she asked for some medicine. I walked into her home and took a seat in one of the well used chairs. Everyone's furniture, and kitchenware (in the poorer parts) looks as either it has been used very heavily for the past 30 years, or are from the 1940s. I looked up and noticed the collapsing ceiling. I tried to take in the site. The sheets divinding the room into two seperate parts; the little wash basin; small stove; the two pots hanging on the wall; three plantain bananas and an avacado in the food basket. There was a small table with three chairs that looked to be the refuge for a very small, obviously excessivly abused little dog. I watch Hermana Veronica with her old skirt and buttoned up blouse; her cheap sandals that were too big for her feet; and the torn peice of cloth that she had wrapped around her nail-peirced wound to stop the bleeding. We sat and talked for the next few hours. Carlos told me that through the last rainy season Hermana Veronica's roof was really falling apart and he found out that she (probably in her late 60s or older) would somehow climb onto the top of her roof and try to patch up the leaky spots with scraps of metal. Once the people from their church knew they quickly came and tried to repair it for her. I listened for the next few hours about this women's life. About her two youngest daughter who are very sick from their Diabetes; about her youngest son who is addicted to sniffing glue. She wept as she spoke of her last encounter with Daniel; how she pleaded with him to turn to Christ. That he can quit what he is doing and salvage the little life he has left. That God can help his addiction and satisfy the longing that he has been seeking to fill; that he can heal those things he has been running from. She told us about how skinny he was when she saw him, and how she fears he will die soon. She continued to weep more (only this time they were tears of deep gratitude) as she talked of her oldest son who had served in the Ecuadorian army. He had jumped from a plane and his parachute failed. He was paralyzed from the neck down and was in a coma. In between her tears and gasps to thank God, she explained how she showed up to the hospital everyday for three years to pray for her son and massage his arms and legs, praying that God would heal him. He lives in Guayaquil now, and cannot work very much, but can walk. She answered questions Carlos asked her, revealing that there is often no food to eat, and no money to turn on the lights. This woman began to teach me about the faithfulness and mercy of God. About how he blesses us, and loves us. I had wished so desperatly that I knew the most beautiful song and that I could sing it in the most beautiful voice for her. And I decided my resolution to learn Spanish and learn to play the guitar well is something I am going to accomplish before I come back to Ecuador. I thought about how if I was Hermana Veronica's neighbor I would come over every morning and play her a song...and remind her to smile.

It took me about 30 minutes to get her small little dog to trust me. He slowly inched out from under the table, across the room to my chair. He literally stopped every 2 inches and would cowar, waiting to see if I would hit him. I thought of the fact that there are so many people in this state. I thought of the woman who worked with Mother Teresa as a Sister of Charity and sat with a terrified little boy who could not speak nor hardly breath regularly. He sat shaking on a small, flat, make-shift hospital bed. Shocked by death and the war in front of him, the sister slowly began to touch his hand, and then stroke his head, and then his chest, and his arms. You can see the transformation of this small terrified boy. And he looks up at this woman and realizes that she was not there to hurt him.....That is what I want to spend my life doing. Finding those people who are terrified, cowering underneath the table, and be able to live with them and show them that I am not there to hurt them, but to love them...and then give them a hug and sing them a beautiful song, and pray for them, and cook for them, and teach them to dance, and play a hand-clapping game...or the phrase "I am happy" in english. Carlos and I prayed for Hermana Veronica and then we went to leave. She told me that when I come back to Ecuador that I must come to her house and share a meal with her. She made Carlos promise that he would give her my phone number and she told me hers very quickly, with such trust that I could memorize it and and call her soon. I repeated the numbers out loud and really did try to remember them. But I will remember her, and por fe, I will come and share a meal with her. I would also like to bring her some real shoes, but they would probably just be in her way. As we walked down the street away from Veronica, and mi perrito, Carlos told me that Veronice is in his sunday school class, and is one of his best students.

I tried sugar cane for the first time today, and I was able to see mis abuelitos in the old folks home. I hope I will be able to leave all the people I have met here something to remember me by. I actually do not care if they remember me, I just want to leave them something that will remind them to smile, and remind them that we have so much to trust in and smile about.

I return to the U.S. in three weeks.

I have decided that I am going to either major, or minor in spanish, that baked plantains are one of my favorite foods, and that I am sure there is no way I will be able to take my heart away from Ecuador.

the end