Month: March 2012

I Live In A Time Warp

Gina said one of the team members told her the other day that it felt like they’d just gotten here, and yet it felt like they’d been here forever. In my experience, Quito Quest is always like that. Especially when it’s less than two weeks on the ground, which is the teams. And especially when you’re used to longer stints, which is me.

The weekend before I got on a plane to come back down here, I couldn’t get it to seem real. Despite the number of times I’ve come and gone, and that I’ve done it on short notice before, I couldn’t get it to sink in until I walked up to the immigration agent and smiled and said “No,” when he asked me, “Primera vez en Ecuador?” Now I’m sitting in bed listening to planes take off and I can at least get that far. I realize I’m leaving. But it doesn’t seem real that in 33 hours I’ll be at work in Elizabeth City. It’s like I live in a series of time warps.

The time with the team just whizzed by, especially once we came back to Quito from the jungle. And then there were moments that just seemed to stand still. The bad ones, sure, like that split second where you know you’re about to throw up and you’re dreading and begging for it at once. Or the really great ones, where you’re spinning around as fast as you can with a five-year-old stretched out, hanging on to your hands, perpendicular to the ground and just giggling from his belly, Spider-man flip-flops flung right off his feet.

Tomorrow I’m going to want to go back in time to do it all over again and spend a few more precious days with 26 Canadians I didn’t know two weeks ago. And despite not wanting it to be over, right now I want to just skip the next couple of days, especially the one involving travel, so I can just see now what my fruit will begin to look like in my life in the U.S.

I’m leaving my home. And I’m headed home. It doesn’t seem real, and it doesn’t seem like near enough time to do all that’s been done, or enough to already be over. In the wise words of one of my favorite animated fish, “It’s a complicated emotion.”

Baptisms

I have heard and given orientations over and over about short-term missions being so much more than rich, white, North Americans going out to the rest of the world and “taking Jesus” with them. And yet hosting a team, it can still be easy to forget that this type of ministry is just as much to the team members as it is to the population of Ecuador.

It was a really sweet reminder, then, to have one of our team members say during the week that she wanted to be baptized in the river in Shandia, to have three more youth decide that morning that they were ready as well, and to have one of our adult leaders obey Jesus’ command to be baptized as we walked down to the river.

It was also amazing to me to be a small part of that. It’s easy to see how God uses other people in your own faith journey, but I got to have a conversation with one of our guys, who thanked me for what I’d said to him as he walked toward to water to outwardly express his commitment to God. I always used to get annoyed at those people who just wouldn’t take credit for anything and say “that’s not me, it’s all God.” And I laughed at myself in my head as those words came out of my mouth, because I was so surprised that in the span of about five minutes my friend’s attitude and words went from “I’m not there yet,” to “There’s no time like the present.” Yay, God.

 







Appreciating

Hosting a Quito Quest team, you always have at least one partner. This time around, I’m working with Jose Luis. This has been really awesome, because we know each other really well, he was willing to do finances, and any number of other reasons related to the fact that he’s a really great guy. But he wasn’t here for a big chunk of today.

I totally understood he had some major things to do today, and I’ve hosted enough teams that I can function on my own. Neither of those things meant it was easy. And I could have spent the afternoon being mad, but after all these years of Quito Quest, my natural instinct was just to miss having a buddy and appreciate everything he does. Because no matter how much experience you have, there are just way too many things for one person to remember, much less accomplish at 100%

Doing all of the host duties today also made me retroactively appreciate things other partners have taught me. How Sarah was always thinking about what was next. How Darío just faced conflict head-on. How other people have taught me to be a more effective decision-maker, leader, translator, and friend.

I also appreciated a lot of the “first day” activities. Maybe because it’s very close to the beginning of my own time here. But I saw the juxtaposition between the art and the statues and the insane amount of gold inside Iglesia San Francisco and the poverty directly outside. And it reminds me exactly why we are so intentional about the way we do ministry here. And on my umpteenth hearing of the Partnership Orientation, I still appreciated being reminded of the process I’m going through even now on my way to making this a fruitful experience.

Thoughts on Transition

I am not a morning person at all. But for some reason, no matter how tired I am and how long I’ve been traveling, I have this amazing inability to sleep past 7:00 in Quito. You would think it’s just the extra noise or the sunlight, but I haven’t woken up grumpy about either of those things in a very long time. This is one of the places where I also never wake up and think “where the heck am I?” on the first morning, despite the fact that I am almost always staying in a new place. So here I am blogging it up at 6:45am.

I know that I am going to see a lot of people who are near and dear to me today. And eat a whole lot of delicious food. And as I wrote yesterday, I’m excited. But I’m also really thankful for the transition time. I told somebody at home the other day that I was just not yet in the mindset of hosting a team. So maybe after a day of enjoying friends and fun stuff, I’ll feel ready for meetings and shopping and airport runs and orientations tomorrow.

That’s actually been my ongoing prayer in the last few days. I want to be prepared to host the team. And that’s being “all here.” I’m going to miss my youth and be wondering how things are going. I’ve got some alarms set to make some phone calls to the U.S. I’m not going to completely block out my life at home. But I can’t worry about all of my plans at home for this time and try to micromanage it from another continent.

And I also have to give my full attention to the 26 people whose lives are my responsibility for the next two weeks. Yes, that’s a dramatic way of putting it, but it’s a good reminder to me. I’m excited to get to know and work with them and see all that God does in and through them while they’re on field. But I hope and pray here in my transitional day that I am ready to be an effective, supportive, prepared and faithful host for them.

Travelling Excitement

I still don’t think it’s fully hit me that in just over 7 hours I’ll be in Ecuador. I know it in my head, and clearly I’ve been planning for this for weeks, but it just continues to be a surreal kind of day.

Maybe it’s the lack of sleep. I always know that I’ll be unable to sleep the night before a big travel day like this, so I’m just in the habit of staying up. It’s part of my ritual to go to Wal-Mart at 1:00am for any last things I’ll need, and then to just stay awake cramming my luggage full of food and clothes and my phone full of movies. I slept from about 3-4 am, and then maybe twenty minutes in the car, and not at all on the first flight. So I’ll admit to being just slightly loopy at this point in the day.

Among the loopy things I’ve done today, despite how I like to brag what an expert traveller I am, I realized at the Norfolk airport that they didn’t print a boarding pass for my second flight. And I just didn’t worry about it. But I didn’t think about the fact that I ALWAYS have to go through security a second time in Miami and that I’d need it. Fortunately, when I got here I just pulled up the mobile version on my iPhone and cruised on through. Unfortunately, my terminal didn’t have a TSA agent with a scanner, so I had to trek back up a concourse and convince another TSA agent that I really did know where I was going once he let me through the checkpoint.

While I’m on that train of thought though, Miami seriously needs to connect concourses D and J in some kind of better way than what they’ve got. Because EVERY time I’m here I go from Concourse D to Concourse J. Every time. And every time, I have to leave the secure area, walk 7.2 Bajillion miles (that’s 11.58 Bajillion kilometers) and then go through security again. This time I was glad that construction didn’t detour me outside, but not so happy about the Dr. Pepper I bought in the airport and then forgot was in my book bag (the TSA wasn’t really happy about that either… but I made it through after several minutes enduring yelling, lecturing, grumpy faces and finger wagging).

So now I’m finally sitting at my gate, trying to decide if I should stay awake for the two hours I have left to kill. I’m excited about seeing all of my friends in Quito, about working for Youth World again for a couple weeks, about hosting a team and serving God in Shandia. But like I said, it’s just surreal. 12 hours ago I was in Wal-Mart in Elizabeth City. And here I am in a city that seems like a foreign country, getting ready to board an international flight to a foreign country that feels like home.

Most of the time I have a point. Not today. But that’s where my mind is right now.

Be Here Now

I’m a planner. A list maker. Someone who is always worried about something other than what I’m doing, in a young Obi-Wan sort of way. Part of that is just who I am. Part of it is Sarah Miller’s voice in my head telling me to be always thinking of the next step. And it’s great that I had my plans for UMYF in March worked out three weeks ago.

But there are also times when I can just be a little kid giving into the excitement of the next great thing I get to do. And that’s why I’ve been keeping one of the sayings/rules of El Refugio in my mind over the last few days. “Be here now.” Because what I’m doing at any given time can be pretty important. I still have 9 hours of work tomorrow and a church council meeting, and prep work for youth and shopping and packing and tons of smaller things to accomplish before I get on a plane on Tuesday. Yet it’s really hard to not be thinking about that plane ride already, or all the people that I get to see, and all the amazing things that are going to be accomplished during my time with the Kortright team in Quito and Shandia.

Sometimes it’s just lot of work to worry about what’s going on in front of my instead of what’s on my calendar.