Category: Ecuador

The House of Caroline and Danny

Emaús was the very first ministry site I ever visited. So it’s extra fun to go back. But I got that time warp feeling (that I’ve written about multiple times before) when Michelle asked me how I was feeling about serving there.

There are things that are the same, like the rhythm of the day and some of the people who are there. There are things that are different, like all the construction and the fact that Nancy is now the priest there instead of Lourdes. There is history there in which I’ve participated both strictly in the ministry sense and in some more tangible things like the murals my students painted in the Sunday School room.

But one thing that is definitely the same is the level of hospitality. I remember the first day I ever went to Emaús. We had a quick devotion that morning and got to work. Lourdes was walking around with a dustpan and her apron on, cleaning up the sawdust behind all the people who were building tables and cabinets. It wasn’t until she put on her stole 8 hours later for Bible Study and Holy Communion that I realized she was the priest in charge, the person with authority at this church. Up until then, she was just one more of the welcoming, servant-hearted people who smiled and worked with us.

In very much the same way, Nancy got us started today with devo and instructions (after she and Anita came running up to the bus to hug Caroline and myself) and then she jumped into the kitchen for the next 4 hours to start cooking us lunch. The maestros and volunteers were the same way. They taught us quickly, and then jumped in alongside us all, working and talking to and laughing whether the person next to them spoke the same language or not.

By 11:00 snack, Emaús had become a part of the team. They were incorporating this experience into their memories and experiences and their understanding of the world and life and the Gospel. This community has a way of grabbing ahold of you because of the way it exemplifies a biblical community.

When we got ready to leave this afternoon (even with two more ministry days at this site) it was a long process of saying “Good-bye.” Nancy told the group (through my translation) that “This is the house of Caroline and Danny. And now it is your house too.” I thought this was accurate. Emaús didn’t become my home over the 9 years I’ve been going there or throughout the time that I lived in Guajaló. It became a home for me when I first stepped through the door to be met by the love and acceptance and smiles and hugs of the entire congregation. The group doesn’t have the history there that I do or that Caroline does. But it’s home for them now. This is not because of the amount of time they’ve spent in this place, but because both these communities choose to embrace each other in love.

Snot and Tears

When we arrived at El Refugio today and got our orientation to the property and the programs, John told us about Shoeless. It’s something that El Refugio does/teaches about being aware of Gods presence as Moses did in Exodus 3. When God told him to remove his shoes, it wasn’t that the ground on which he stood had suddenly become holy. It was that Moses was becoming aware of it.

Today was a long day of orientations and solo time. A couple of people even said they didn’t think we would do a debrief tonight. And the debrief we did was not the one we planned. But full of hotdogs and cuy, we launched into what began as a simple recap of our day.

What continues to amaze me about Sabbath time at El Refugio is how seriously the teams take it. With this and most teams, we are about halfway through our time on the ground when we go to the property. So the group should be tired. But they’re not disengaged. And as scary as three hours walking around the mountain and listening to God might seem to some, people really do it. So that’s a huge amount of time to process not just what they’ve seen today or this week, but to really begin listening for what they are supposed to do with all of this post-field.

This meant our “simple recap” of the day of and of solo time quickly became 18 of us sitting around the campfire crying our eyes out as we processed where we were and where God was bringing us. Several years ago there was a joke during Quito Quest training that a “successful” debrief meant crying. This is certainly not necessarily the case, but the whole group being able to go to that deep a place emotionally is one of the possible side effects of doing solo time and debrief with the correct attitude. It wasn’t successful because we cried. But we were crying because it was successful.

The issues and the discoveries and the celebrations that came about through that time aren’t things that should be written in a (relatively) public forum like this. Suffice it to say that there were issues worked through. There were discoveries. There were celebrations. There was support. And there was God’s presence. Which is, of course, there all the time. It’s just that we became aware.

Put on Your Own Mask First

Mike Breen taught us during our 3DM immersion that “the learning is in the room.” It’s not always the person up front and leading something who has all the answers and the things we need to hear, no matter how much education and experience they might have. I’ve been doing Quito Quest across nine years, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. So it’s been super fun to keep learning from the wisdom this (young) team has brought with them.

Quito Quest pushes you. It’s physically demanding. It’s spiritually demanding. It’s mentally demanding. And it can be downright emotionally punishing. And being with a team of awesome, excited people serving alongside loving, welcoming, hard-working locals can cause this sense of wanting to “keep up.” So we run into exhaustion very easily. We run into guilt when we just can’t stretch anymore in this particular way, but we compare ourselves to someone who seems like they can.

My first block hosting a team in 2008, I never asked for a break. I felt like it was complaining to even say out loud honestly when I was tired or hungry or pissed at a team leader. By the fourth block, I found time to sit and read our daily scriptures, to rest, to blog, to stay out of the sun and away from people for a few minutes during the day. This wasn’t because I’d actually wised up at this point. It was because after 70 days my body finally fought back and let me know that my rhythms were unsustainable.

It’s not my instinct to take a break. Or to let someone else work harder than me (in my perception). But another thing Mike Breen taught us was to work out of our rest, rather than resting from our work. It’s an important distinction. If you just go go go until you have to rest, that’s not really rest. It’s catching up. But if rest in Christ is intentionally part of your rhythm, there’s a well from which to draw, and a power which is not our own, out of which to minister.

A team member brought her own learning to the room tonight. For those members of the team who were tired and expressed a frustration born from trying to keep up and to have something to offer to those at the ministry sites, she offered that wisdom to us. She said that it is much like the safety instructions on the airplane. When pressure drops and the masks come out of the ceiling, you have to put your own mask on before you help anyone else with theirs.

What’s funny is how many people in the room immediately said “I hate that!” I guess I’m not alone in wanting to take care of others. In wanting to tough it out and keep up regardless of my own weakness. In picturing some little kid sitting next to me in that emergency and wanting to get a mask on them immediately. But the whole point of that safety brief on the plane is that if you don’t bother to take care of yourself, you may become unable to to take of anyone else either.

Rest isn’t selfish. It was modeled by Jesus in how much time he spent in the wilderness or the mountains or in the garden alone with the Father. It’s how we have enough energy to do what we are called to do. It’s how we go from serving out of our own guilt to ministering out of God’s grace.

Be Yourself When You’re Uncomfortable

Since the day before the team arrived, I’ve been a little under the weather. I wrote about altitude affecting me by making me tired. But it can also occasionally cause some digestive issues. In 9 years, I’ve never had that problem, but apparently I do this week (EDIT: turns out I actually got an intestinal infection. Awesome!) At any rate, it sucks. And it’s sucking energy out of me, not being able to keep food in my system.

The other fun thing about this situation is that I’ve been up every few hours during the night, so I’m way low on sleep since I’ve been here. I can function when I’m sick. I can function without food. But since my first summer here I’ve known that I just don’t function well when I don’t sleep.

In the States I can pretty easily just decide “I can work from home today.” But when your job is translating and going on home visits and transporting people and paying for food, you can’t really Skype in for that. So my first couple of days with this team have been somewhat uncomfortable. I gave somewhat lethargic orientations at the Basilica and at Plaza San Francisco, and I’ve been doing all I can to take it easy in Argelia Alta (including taking a couple hours off this morning to go to the doctor for the first time ever in Ecuador). I don’t like not feeling like me when I’m with the team. And I thoroughly dislike feeling like I’m less than capable of doing the job that I’m here to do.

But one of our team members said something tonight at debrief that struck me. She was speaking in terms of cultural adjustments, but her advice to herself and to the rest of us was “Be yourself even when you’re uncomfortable.”
Yes, being sick really bites. And as I’ve been getting better I’ve described it as feeling “more like me.” But I get to choose to be me however I feel. And I’m glad that I took that opportunity at a few points. Full of or lacking in energy, I did stick with the team as much as possible, and I do feel like Quito Quest is one of those things that makes me me. And still not at 100%, I can choose to be me. I can choose to find my identity and my outlook in Christ instead of in this sickness and how it has physically made me feel. I’m not saying I’m great at making that choice. But in a new way, I’m aware of my ability to keep making that choice now.

Acclimatizing

When a short-term team comes through the Quito Quest program, the first full day that they are on the ground is a day to acclimatize. Somewhat literally, as altitude is generally a large concern, and somewhat figuratively, as they experience the language and the culture and the food and the pace of life in Ecuador and in Quito specifically. It’s an “easy” day in the sense that they are not working at ministry sites yet, but it is full. Or as my bilingual brain would put it, “full full.”

Today was a day like that for me. At the end of plane ride #10 to Ecuador, it seems perfectly normal for me to walk out of customs, meet Roberto, and walk out into the night air and city sounds of Quito. But “regular day” though it felt, the travel does take its toll on me, and after an hour car ride back home to the Vicancos’ last night, I was beat. So I was very thankful to have the opportunity to sleep in this morning.

I woke up slowly to the sound of the boys moving around and beginning to get ready and eat. And I was greeted by Graham’s surprised, joyous cry of “Daaaannnyyyy!” From the breakfast table when I finally (at 8:00) walked out of my room this morning. I just got to just participate in life at casa Vicanco. Breakfast and playtime and walking Graham to preschool and jamming on a ukulele with Liam. We went to the bread store and I copied some keys and I got to participate in my first Tuesday morning Quito Quest meeting in almost six(!) years. When I woke up there was one and only one thing on my schedule for the day. And it didn’t happen. Because the day began to fill up with normal life despite my lack of plans. And again, I was exhausted by 3:00 in the afternoon. Travel takes its toll, but so does altitude. It makes normal life take twice as much energy.

After a quick nap I met Roberto on Av. Brasil and jumped into the Suburban with him, Joaquin, the three other members of his band (Gedeon) and a trunk full of instruments and sound equipment. Way too many people and cases in one vehicle, but once again, totally normal around here. We drove out to El Refugio and began setting up for their gig, which was to play for a group of leaders who have been training out there and were celebrating their time together before they head home. There was a dinner and the plan was for Gedeon to play both some romantic music and some praise songs. But about 20 minutes before the dinner was to begin, all the power in the Grace Center went out. I thought the band had blown a fuse with all their equipment, but it turned out that the power was out all over the property. My friend Christy summed it up immediately and succinctly: “That’s unfortunate.”

Having spent more than half my life in North Carolina with its nor’easters and hurricanes and people who crash into power substations during fog, I’m no stranger to electrical outages. But Ecuador can take them to a whole different level. We had no idea when or if the power would return tonight or tomorrow or next week. Especially outside the city of Quito. So the band dug up an acoustic guitar and a djembe that someone had on the property so they could begin rehearsing an emergency acoustic set.

Byron rescued the situation, setting up the El Refugio generator so the band could have power and we could have one work light under which to eat. And throughout dinner and music and presentations, the lights returned and went out 3 more times. Totally unpredictable, and totally normal.

I won’t even go into detail about the preaching, or the worship, or the dancing that happened throughout that dinner gig. It was all entirely behind schedule (that I worried we’d be on time to the airport) and fantastic and hilarious and God-filled. I’m not sure if it’s okay to describe something God-filled as “normal.” Suffice it to say it was all within the theme of the day.

Our final adventure of the night was to pick up Caroline from the airport. We were worried we’d be late as we hauled tail all the way from El Refugio but with three planes arriving at once, we waited for about fifteen minutes before Caroline’s wide-eyed smiling face poked out from between the doors from Immigration. Totally normal to see her in Ecuador and weird that the last time we hung out was in North Carolina. And all three of us were thrilled both to hang out in the car for an hour and then to fall into each of our beds.

Travel takes its toll. Altitude takes its toll. And long days take their toll. So I’m grateful for my day “set aside” for adjusting to my Ecuadorian life. And thrilled at how normal my abnormal Ecuadorian life has become.

That Time of Year Again

It’s March (or it would be if this wasn’t a Leap Year), so I’m on my blog again. It seems that lately I get my renewal notice for my hosting and domain name registration and I log in for the first time in months to do maintenance and maybe put a post on here about my 2 weeks in Ecuador. And that’s definitely the case right now. I’ll be in Ecuador from March 7-23 hosting the team from Sewanee with some of my favorite people, and hopefully not getting sick this year (which should leave me much more time than in 2015 to actually record and processing my experience here on the blog).

Look forward to it.

Where Am I?

Fifteen hours into my two weeks in Quito I’m not sure where I am. Or maybe who I am in this place that’s so familiar but somehow not home anymore. I guess you can call it culture shock, but that just sounds like something enormous and sudden. My culture problems come in these strange little jolts more like the jerky feeling of riding in a car with someone who is just learning to drive a stick.

There are things I leave behind in my home culture like driving everywhere by myself and things I bring with me like my soda addiction. There are things that I pick up here like speaking Spanish and navigating the crazy public transportation. There are things that I should probably leave behind like my need to be “plugged in” all the time, and things that I should pick up here like eating pan de yuca but even though I know that, I don’t plan to change either of those habits.

When I’m hosting a team and we take them to the mall to eat, I always encourage them to try the Ecuadorian places instead of just going to McDonald’s. And once they have all dispersed, I go to KFC. My own youth totally busted me doing that this past summer when we were all here and eating dinner at Quicentro Sur. Oh well, I like my greasy comfort food. But sometimes I don’t have that option, especially late at night when everything closes. There’s not a lot of late-night options like Cook-Out or anything in Ecuador, but when Roberto picked me up from the airport last night and asked if I was hungry, the Menestras place was still open.

When I walked in I was thinking “It’s not Cook-Out, but it’ll do.” When I walked out I was thinking “That was so delicious, why don’t I live here?!” But I did hit the American fast food for lunch today. I’m a cultural pendulum when I first get off a plane.

There’s not really a point to this particular post. I don’t have some way of summing this all up and saying “here’s a lesson I learned” or “here’s a rhetorical question for you.” You know, all the ways a good blogger ends a post. But I’m out of practice at this whole thing and I just want to acknowledge I’m really excited about this whole time I’m going to be here. All the people I’m going to see. All of the experiences that I (and “we” as a team) are going to have, but also that I’m just going through that first day weirdness.

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.