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Remember Your Baptism

The Baptismal font and the “flinger” at Emaús.

As a staff at Soapstone, we have been reading Liturgy of the Ordinary by Tish Harrison Warren. From the first chapter, it has sparked a lot of conversations both about how we are mindful of our faith in everyday activities, but also about having intentionality in all aspects of worship.

I have used many of her examples about Baptism in the last few weeks as I have taught Confirmation and UMYF, and led discussions on missions. The call to Remember our Baptism keeps bringing me back to living in Gaujaló and working at Emaús. At Emaús, the Baptismal font lives right next to the door so it’s easy to touch the water and be mindful of it upon entering for work or worship. When Lourdes was the priest in charge here, she would end every single service by sending water flying with a metal “flinger.” I’m sure there’s some ecclesiastical term* for it, but “flinger” really gives you a picture of what happened. Because Lourdes has an arm. I think she missed her calling as a softball pitcher. When that water was flung at the face, it hurt. You couldn’t help but remember your Baptism.

Lourdes used to use the same flinger, or sometimes a branch, to send water all over the place when she would bless a house for someone who had just moved in (including when her own family and I moved into the house above the tienda). The blessing of the household was a reminder that God is present with us not just in the church building, but all throughout his creation, even what we consider the mundane. My friend (and star youth ministry volunteer) Sylvia remarked recently that her biggest monthly expense is rent, so in being mindful of how she uses her resources, she tries to find ways to use her home as a place of fellowship to glorify God, and I’ve appreciated that reminder as well.

There have been two Baptisms of small children since I’ve been at Soapstone. The first was of an infant who looked over his mothers shoulder the whole time trying to see the font. He wiggled and squirmed quietly, not trying to escape, but trying to get in the water. He just wanted to dive right into the water if Baptism. The second was an elementary-aged girl who seemed very skeptical as Pastor Laura began drenching her, but began to smile as the words of blessing were spoken over her. You could see in the change of her expression the way she was beginning to give in to what God was already doing.

At different times in my own life, I would describe both of those reactions as “mood.”

There’s nothing special about the water in the font, or on the flinger, or on my face or the wall of a home. But there’s a reminder in seeing and touching and hearing it splash of the fellowship and the Grace that we get to live into every day. And writing this post four feet from the font and ten feet from my team members, I’m excited I get to live into that with a new group at one of my favorite places for another week.

*Turns out when I looked this up, even the Catholic supply stores refer to the “flinger” as a “Holy Water Sprinkler.”

Good Omens

On the bus ride from the airport to the hostel, Caroline and I had barely learned the team’s names, but I already called that this was going to be a good, fun, low-maintenance team. It may be that I’ve just hosted so many groups at this point that I can pick up on their vibe like a guinea pig¹. Or maybe they’re just that chill a group that anyone would notice.

The days have seemed pretty long because they have been so full, and because I was so low on sleep by the time I arrived via Houston. It has truly only been a small number of hours we have all been together. But even this morning as we received our welcome from Reverenda Nancy at Emaús, it seemed more accurate than normal when she told the team that this is their home. I’ve been thankful already for Lauren, the team leader, who is super calm, easy-going, and consistently expressing love to all around her. That kind of thing rubs off on a team in a big way, and I will probably continue to remark how much a leader can make or break a team. The other fun thing about our first few days is that despite it still being rainy season, it has been unbelievably clear outside. In the US, we talk about the sun being out. Here we talk about the volcanoes being out. On a particularly clear day, from here in Quito you can see the snow-capped volcano Cotopaxi, even though it is a whole province away. We had a gorgeous view of Cotopaxi for most of the way to Guajaló this morning. And when we walked up to the roof of the building we were even able to see the Panecillo from here. It is really not all that far away in the city, but the clouds or the fog usually stop us from seeing it.

The Panecillo and the Virgin of Quito (way in the background between the trees) from the cross on the roof of Emaús.

It has been years since I could see Cotopaxi while I was in the bus with a team, and I told them what a treat it was to have the view we have even from the roof. Being in this place is always fun and meaningful, and I can see God’s work even when it pours so hard we get rained out of going to the park. But it certainly makes it easier to be in a good mood when all of God’s creation is on display so blatantly in every direction.

A rare view of Cotopaxi during our commute.

I also think it’s a good omen when native Spanish speakers manage to correctly spell my name (both “N”s and no “I”).

The people at Emaús always find a fun way to make sure everyone on a team knows they are welcomed.

¹People here say that guinea pigs can “sense auras.” When a group walks past a guinea pig pen, the animals will squeal if a group is anxious, but they’ll be quiet and still if the people in the group are calm. I never tell my groups this in advance, but I’ll tell them when we leave the pen if the guinea pigs were quiet when we were around.

This Place Breaks My Heart

Since Saturday night Roberto and I have been hosting a team from South Carolina. It’s a fascinating group because it’s centered around a couple who is getting married on Tuesday. Part of the team only thought they were coming on a mission team and didn’t even know there would be a wedding while they were here. Part of the group only thought they were coming for the wedding.

Having worked so long with an organization that focuses so much on doing short term missions well, there are some things about this that I struggle with. But this group has had particularly fresh eyes for the things around them. I think little-to-no preparation on the part of the team members was in this case better than bad preparation, because they simply didn’t have time to have any preconceived notions. This struck me the first time when a 50-something team member said during our orientation at Carmen Bajo “This place just breaks my heart.”

I initially wanted to push back on that, to tell him “no, this is a place that’s full of joy,” to argue with him what a difference it makes in the community. Knowing that I have served at Carmen Bajo for almost 10 years and whatever was going to come out of my mouth was going to be an emotional response, I held my tongue. And I’m glad I did, because while all those thing I thought are true, that doesn’t mean we can’t all (myself included) be heartbroken at the underlying need for a place like Iglesia Carmen Bajo and it’s school and social project to even exist.

We heard Pastor Fabian’s story of being called to the neighborhood. I’ve heard it many times before in orientations or at dinners at his house. We heard testimonies from church members and stories about the students from the staff. Most of those stories were things I’ve heard before. Tough, terrible stories of loss and hardship, but familiar problems in that area just with new names and faces to go with them. Those stories are shared so we can give glory to God for what he has done in the midst of it all. For healing and wholeness found in His Church, for hope that has come through educational opportunities, for a generation that is giving back to their community because of grace and mercy encountered through people sharing love, and for there being enough resources to solve social and economic problems because basic needs like food are being met through the compassion of teams and a church and a people who care.

But the relief that comes through that place doesn’t mean all the problems are gone. There is still endemic abuse and neglect in the neighborhood. We met a woman who is fighting to give four of her sons with disabilities a better life, but whose son’s disabilities were caused by fetal alcohol syndrome. There was a kindergartener who is happy and healthy and learning, whose education is funded through the scholarship program and whose lunch is funded by Compassion International, but who has to walk an hour and a half each way, each day between his home and Carmen Bajo. A kindergartener.

There are times when I’m listening to a story or translating on a home visit when I just sort of turn off my heart and only use my head. I change the words from Spanish to English and regurgitate them for the team so they get the information. But I do it with a certain sterility, not letting the emotion effect me in the moment. I become the task-oriented North American with data to get across rather than the missionary, the minister, the brother in Christ who should be broken-hearted by what I see.

And what I see is injustice. Brokenness. Sin. Those things are why we need the church. We we need missionaries. Why I’m here at all. I’m very rarely shocked at a story I hear in his place anymore. But familiar as this brokenness is, and optimistic as I hope I continue to be about all that is going on to fix it, my prayer is that i will continue to be as broken-hearted about it all now as I was the first time I came here.

Photos from Sewanee QQ Team 2017

Back from the Jungle

I spent Block 4 with a team in a Shuar community called Chuwitayo, and maybe I’ll get around to writing about it when I’m not sleep-deprived. But I thought this video was worth sharing from our welcome party, displaying a traditional Shaur dance. The best part was the little guy that joined in… with his own little spear.

Spring Intern Retreat

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve gotten to be a lazy blogger lately. The benefit to y’all is that you get to see lots of pictures.

Here we all are in front of canoes we took down the Napo River. I hope I never get over the beauty of Ecuador, but there are some moments where I realize how much certain things have gotten to be normal life for me. As I looked out over the river, I thought to myself, “This looks a lot like the Pasquotank.” Then I snapped back and remembered I was surrounded by all this crazy jungle foliage and palm trees and thought “Yeah… not really.” We all look oddly red in this picture, but nobody’s sunburned.

On Tuesday, we planned to fly into Tiweno from the MAF field in Shell. Turns out it rained literally all day, so we spent some time doing a couple work projects around the hanger. Matt is holding a heavy-duty hair dryer to warm up the wall while Joanna strips the paint and Lauren is sweeping up.

The people from Tiweno show us a traditional-style Huaorani dance and sang a couple of songs for us. Chet was the first of the gringos to get dragged into it, but we were all in the circle by the time it was finished.

This post originally published at www.dannypeck.net

More Photos from Carmen Bajo

Normally I arrive at Carmen Bajo and unlock the door to my classroom to find it pristine, unchanged from the last time I taught. Laura and I are the only ones with keys, and for the most part we leave each others’ stuff alone, and nobody else goes in there when one of us isn’t around. I didn’t really remember how we’d left it last week though. While the team was on the ground, and since I had a key on me all the time (as opposed to the room downstairs, for which we have to hunt down the key every ten minutes), we used the art room as a storage room for all the craft supplies, guitars, cameras, and various other gringo junk. Assuming that I’d need to sort out some leftover ministry supplies, I came early today. Despite expecting to do a little work, my reaction when I opened the door was “Where the heck am I gonna have class?!” The photo below is en media res because I forgot to take a totally “before” picture.

Again, I’d already been cleaning and sorting and rearranging for 45 minutes before I bothered to take a picture. There were several more very large suitcases full of stuff when I started.

Jackpot! These mostly went upstairs to the women in the kitchen. Mostly.

Jostin and Josué jam on some ukuleles (under very careful supervision). My two favorite parts were that they were both holding them backwards, and they were totally singing along to the awful noise that was emanating from the tiny instruments.

What an influence the Canadians were. Unprovoked, the colegio boys chose to play real field (patio) Hockey instead of Wii Boxing. WHAT?!

A Day of Adventures at Carmen Bajo

On Friday afternoons I teach at Iglesia Carmen Bajo. This is a glimpse of what that tends to look like, though in the style of another blogger friend, I”m mostly going to let the pictures do the talking on this one.

Laura’s art room at Carmen Bajo, which becomes my guitar classroom on Fridays:

Cameron Vivanco and Sarah Marr helping with lunch. This is always a great project if you want to make yourself useful at Carmen Bajo. I don’t think Sarah was expecting to spend her afternoon preparing cow livers, though.

A close-up of the liver-preparing process. They got dunked in egg mix and covered in cornmeal before being fried into something that looked a little more edible.

An impromptu ping-pong tournament ensued as we were waiting for kids to get picked up. Fabian and Santiago were both totally cheating.

One of my newest students, Ana, working on the notes on the first string.

Communication

This weekend the Quito Quest staff went to Riobamba, Ecuador, partly to participate at ministry sites in the area and partially as a scouting mission for some short-term teams we will be taking there during the spring and summer. It was an absolute blast that the whole of QQ got to go. We absolutely have the best department in Youth World. Not always the most serious, amicable, or reverent, especially when ill-rested, but still the best.

We actually mainly just slept and occasionally ate in Riobamba proper, because the ministry sites which we visited were all pretty far removed from the city. This meant driving usually over an hour up and down crazy mountainsides with sheer cliffs to the side and rocks, ditches, dogs, and sleeping women in the path of our bus. On the way to a second ministry site on Friday, a makeshift bridge actually broke under the driver’s side front wheel and we spent the next significant portion of the afternoon attempting (and finally succeeding) in removing our only realistically conceivable mode of transportation from the ditch in which its entire front had become lodged. I might add that we did this with only rocks, a long but rather flimsy-looking log, and elbow grease. We were also all incredibly thankful that the wheel, tire, axel, and surrounding body were undamaged, especially considering we had exactly zero spare tires.

At the ministry sites themselves, it was one surprise after another. We had been told to expect a colder-climate style culture than what we are used to in Quito or on the coast or in the jungle. What stood out to me after two days was the difference between each ministry site and each of the others in terms of how people reacted to our presence and our activities there. At our first stop, with only twenty people or so, those who came sang with us, responded to questions, and jumped into our ridiculous games. Even the older adults were enthusiastic about running around during a fantastic gato y raton game that I’m going to have to take back with me for North American youth activities. Our second ministry site was much the same in enthusiasm, probably more so here, however, because of the huge number of children present. But Saturday morning, we went to another mountain community and felt like we were pulling teeth to even get “yes” or “no” answers or hands raised to simple questions.

Part of this, I’m sure, had to do with language. Certainly not all, which I’ll get to in a moment, but part of it, at least, had to do with language. While pretty much everyone did speak Spanish, it is a second language for a significant portion of all of the communities which we visited. These were very much indigenous communities, and most of the people there, particularly the older ones, grew up speaking Quichua. We actually got some Quichua lessons over breakfast, and I now know the phrases for “What is your name?”, “How are you?”, “Yes,” “No,” and “Flower,” in Quichua. We practiced the first four over and over again during breakfast, and “Flower” happens to be the only word of somewhere around 4o million that one of the pastors’ sons taught me on a bus ride Saturday morning. I won’t attempt to spell any of them here in Quichua, but I can say them.

That said, there were a few stumbles, especially among gringos and Quiteños attempting Quichua, and depending on whether Spanish or Quichua was the first language of each individual indigenous person, but overall that aspect went well. The epic fail was our humor. By Saturday afternoon we had learned how not to make to much of fools of ourselves, but up until that point, there were a lot of times when someone would make a joke (in Spanish), and everyone from Youth World (Ecuadorianas included) would laugh and everyone from the community would just stare at us. The one time they were sure to laugh, however, was when one of us would ask how to say something in Quichua, someone else would tell them, and then we would proceed to butcher it. We’ll take what we can get, though.

Aside from some awkward moments where the kids and even the adults would hardly talk to us, we actually got to plug into what was going on at these sites, and I am looking forward to the possibility of going back with some of this Quito Quest crew to these sites this summer.

Students

Since starting at Emaús and Carmen Bajo, this has been the first time I’ve ever taught guitar. I’ve shown some people a chord or two before, and given instructions on how to hold or tune or play a little bit to people who bought instruments from me at Albemarle Music. But sitting down and having consistent lessons every week and being the teacher is something new for me. It’s been a fun experience, and doing it in Spanish is just an added bonus.

In the South, I have six students for one-hour blocks all day Wednesday, and a couple more on Monday evenings. They range in age from ten years old to one of the priests, and several of them I’ve known since I first came to Ecuador in 2007. At Carmen Bajo, I theoretically have five students on Friday afternoon, all around eleven years old, but the schedule has been a little wacky the last couple weeks, and any time I don’t have a student, one of the other kids that’s there for the compassion program just jumps in, so I’ve had three pretty consistent ones and then a slightly rotating mix.

I’m teaching them all to read music, and my goal is to get them to learn the first couple of positions on the fretboard and then move into chords. Sounds easy enough, but I’ve had to relearn a lot of my music theory in Spanish. In Ecuador, as in most of Latin America, notes and chords are not named by letters, but with a “fixed Do” system. (E.g. C= Do, D=Re, E=Mi, F=Fa, ect.) The good thing for me is that by the time any of the kids work up any speed on any of their exercises, I’ve been through them all with 10 other students, so I’ve gotten quite a bit of practice playing “Mi, Fa, y Sol” on the first string and thinking those names instead of “E, F and G.”

It’s also fun on the student side of things. I have one student just flying through exercises, and she’ll be playing on all six strings before I know it. I’ve got one who’s having a little trouble with knowing the notes on the staff, a couple who just need to work on coordination between left and right hands, and one who started with absolutely no concept of musical rhythm. I’ve played so many instruments for so long that reading music is as easy to me as reading the words on this page. So it’s sometimes difficult to figure out how to explain something in a different way so that they get it. I guess that’s the whole concept of being the teacher. I’ve gone through a whole lot of blank staff paper writing out exercises, and a couple of times I’ve covered my students’ eyes and called out notes for them to play to get them to see that they don’t need to watch the fretboard, but the music.

One of the reasons that I finally switched my major from music was that I decided my goal wasn’t to teach little kids how to play instruments for the rest of my life. And customers who came in to Albemarle Music used to ask me quite frequently if I taught guitar. I’d tell them I just ran the store while everyone else was teaching because I didn’t think I had the patience for it. Turns out I do, and I enjoy it quite a bit. Some of my students will get frustrated if they get hung up on something and can’t get it right, and I know quite well the feeling of wanting to nail it when you’re in front of your teacher. But I keep reminding them that making mistakes is part of learning, and that five years ago I knew absolutely nothing about the guitar. I hope that gives them confidence that they will know how to play music in a very short amount of time, and I’m looking forward to seeing them take off.