Category: Teams

Stray thoughts from hosting

I just want to share a few random thoughts and adventures from the last couple of days. We currently have a team of 61 people on the ground. It’s not the largest team Youth World has ever had, but it’s far and away the biggest Quito Quest team ever, so even things that we’ve got down pat like feeding and transporting and debriefing large amounts of people are really complicated. It’s been a challenge just keeping up with the logistics sometimes, much less learning 61 names and faces and personalities and stories. But it’s been a blast working with them and seeing both how much they are able to accomplish and how much they are able to grow. It’s an emotional roller coaster some days, even for us hosts.

For example: as I posted on Facebook earlier today, I started my morning trying to wave down our bus as it drove past me on Av. America and Dana pointed out the window and laughed. I was thinking her face was priceless, but as I tend to have a rostro expresivo myself, she was probably thinking the same thing about me. After I did manage to jog back to the bus, make it to the seminary and pick up our team, I (only semi-) accidentally got 65 people into the Mitad del Mundo monument for free. I didn’t feel that bad about it because a security guard watched us and 70 school children walk in, and the gringos bought some souvenirs. We also took the opportunity to hop on a chiva, which is basically a party bus. We thought we’d be getting a nice little ride around the Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, but it turns out we got a ride around the actual ciudad. For a dollar a person, we got a 20-minute excursion back through the parish of San Antonio de Pichincha, ducking power lines and waving at everyone we passed, all the while blasting music from Spanish reggaetón to the Black Eyed Peas. We made it back to the monument just in time to join the rest of our gringo group in dancing to “Foot Loose,” “Mambo Number 5” and “YMCA” as it blared over the speakers while curious and amused latinos photographed us all.

Then we went to El Refugio for lunch and an hour and a half of solo time. Having done a significant amount of that last night, I sneaked off and went to staff meeting, and the worship session there was exactly what I needed. After that I caught up with some of the rest of our team hosts and El Refugio staff and hid out with them drinking coffee in the Grace Center to relax, get to know each other’s plans and stories a little better, and process and plan. Then it was time for debrief.

Fortunately we’d had that little bit of transition time, because although debrief wasn’t as deep as I would have liked and hoped, it’s getting there. We had a few tears, but mostly just youth hashing out what ministry and relationships with each other and God will look like back in Canada. Having Christy back with our debrief group after a couple of days away for various reasons, I took the chance to take some notes for my own personal processing time and to pay attention to each member of the group and figure out who needs time outside of our normal plans to get deeper. We can pretty easily pick out the internal processors and the ones who are really wrestling with things. But being an internal processor myself, sometimes it takes a while to be able to jump in there and help somebody hash those things out.

Right now I’m tired, both physically and of processing. Therefore, this isn’t going to be one of those deep posts with a moral attached. But to sum it up, and despite my really low amount of energy right now, I will say this: as a certain former Quito Quest host once said to me “I love teams!”

Tree House

When I was a little kid in Anderson, South Carolina, I had a tree house. It was huge (granted, I was 3-5 while we lived there) and had a swing set attached and a sandbox underneath. I remember running out to it in the rain and climbing into the covered part when we were house-hunting before we even moved there. I remember playing up there for hours with Dee Hayes. I remember the time I fell off the top rung of the ladder and twisted my arm catching myself on the way down. I remember begging my mom to take the whole thing apart so we could move it with us to Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Maybe it’s because of these that I so closely associate tree houses with childhood, but I felt very childlike this afternoon as we took the team out to Hacienda El Refugio and had facilitated quiet time in the tree house. The El Refugio tree house is something dreamed up by Paul Reichert that the staff and tons of teams have been building for three years. It’s finally finished, and this was my second opportunity to spend time there.
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Part of Paul’s devotion was about the fact that we are children of God. People talked about the image of sitting on God’s knee, or thinking in terms of other people being God’s children as well. But for me, I just thought of how much we have to learn as children. Being a learner, especially even as I am in a leadership position this week, has been a theme for me over the last few days.

We talked a lot today about why we have days out at El Refugio. We want to have intentional quiet, worship, and prayer time, taking a step back from scheduled “ministry” days to realize that we worship and minister through our lives. Having that childlike feeling of being in a tree house, it was quite easy to do that all afternoon, being intentionally in the position of a learner and being among other children of God. Even after our official time there was finished, I stayed around and had a chat with Mark, Cathy, and Deb. They are all old enough to be my parents, and Mark is the team leader, but as we talked about our worship time, about the tree house, about ministry, and about what God had been teaching us, I think we all learned something from each other and from God, and did our best to share our hearts and thoughts as well. For those twenty minutes or so, reading scripture and talking, our responsibilities, our titles, and our schedule simply didn’t matter. We just had fun being God’s kids together.

I’ve heard Paul’s orientation both times I’ve gone to the tree house, and as he puts it, we don’t have to go to a specific place to worship, but it’s a helpful opportunity when we set aside a specific time and space to connect with God. A lot of what that specific tree house represents is a space in my heart, but that’s exactly what I was able to set aside today, and what I think we all need to remember to do as we go about serving not just in physical times and places set aside, but with every aspect of our lives.

First Adult Team

I knew going into hosting this team that it was totally made up of adults and that that would be something different for me. I’ve always had youth teams before, and it’s been interesting to observe, before we’ve even had a scheduled ministry day, how very different certain aspects of our time together have been.

The first thing that has really stuck out to me has been their tendency to wander off. For the first hour or so at the Basilica today, it drove me nuts, but as I told Dario later on, I realized that to some extent that’s something I need to let go of. With youth teams, the teenagers might not necessarily want to be right with the whole team all the time (or any of the time), but they will at least stay withing seeing distance, because they know if they wander off, they’ll be in trouble with somebody later. Every time I did a head count today (which is something I do pretty constantly), someone was missing. More often than not it was the same person, who always quickly found his way back to us.

The questions this group has asked me have had their own twist to them, they follow the rules really well and drink lots of water and wear their sunscreen, we take lots more bathroom breaks, they’re quiet on the bus and at meals but animated at debrief, and they sing. Let me repeat that. They sing. I love groups that sing. I hosted a summer team once which whom devotions including music was like pulling teeth, so I appreciate it when groups actually participate vocally. Not that worship has to be musical, but personally, a devo wouldn’t be devo if it didn’t include either writing or music, so it means a lot to me when they choose to throw in songs at the end of a debrief and it’s a way that I can really worship as well.

The great thing about a team of only 10 is that you actually know everyone’s names at the end of the first day. I’ve gotten to spend at least a little bit of time already with almost everyone on a one-on-one or smaller group basis, and I feel like we’ll know the team really well be the end of their time here. There’s only one or two I have hesitations with about their level of flexibility, but we are working at Carmen Bajo this week. Not that you can help falling in love with any ministry site here, but speaking from experience, you really can’t help but fall in love with Carmen Bajo and I think after a few hours getting to know people there and seeing how things are done the South American way, I have no fear that will melt quickly away.

With only one person’s luggage lost and no other disasters on the first day, I’m looking forward to working, serving, and worshiping alongside this group.

OH! And I ordered food on the phone in Spanish for the first time today. That’s always been something that has terrified me. Possibly because I’ve heard what a nightmare it is to order pizza in this country (fortunately we were calling in for chicken), but mostly because speaking your second language on the phone is exponentially more difficult. But I ordered twelve boxes of chicken, two salads, and three drinks… and half an hour later, the order showed up exactly right and in the correct place. The senorita on the other end didn’t even ever have to ask me to repeat anything, and when I gave her a non-standard answer to “what room are you in” at the hostal (I responded “I’ll be there to find the driver” because I could think how to say that much faster than “there’s a common room at the top of the stairs”) she rolled with it and wasn’t confused by what I said. I’m a little proud. Probably a little too proud, but there you have it.

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.

Emaus Mission Team

This weekend I had the opportunity to go to Shell with a group from Emaus to work at La Casa De Fe. I won’t give the history I could on either group, I’ll just skip to the part about what we did this weekend.

It was pretty amazing to see the “Promised Land” after having been absent from the property for two years. When I was last there, it was a patch of tall grass, a stream, and a backhoe. Now there’s a completed water tower and bodega, and a significantly constructed multi-purpose building. The entire concrete framework of the building is done, to the point that we were able to camp out under tents and misquito nets on the top floor as we worked on the first floor.

I’ve been saying today that this weekend was probably the most work I’ve ever done in my life. I’m trying to think of a time that could beat it, and I haven’t come up with one yet. We shoveled out and leveled the dirt under the first floor, dumped in bigger rocks that won’t hold water, covered it with a layer of plastic and rebar-like metal grate material, then mixed and poured concrete for the real floor of the ground level. Part of that involved carrying around 50-kilogram bags of cement to mix concrete.

Now, being your typical kid from the United States, the only metric conversion I know how to do in my head is miles to and from kilometers, and I only know that because of a minor road trip I took to Canada with my grandpa during which I sometimes drove. It wasn’t until after I’d staggered around carrying three or four of those bags that I discovered that it’s more than a 2:1 ratio of kilograms to pounds. I don’t even weigh very much more than 50 kilograms.

Needless to say, between that and the shoveling and pushing wheelbarrows of concrete and sleeping on a constantly deflating air mattress on more concrete, I’m more than a little sore right now. But since I don’t plan an exercise regimen of shoveling concrete and rocks every weekend to keep up these muscles that I didn’t know I had, I’m glad about some other things with which I came away from this weekend.

At certain points it was hard being out at the new property basically all the time and trying to think of it as a ministry site and not just a work site. But when we did finally have the chance to go over to the orphanage, and then to have a bunch of the kids come out to the property to have a worship service with us this morning, it drove home one of those things that I did come away with. Twice now, after having seen the property when it was a piece of land indistinguishable from the rest of the jungle around it, I’ve gotten to be a part of building a place that’s there only because of people acting out God’s love, and which will soon be not just a building, but a home full of that love.