It’s starting to feel right

It’s starting to feel right. It took a little while, I must admit – two months of homesickness (and not just for friends and family in the states anymore), learning new buses, new smells, a new routine, getting used to living my life in Spanish again . . . but here I am, finally.

Things are moving slowly – no big surprise considering this is still Ecuador. I am still negotiating my place at work with Hogar. We are still waiting for the house, although we have seen some progress in the past few weeks. I don’t think that big piles of dirt have ever put me in such a good mood. I can’t wait until I can say that I actually live in Monte Sinai. Patience is a virtue, and is the lesson that God has been trying to teach me these past few months.

My favorite time of the week here are the weekends (anyone else know that feeling?). Because we don’t live very close to the new neighborhood, we haven’t been able to spend time there during the week – extreme bummer. So, we take advantage of the weekends. Friday morning through Sunday afternoon, it is pretty certain you will find us wandering around Monte Sinai. We have become great friends with a community of nuns who live a few blocks from where we will be living soon and run a small elementary school in the neighborhood. They have taken us under their wings, introduced us to families, fed us, and let us use their home as our satellite place to rest on the weekends between house visits. I have also started teaching catechism there with them on Saturday afternoons. I have been given a group of 20 or so kiddos between 9 and 13 years old. Its nice to be in educator mode again.

So, everything is new – new faces, new stories, new questions, new relationships, but something about it is strikingly familiar. Spending hours in conversation, walking house to house in the sun, hugs, kisses, playing with kids, sharing struggles, laughing – oh man do we laugh. It’s Rostro. It’s comfortable. It’s home. It’s why I came back to Ecuador for another year. The families I have been getting to know are wonderfully welcoming (again, no surprise there). The nuns have helped us out by explaining a bit about who we are and why we are in Monte Sinai in the first place, and between the four of us here, I think people know what we are about (or should I say Who we are about?). And, all in all, it seems that they are excited about having us around. It looks like Rostro really fits here. When we are in the neighbors houses, or when we are at mass, it is impossible to not feel God’s presence. He brings me such peace in the moments when I’m not really sure what I should be doing to best serve Rostro. He has filled my last two months with challenges and grace. Those two tend to come in an interesting pair.

All in all, the time here is full. I think of you all often, which sounds strange considering many of us have never met, but your legacy, the work you have done, or better put – the way you have been in Ecuador – I carry that spirit with me in a profound way in this new year. Being a part of this new step for Rostro makes me think about everything that past volunteers have done to get us to this place. Thank you so much for your prayers and for continuing to hold Rostro in your lives.

Some Thoughts on Advent

Hello! Happy Thanksgiving a week late, and happy Advent to you all! It's hard to believe that we are already in the midst of the holiday season. It feels very strange - and sometimes lonely - to be spending my holidays here in Ecuador, to be preparing for Christmas when it's getting hotter and sunnier every day, to hear Spanish carols pouring from cane houses, to be celebrating advent in Spanish at the misa, to be celebrating here with children whose biggest - or perhaps only - gifts might be the etch-a-sketch and sunglasses they just received from their sponsorship program, 'Children International.' Yes, it's incredibly strange. And yet, I am discovering, it is also a beautiful, beautiful blessing.

With Advent beginning last Sunday I've been reflecting on what Advent and Christmas mean here, in this time and this place. And with every day and every reflection I am finding myself more deeply thankful to be spending Advent here, in a world in which the message and reality of Advent and Christmas suddenly seem more raw, more real, more applicable, more possible. I wanted to share a few reflections...

Entering the Advent season here has prompted me to consider that this world of poverty and injustice that I am surrounded by here in Ecuador is a world very similar to that into which Christ was born. Monday night as my community was praying with Luke's annunciation story, I couldn't help but think that one of my young neighbors, sweeping the dirt floors of her small wooden home, might make a very appropriate Mary, and her young son playing on the floor at her feet might then make a very appropriate Christ child. Yes, this world is the same desperate, oppressed world into which Christ was born, a world of poverty and violence and corruption and gross inequalities (all things that also exist in the States but that have reached such proportions here that they can't possibly be hidden or ignored).

I have been considering, too, this idea of waiting, and what it means to wait in solidarity. I am waiting, as we do every Advent, for Christ's coming, but that seems to take on a new significance here. Here I wait with my friends and neighbors, with my students, with the patients at Damien House, and with the beautiful children who make my life here so joyful. Together we pray 'come Lord Jesus,' come into our hearts and our families, come into our communities and our country, enter into our entire world. Come Lord Jesus, we pray, and turn our world upside down. May the last be first and the kings pulled from their thrones and the rich sent away without, as you have promised. Come Lord Jesus and lift up the little ones you loved so much, here in Ecuador where those little ones, the simple and the weak and the poor, fill the streets. Come Lord Jesus I pray, together with my neighbors, and together we wait in hope.

And I know that this is important too, that we not only wait but that we do so in hope. This can be hard, especially here. Many days our world seems incredibly broken, irreparably shattered. It seems hard to conceive that even Christ could put it back together again. Hope is sometimes hard to come by. And yet as I pictured the annunciation the other night I found myself brimming with esperanza. What an incredibly long time, I reflected, the Israelites were waiting for their Messiah. And who could have ever imagined that that Messiah would enter the world in the way that he did, born in a stable, out of wedlock, the son of a carpenter and a young, insignificant girl in Galilee, destined to become the friend of sinners and the champion of the downtrodden and powerless. As Christ's birth, life, and death have shown us, God's time is not our time, nor are his means our means. And as Christmas inevitably comes after Advent, we wait in hope that Christ's world-turned-upside-down must inevitably come as well. This waiting, of course, does not mean idleness or indifference. I firmly believe that Christ's world is slowly breaking into our own, that our own attempts to love and to work for justice and peace help to bring his kingdom slowly into reality. And yet as we struggle through the day by day, when progress is far from apparent, we Christmas is God's present to us, his promise that, as Oscar Romero tells us, love must win out - it is the only thing that can.



And that is where I leave you today, on a thoughtful note. Thank you for reading my ramblings and my thoughts. Whether or not they meant much, this is where my heart is right now. I know I have said nothing of my comings and goings; I suppose that will have to wait until a later email. Know though that I am thinking of each of you, holding you all in my heart! I am thankful for you all :)

A lot, a lot of love is being sent your way from South America -

Hello from Ecuador!

This is my attempt to keep my word and try to stay in touch more
regularly. Perhaps then I can keep my notes a little shorter and more
manageable... thanks to all who actually made it through my last
message! Very impressive.

So here is some of the news from here in Duran, Ecuador:

I have been back for a week from my vacation in Baños in the Andes
mountains - which was incredibly beautiful - and I am so very happy to
be settling back into a routine and to be able to spend time with my
community and with our Ecuadorian neighbors. As usual, there have been
emotional highs and emotional lows, days where I am smiling all day
and days where i might start crying at the slightest things, but I'm
realizing that is life here in Ecuador - the emotional swings are
incredible and there is very little middle ground. Sometimes I feel
like I might explode but all in all i am so thankful that I am feeling
here - really and truly feeling things and experiencing things and
living things with my whole heart.

And I am growing - I think my heart is stretching and my faith is
growing and I am learning to open myself and empty myself a little
more every day.

To talk more concretely, an interesting fact, I suppose, is that we
are experiencing an energy crisis here in Ecuador right now. We are
coming up on the rainy season, which begins for real in January, and
usually during the transition from rainy season to dry season it will
begin to rain, little by little, as January approaches. This year,
unlike most years, there has been no rain as of yet (it has not rained
here in Guayaquil a single time since I arrived here in August), and
they are not forecasting rain for a while. This means that the rivers
are very very low, and although I don't completely understand it all,
much of the country's energy comes from hydroelectric power. Anyways
with this power shortage they are rationing energy by shutting off
power to certain parts of the city at specific times every day. For us
in Duran, the power goes off from about 7 in the morning to 10 every
day and then again at night from 6 to 8. We are well situated to deal
with the lack of energy because we generally still have water due to
the way our plumbing is set up (another thing I dont fully understand)
and we have a gas stove, so especially in the morning, lots of times I
don't even realize that we don't have power. At night though it is a
little more tricky, as it gets dark every night at 6. It's a little
dangerous to be wandering around at night without light - the other
night I tripped over the dog and almost fell on my face - and we are
also often cooking eating etc in the dark. It was an adventure at
first and a little annoying now but we are becoming very adept at
living with a combination of headlamps, flashlights, and candlelight.
The energy shortage is forecasted to continue for the next 2 months so
I'm sure by the end then we will be experts at surviving sin luz.

In other news, I love teaching more every day. A lot of it I think has
to do with finally feeling like I know what I am doing, at least a
little bit, and also getting to know my students a little better and
earning their trust. As I type this I just got out of an hour and 20
minute class with my high school seniors. We just started discussing
the idea of 'us' versus 'them' in our modes of relating with people,
and today we discussed racial stereotypes within the United States and
here in Ecuador. We started out discussing the legacy of segregation
in the US and I explained to them 'Brown versus Board of Education,'
and from there we were able to have a really great discussion on
racism, including whether or not we might all be 'inherently racist,'
simply because of our background and our fear of the unknown, the
'them.' Sometimes I feel like trying to get my class to talk can be
like pulling teeth and sometimes it is so hard for me to get them to
think critically but I think the discussion today really resonated
with them, and I think we all walked out of class with a lot of things
to think about. And it all seems like such a blessing to me, to be
able to discuss issues like this with students in a culture different
than my own, in a culture where i am actually the 'them,' and to
really feel that genuine interest and the understanding, to know that
we are all growing and learning together. What an amazing blessing.

i think I'm going to leave it at that today - - hopefully if I stay up
to date with these notes I will be able to continue sending a few
paragraphs at a time instead of entire chapters :)

Once again thank you for all of your support and your prayers and your
love. Thinking of you all as the holidays approach. I wish i could be
there to celebrate with you but i will be holding you in my heart.