On My Faith

I’m on the train to NYC, where I’ll hop a bus to Ithaca later this evening. I hear multiple languages, see multiple races, and can easily pick out different cultures. The train is full of different stories; those already told, and those yet to come. But this one ride, this short jaunt through New Jersey, is one we will always share.

One hundred fifteen different people have now shared time on Woodside’s mission trip to Grand Bahama Island over the last eight years, creating a commonality amongst the least likely of friends, leaders, and teens. The groups have ranged from 16 to 51, and we are on an upswing in attendance, enthusiasm and interest.

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It’s Only Just Begun

The school bus arrives to take us away. We hear it roll up, make note of the calls to finish cleaning up, and slowly make our way past the work we have poured ourselves into this week. Some stop to take photos; neighborhood kids, finished projects, new friends. One of the teens living in the foster home passes around a piece of paper. We’re told to write our names down so we can be Facebook friends. Our lives couldn’t be farther apart, but we can now be close thanks to a website dedicated to sharing.

Some of the local kids cry. Others seem confused. These children have written us poems, sang us songs, held our hands and beat us at basketball. But what does it mean? What was this flurry of work they’ve witnessed for four days? And why aren’t they coming back tomorrow? 

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A Short Thought on Impact

Earlier tonight, our small groups met and discussed what sort of impact we would like to have on others on the trip, in the area we are working in, and also back home once the trip is over. It’s a tough question in a lot of ways, and it definitely made me think about a lot of the issues I’ve faced this week.

For one, this is my first official trip as a full leader. Because of this newfound status, I’ve been thinking about what mark I want to leave on the others on the trip for a while. I probably thought a bit too hard about what attitude I wanted to have, because the second the trip started I just started being myself, in the purest sense of self I know. I’ve said it many times before, but I feel more at home and at peace during this trip than pretty much any other time. It’s been my natural high for eight summers as I recharge the batteries before facing the real world once again. 

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Welcome to The Sauna

Earlier this spring, Dan (the trip leader and friend of the blog) asked if I wanted to be in charge of sheetrock / drywall this year. I said yes, assuming there were some simple patches like there had been in the past. I’m sure he told me somewhere along the way that it was a bit more complicated than that, but I clearly wasn’t paying attention, because when I discovered the scale of the job I had volunteered for I knew I’d overreached. 

We’re at a foster home this year, and Velma, the foster mother, saves the worst room for herself. She has no bed, just an old mattress pad on the floor, and the room is exposed plywood with crossbeams, stray nails and holes galore. This week she’s getting an upgrade, as my team is working to drywall, spackle and paint her entire room. It seems like a pretty cut and dry job, almost literally, but when the floor boards are also poorly maintained plywood, it becomes a bit trickier. Then you add in the fact that the roof is sloped and the floor bows, and the measurements get a bit wackier. And then you subtract any cross breeze through two open windows and crank the temperature to, quite literally, over 100 degrees, and it becomes a bit sweatier. This, my friends, is how “The Sauna” came to be.

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The Big Question

Under most circumstances, I am happy to let the professionals handle the kind of work I do here on the island. I’m no expert at sheetrock, or a perfect axe-wielder, but for some reason it all works out down here. And by “works out” I just mean that I don’t accidentally kill anyone. So the bar is pretty low, but still.

The first day at a worksite is always full of stop-and-go action. We give instructions, wait for them to be digested, work for a bit, run out of materials, invent other things to do, and then when we finally get the right materials it’s late afternoon, it’s hot, and everyone is pretty tired.

The big question mark, then, is what happens when those materials show up late in the afternoon. Does the team shrug and push the new work off until Tuesday? Or do they step up, dig deep, and make the most of every moment they can?

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On Wasps & Russian Roulette

Have you ever played Russian roulette with a nest of wasps? You can’t win. There isn’t any chance that the situation ends well, especially if the plan involves a bucket and a long stick. Of course, I knew that the plan had a chance to fail before it was even underway, but how do you turn down a chance to tempt fate?

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New Faces in New Places

Having been on this trip for eight years now, I’ve developed certain routines as I enter the island: big hug for Raoul after passing through customs, learn all the names of the new people on the trip, and figure out what condition my room at Xanadu is in. (Xanadu, for those new to following along, is a historic resort outside of Freeport that used to be owned by Howard Hughes, visited by Frank Sinatra, and basically just the coolest place around. Now it’s rundown, empty, and basically a sore spot on the coast of the island. But, it was also our home for the last seven years. Too rundown for other people to really use it, and just enough amenities to be rendered useful to a mission group.)

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The Bubble

A few weeks ago, I got an email from IndieGoGo, a fundraising site I’ve used from time to time in the past. It was a new comment on an old fundraiser I’d done in 2009 for the mission trip I go on in the Bahamas every summer. For the past seven summers, I’ve spent a week on Grand Bahama Island with a group from my home church in Pennsylvania. It’s a trip designed for high school students to strengthen their faith, teach them some life skills, and show them that the world isn’t as shiny and pampered as most of our lives in the United States seem to be. In the past, I’ve done blogs, podcasts and live video chats from the Island, as a means of explaining our work and also to help tell a fraction of what the experience is like. Here’s the full text of the comment:

As a Bahamian/American I find this [the mission work and subsequent storytelling] misleading. I have seen far more poverty in the US than I have ever encountered in The Bahamas. Yes there are families in poverty however you make it appear that the majority of the population is experiencing this. I understand that your aim is to do some good but please, as a journalist, give an accurate description. State that your efforts are to help a particular community not an entire country that is, in actuality, the wealthiest in The Caribbean.

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Meko

Saturday, July 23, 2011

He’s here again. Random how he always knows exactly where we are. There’s a good chance he’s chatted with a trip member on Facebook or someone told him we’d be here in the Port one more time before we fly back to the States. Meko is good at that - just showing up. He’s 18, with a massive smile and a thin build. No features stick out save for that smile. His cornrows are common, his clothes are common, but there might be something different about this one. We may never know. He says goodbye to us at the airport and hours later has tagged many of us in non-sensical links and photos. It’s his way of saying he misses us.

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