8/2/08
I'm home now. Again, I find myself caught in that realm between travel and return, where the mind has yet to catch up to where the body finds itself, walking these Arizona streets that are familiar enough to deceive me into believing for a moment that I never left. This was another trip whose influence on me I can gauge by how it felt to leave: it's been an amazing week. This morning - 16 hours ago, while now I'm sitting at the bar of a California Pizza Kitchen in Tempe - when we said our goodbyes and boarded the van, we looked back to find many of the kids that had come to see us off in tears, some embarrassed and trying to hide it, most openly.
I've been given a really unique, wonderful opportunity through this and in addition to the experience as a whole. I'm sure you've seen those commercials asking you to sponsor or support a child; you may have wondered how much of your money would actually benefit the child, or allowed procrastination to stretch into forgetting, or felt a strange distance. Would it help to have met him or her, to know her story? Would it help to have held her? To have sat with her and sang with her and prayed with her and laughed with her? I have. The child I felt closest to this week - Zoila, 5 years old - the one that sat with me at the devotionals and services, was one of the ones that still needs sponsors. I've become one for her.
Looking back over the week ... we poured 35 x 17 feet of concrete 6 inches deep or more to make a new driveway entrance for the orphanage and school. But we weren't called there, brought there, because they needed a new driveway. On our first night, Rick told us that on work and witness trips like this, it is often the missionaries who are changed, and now I think, Of course, how could we not? In a few years, will I return as a long-term missionary or teacher? I can't know yet, God's plan is only observed in hindsight. But it is an option now, and one that is more than a backup plan, and that's something I could not have said a week ago.
This morning I was in a third-world country (maybe developing ... second world?), and visited some of the poorest people in the world. Now I'm sitting at a restaurant's bar where the drink in front of me costs the same as an El Salvadorean's daily minimum wage. How's that for culture shock?
I don't know the actual definition of a third-world country, but I haven't thought of Belize as that, and El Salvador is said to be the most industrial/developed in Central America, and yet the term third-world seems more appropriate somehow. In Belize, the people seemed, if not happy, at least content; in El Salvador, there was a kind of desperation in the way many lived. El Salvador is the most densely populated Central American country and, though industrial, not everyone benefits. In Belize, tourism and agriculture are big sources of income, so even when a corrupt government takes millions form oil or other resources, there's something else. My best guess, after one week there, is that in El Salvador, as the whole country grows, it stretches out, so the top reach higher, while the bottom falls further; we saw both, but it's the latter that gave me the sense of it as a third-world country.
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