I keep on putting my underwear on backwards. Let me explain. After years of folding my own laundry, I have been used to being able to unfold my underwear and put them on without looking, knowing that the front will be in the front and the back in the back. However, now, with our staff person, Nanotte, folding all our laundry, my underwear, shirts, socks, and pants are all folded differently. This is how my days often start: with some vivid reminder that normal is being redefined.
I think it was Patsy Clairmont who said, "Normal is just a setting on your dryer." Normal. Websters tells me normal is "conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern." Sometimes as I think about how we are settling into life and ministry here, I think that things are becoming normal. Sometimes, as I engage the myriad of challenges of ministry and life, I think that things are anything but normal.
When things were normal for me, like 44 days ago and before, leaving the house in the morning involved getting in the car, pressing a button to open the garage door, backing out of the driveway, pressing the button to close the garage door, and then driving away. It was normal, and took all of 30 seconds, and didn't make me sweat. Now, leaving involves temporarily putting the guard dogs in the garage, unlocking the three locks on the 16' wide sliding gate across our driveway, sliding the gate open, backing the SUV out, turning it off, locking it, sliding the 16' gate back across the driveway, letting the guard dogs back out, and exiting through the double locked man-door (sorry to not be gender-inclusive) in the gate. Then, sweating profusely from the 90 F degree 7:30am heat, get back into the SUV and drive away. Time lapsed: 4 minutes. Now, this is normal.
When things were normal for me, back in Cambridge, I would see children walking to school in the morning and walking home at night. Crossing guards ensured safe passageway across roads. Children, at least most of them, would have had breakfast and would be carrying a lunch. They would be on their way to classrooms where teachers with teaching degrees and lesson plans had spent time preparing for their day of learning which would include a pair of nutrition breaks, plenty of DPA (Daily Physical Activity), and time to eat the food they had brought with them from home. Then, at the end of the day, these same children could go home and if they had homework to look up on the computer, they could do so at home. Here in Port-au-Prince, normal is different. Children of all ages are escorted by parents to schools dotting the landscape, sometimes crammed into what are otherwise houses. Three doors down from our house is a house of a similar size which is a school for a few hundred uniformed children every day who arrive to a teacher who may have a grade school education and who leads them through unprepared curriculum-driven, one-size-fits-all "lessons" of rotely repeating exactly what the teachers say. Yesterday, I heard a class of 3rd-graders practicing saying the numbers from one to thirty. It was audibly cute but genuinely disheartening.
Normal, at least looking back at life in Cambridge, had pockets of relaxing in it. Evenings out at soccer, sitting at music lessons, walking to friends houses for a visit. Occasionally, when I was feeling creative or ambitious, or on the rare occasion that something was broken, I would have to go to my tool box and do some work. Now normal doesn't feel to include as much relaxing. It's not just the four minutes vs 30 seconds that it now takes to come and go but it is a host of other things -- the mental preoccupation of whether we have enough water in the cistern, in the roof tanks, or in the water cooler; the keeping track of whether the dogs or the chickens or the fish have been fed. The constant monitoring of how much electricity we have stored up in our back-up battery/inverter system and guess-calculating whether I need to add power in the daylight through running the generator before knowing the if/when of whether the city will turn on the power tonight and if not that I need to go out in the dark and strike up the generator. And with these and other things contributing to a state of un-relax, it makes sense that I am tired and most of my family with me.
Compounding this is the challenge of ministry in Haiti. In a country where record volumes of every kind of aid has come in for more than a generation, there are times when I wonder, like Timothy Shwartz did in his book "Travesty in Haiti" whether all the aid has created dependency rather than empowerment. I mourn the reality of relationships between populations in Haiti and Elsewhere where the common language is neither Creole nor English, but Dollar; and I struggle how we from Elsewhere who bring the Dollar must negotiate that fine balance of empowerment which neither abuses nor ignores the power Dollar brings.
As I think about these things, how my normal is shifting and how hard an adjustment it is for me and for my family, it strikes me just how short of a time we have been here so far. Today, for Carol and the boys and me, is Day 44. For the girls it is day 21. I have met people here who have been here for 21 years, 30 years, and more. They have said, "It doesn't get normal." I find this both troubling and encouraging. On the one hand, I want it to feel normal soon; on the other, I never want to get to a place where the chaos, poverty, sadness, futility, and frustration of this place seems to me like the way it should be.
Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe." A lot of people over the years have taken the repent to mean that you are supposed to beat yourself up internally or emotionally about how much of a shmuck you have been, but that is certainly not what Jesus had in mind when he said, "Repent." Repent, as the Greek language so wonderfully phrases it in the word "metanoia" is to "change one's mind." Repentance is turning from the broken that is to the rebuilt that could be. Repenting, here is Haiti, as the plaque in our hallway says, is "Seeing light with our hearts when our eyes see only darkness."
So, today, again, I will choose, as this anniversary of my Uncle Bill teBrake reminds me, to walk by faith, to change my mind, to believe that the squalor, chaos, sadness, and road ruts are not all that life here is paved with. I will choose to live in Haiti this year but also to live in the Kingdom, a place that my inner self yearns to one day be normal, to be everywhere and everything, and by God's grace, everyone.
I think it was Patsy Clairmont who said, "Normal is just a setting on your dryer." Normal. Websters tells me normal is "conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern." Sometimes as I think about how we are settling into life and ministry here, I think that things are becoming normal. Sometimes, as I engage the myriad of challenges of ministry and life, I think that things are anything but normal.
When things were normal for me, like 44 days ago and before, leaving the house in the morning involved getting in the car, pressing a button to open the garage door, backing out of the driveway, pressing the button to close the garage door, and then driving away. It was normal, and took all of 30 seconds, and didn't make me sweat. Now, leaving involves temporarily putting the guard dogs in the garage, unlocking the three locks on the 16' wide sliding gate across our driveway, sliding the gate open, backing the SUV out, turning it off, locking it, sliding the 16' gate back across the driveway, letting the guard dogs back out, and exiting through the double locked man-door (sorry to not be gender-inclusive) in the gate. Then, sweating profusely from the 90 F degree 7:30am heat, get back into the SUV and drive away. Time lapsed: 4 minutes. Now, this is normal.
When things were normal for me, back in Cambridge, I would see children walking to school in the morning and walking home at night. Crossing guards ensured safe passageway across roads. Children, at least most of them, would have had breakfast and would be carrying a lunch. They would be on their way to classrooms where teachers with teaching degrees and lesson plans had spent time preparing for their day of learning which would include a pair of nutrition breaks, plenty of DPA (Daily Physical Activity), and time to eat the food they had brought with them from home. Then, at the end of the day, these same children could go home and if they had homework to look up on the computer, they could do so at home. Here in Port-au-Prince, normal is different. Children of all ages are escorted by parents to schools dotting the landscape, sometimes crammed into what are otherwise houses. Three doors down from our house is a house of a similar size which is a school for a few hundred uniformed children every day who arrive to a teacher who may have a grade school education and who leads them through unprepared curriculum-driven, one-size-fits-all "lessons" of rotely repeating exactly what the teachers say. Yesterday, I heard a class of 3rd-graders practicing saying the numbers from one to thirty. It was audibly cute but genuinely disheartening.
Normal, at least looking back at life in Cambridge, had pockets of relaxing in it. Evenings out at soccer, sitting at music lessons, walking to friends houses for a visit. Occasionally, when I was feeling creative or ambitious, or on the rare occasion that something was broken, I would have to go to my tool box and do some work. Now normal doesn't feel to include as much relaxing. It's not just the four minutes vs 30 seconds that it now takes to come and go but it is a host of other things -- the mental preoccupation of whether we have enough water in the cistern, in the roof tanks, or in the water cooler; the keeping track of whether the dogs or the chickens or the fish have been fed. The constant monitoring of how much electricity we have stored up in our back-up battery/inverter system and guess-calculating whether I need to add power in the daylight through running the generator before knowing the if/when of whether the city will turn on the power tonight and if not that I need to go out in the dark and strike up the generator. And with these and other things contributing to a state of un-relax, it makes sense that I am tired and most of my family with me.
Compounding this is the challenge of ministry in Haiti. In a country where record volumes of every kind of aid has come in for more than a generation, there are times when I wonder, like Timothy Shwartz did in his book "Travesty in Haiti" whether all the aid has created dependency rather than empowerment. I mourn the reality of relationships between populations in Haiti and Elsewhere where the common language is neither Creole nor English, but Dollar; and I struggle how we from Elsewhere who bring the Dollar must negotiate that fine balance of empowerment which neither abuses nor ignores the power Dollar brings.
As I think about these things, how my normal is shifting and how hard an adjustment it is for me and for my family, it strikes me just how short of a time we have been here so far. Today, for Carol and the boys and me, is Day 44. For the girls it is day 21. I have met people here who have been here for 21 years, 30 years, and more. They have said, "It doesn't get normal." I find this both troubling and encouraging. On the one hand, I want it to feel normal soon; on the other, I never want to get to a place where the chaos, poverty, sadness, futility, and frustration of this place seems to me like the way it should be.
Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe." A lot of people over the years have taken the repent to mean that you are supposed to beat yourself up internally or emotionally about how much of a shmuck you have been, but that is certainly not what Jesus had in mind when he said, "Repent." Repent, as the Greek language so wonderfully phrases it in the word "metanoia" is to "change one's mind." Repentance is turning from the broken that is to the rebuilt that could be. Repenting, here is Haiti, as the plaque in our hallway says, is "Seeing light with our hearts when our eyes see only darkness."
So, today, again, I will choose, as this anniversary of my Uncle Bill teBrake reminds me, to walk by faith, to change my mind, to believe that the squalor, chaos, sadness, and road ruts are not all that life here is paved with. I will choose to live in Haiti this year but also to live in the Kingdom, a place that my inner self yearns to one day be normal, to be everywhere and everything, and by God's grace, everyone.
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