Wednesday, 26 June 2013

Fruits of Labor (June 26th, 2013)

Today started off pretty similar to yesterday. I started out just offering the people I will be working with today to the Lord and recognizing that I need Jesus every step of the way. Wednesday mornings at World Relief start with a 30 minute prayer meeting. Sometimes there are plenty of the employees there and sometimes there is just me. I like both. I love hearing the case workers praying in Spanish, Burmese, and Ukrainian. I love hearing the American case workers praying fervently for the refugees we serve to find jobs, for God to open opportunities to get their other family members here, for the sick to be healed. It is a beautiful scene to see hearts still softened to the needs of others, no matter how redundant those issues seem. Compassion is something I have to fight to have, I know it may not seem that way, but I really struggle to feel for others day after day. It is crazy to me to see almost every single employee here really care about their "clients" (refugees) and are still not just moved to tears sometimes, but moved to prayer. I also like praying alone because I like to pull out a hunk of scripture and just pray that over the clients I work with and the workers here. Recently I have been hooked on Isaiah 42:1-7

Isaiah 42:1-8

Holman Christian Standard Bible

The Servant’s Mission

42 “This is My Servant; I strengthen Him,
this is My Chosen One; I delight in Him.
I have put My Spirit on Him;
He will bring justice[a] to the nations.
He will not cry out or shout
or make His voice heard in the streets.
He will not break a bruised reed,
and He will not put out a smoldering wick;
He will faithfully bring justice.
He will not grow weak or be discouraged
until He has established justice on earth.
The islands will wait for His instruction.”
This is what God, Yahweh, says—
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people on it
and life[b] to those who walk on it
“I, Yahweh, have called You
for a righteous purpose,[c]
and I will hold You by Your hand.
I will keep You and appoint You
to be a covenant for the people
and a light to the nations,
in order to open blind eyes,
to bring out prisoners from the dungeon,
and those sitting in darkness from the prison house.

Today as my Pandora started blasting All Sons and Daughters I began praying this out verse by verse, name by name, situation by situation. I was pleasantly interrupted by a lovely volunteer named Shannon who sat with me the remanding 20 minutes. We quickly discovered we both love the Middle East and she is interested in learning Arabic! I was elated; I rarely meet woman my age who are even the slightest bit interested in the Middle East.

Once I found a room available for my 3 English students, Peter Wah from Burma, Tulasi and his wife Chandra from Bhutan, I began to pull out my delicious props. Today I thought we could take a break from filling out forms and writing names and do something a little more fun...like eat! I brought an angle food cake, apples, mango, watermelon, zucchini, bell pepper, garlic and yogurt.

We of course started with the cake but it was kind of a misunderstanding. I waved hello to Tulasi and Chandra and they just followed me into the room where I was preparing the food. I was trying to tell him that I did not need them yet and that they could continue to clean our building but neither understood me or my gestures so I just made the best of my situation and we ate some cake. It was really funny to see their reaction to the cake. Tulasi was smacking so loud it sounded like a camel and Chandra did not make much noise bbut when I walked by the water station she was chugging a cup of water as fast as she could. I do not think they were impressed but I could not help but giggle.

When I had all my students together I started with apples and I cut and served them (they ate every part of the apple #hardcore), then the watermelon (which they all love), then the mango. They did a great job with the fruits and ate them all willingly. Then we moved to the zucchini bell pepper and garlic. I tried to bring things they would know and I think it was successful. They all knew the fruits and veggies and all cooked them in their own way. Peter Wah was very animated when he was showing me how he cooked the garlic and we all had a good laugh at it. The foods we ate turned into charades of what animals we ate and what animals were culturally unacceptable (like pigs and cows fro the Bhutanese who have lived in Nepal for a majority half of their lives). It then lead to looking at pictures on the internet of food which was a blast and hilarious. I looked up pictures of Nepali food which Chandra and Tulasi loved teaching me about and looked up pictures of fruit that were completely foreign to them like kiwi. One fruit chart I pulled up was cartoon and all the fruits and veggies had faces (like Veggie Tales). Through out this lesson I was asking them "do you like this" "do you like that" and they were answering yes and no. Peter Wah said yes to almost everything I pointed at but when we got to this animated fruit chart he looked really confused and kind of disgusted. I kept asking him if he liked this and I would point at something and he would reply "no no- no good" and then I would point at the apple and he would say "don't like' and finally I said "what do you mean you don't like- I just cut up all of these fruits fro you and you ate them all!". He finally pointed to the eyes and mouth on the fruits and said "no good- no like- don't eat that". I about fell out of my chair laughing. Of course he would not eat an apple or watermelon with a face. This was probably his first experience with cartoons or cartoon fruit at least. Tulasi also branched out a little bit and took a stab at drawing a picture of an animal that he ate. The picture was hilarious and I wish I would have gotten a picture but after making the animal noises I realized he was talking about a goat!

After the fruits and vegetable lesson we started with the alphabet. to my surprise and delight al three of them had their alphabet memorized! Trying to communicate that the letters of the alphabet made sounds was hard. I was trying to get them to sound out words but they would only repeat the letters for the most part. But at the very end of our two hour lesson Peter Wah read his first word! "Pam"! That name never sounded so sweet. I think I may have freaked them out a little bit because I almost jumped out of my chair when I heard him say it. Tulasi and Chandra did not read their first word but their victory was concurring the letter "F" and coming really close to being able to make the "eff" sound. I literally put my finger on Chandra lip to shove it under her teeth but we were laughing so hard it was impossible.

Yes, today has been a blessed day already and I am only half way though. Right now I am eating my tuna fish salad (that the foreign case workers are teasing me about) and waiting for my roommate to pick me up and accompany me to teach the other refugees in their home!

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Today has officially come to a close and I could not help but finish this blog. Soon after I ended the first half my roommate and I drove to a Burmese apartment and taught English to a mother with 4 children. They all are basically illiterate but are doing such a great job learning English. The children are picking it up really fast! I brought over the remaining fruits and veggies and went through the process of teaching the verbs "to like, cut, cook, and eat". They did such a great job! I could not help but be so proud of every single one of them. The mother is one of the most patient woman I have ever met. She just so sweetly and shyly allows her chunky and demanding 1 year old to crawl over her and play with her face and sit on the table and whatever else he feels. It is really cute to see some of her emotions surface finally. We are finding things to laugh about and today I had the pleasure of watching her playfully hold and kiss her 1 year old. I have always known she loves him, but today I got to see that look mothers get in their eyes when they are just delighted to have their baby close to them. I do wish I could find a way to explain to her how to store food properly. There is a huge bug and roach infestation. It seems like there are most and more roaches every time I come over. The kitchen is just crawling, and today I checked out the fridge and to my dismay the bugs have infiltrated almost every item in the fridge. One of the problems could be the over flowing amount of trash which is mostly just left over peels and food. I just cannot figure out a way to communication kitchen sanitation with her because I do not speak even a fragment of her language and know little about her culture. I was encouraged by the home hygiene of the other Burmese woman I visited in the same complex. Her name is Sara and I had the blessing of being with her when she gave birth to her precious baby boy "Ring Loon". He is already 7 pounds and 11 ounces! That is almost a pound he has put on since he was born. We chatted with as little words as possible and she showed me her Burmese Bible. I tried showing her my favorite verse and realized a few moments ago that I gave her the wrong reference! ...Typical... But she was healing great and her place was super clean and organized. I was happy to be able to pray over her and Ring Loon again.

 
We then drove to a Congolese woman about my age to help her build her reading skills. We read a children's book about Joseph and the coat of many colors. She did pretty good but it was all in past tense so that was kind of hard to work through. it was so cool though because she, her husband, my roommate and I just all sat and talked for about an hour after the reading ended. I learned a lot about their family of three and a lot about Africa. As we talked about our lives, families, and countries, we talked about fears like hippo's, snakes and alligators and I showed them pictures I found on my smart phone to correlate what we were talking about. She almost threw my phone when I pulled up a hippo! We talked about very humorous and different practices like marriage. Sanga (her husband) proudly proclaimed that he had to buy 12 cows and 3 cases of beer to her father in order to marry her! I made him repeat his story a few times to make sure that I was getting it right and when he found out that in America the groom not only pays nothing for his bride, but the parents actually spend money, he could not believe it. We all had a good laugh about that topic but the giggles faded away as they started sharing stories about how genocide ripped through their villages. Sanga's mother and father both dies by getting their arms cut off and then their head, and later on in his life his first wife and 3 children were brutally murdered by a conflicting ethnic group. Sanga's wife nonchalantly gestured what they did to pregnant woman, which I do not plan on exposing, and I could not help but thank God internally for saving this family. She really has worked her way into my heart and at the end of our time together she playfully leaned into me and said "I love you". It was the first time a refugee has told me that and I tried not to expose how excited those three words made me. I love her too, and the rest of them. I love the smell of the potatoes she makes her children, the sound of the Bhutanese couple ordering each other around, the way Peter Wah shouts "TEACHA" at me whenever he has a question, I love his wife's sweet and gentle smile she gets whenever I complement her memory, I love watching the children laugh at me when I clumsily stumble through Karen words they teach me, I love hugging the Sudanese women and side kissing her cold cheeks. I just love them, and I feel so blessed to be apart of their precious lives.

Lord I am in awe of your goodness. Thank you. 

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