SINGING
The church has a number of choirs. Mostly youth. One is former and current gang members. All good.
The choir that sings on Sunday night is by far the best. All teenage girls. All enjoy singing very much (or at least they look like they do).
One evening the Sunday night choir was practicing in the church. Jack wanted to hear them sing. So how all of us ended up in the church.
It was obvious the girls were a little embarrassed to have people watching (I know what it is like to have people watch you practice. It is a little weird.
So how Joia was coerced into singing. She stood up and started singing something acapella. The choir of girls collative jaws dropped. They were completely blown away.
We hung out for another hour, almost everyone taking a turn picking or singing a song. (No I didn’t sing. I didn’t want to create an international incident.)
It with limited language we are able to she community and connections.
It was beautiful.
MY HEAD IS GOING TO EXPLODE
Over the last two weeks I have had a number of conversations with many members of our group as they have returned to their daily lives.
The experience is very consistent. Somehow most everyone feels they are living in two worlds at once or living in neither world. What makes it harder is it is impossible to explain.
We all have experiences that are profound to us, that are only ours. Nothing you can do can adequately explain it. I have seen many friends become parents for the first time. You can see it in their eyes; they are different people. I can tell something is brewing, but never having any kids of my own, I have no chance of fully understanding.
This is the same. You see and feel things that are so new and so different there is no vocabulary to express what has happened. You try to explain and words just keep coming and coming. Whom ever you are talking to at a certain point just glazes over. When you see that you just stop talking.
I have gotten to the point when people ask how the trip was, I say, “It was challenging.”
The hardest part of the transition back is the completely incongruent experiences I have been having.
1) Our last night in Lima we ate a very modern mall. Like any nice mall you would find in the US. 10 of us spent as much on dinner as we did to rebuild three rooms in one house.
2) The day I got home I napped, walked to get some take out, and turned on the TV. Some how I was so tired form travel I was incapable of changing channels. The TV was on Bravo and I watch three hours of Project Runway and Make Me a Supermodel. Work with the poor to total superficiality.
3) I am writing about my experiences in a coffee shop on a computer that cost more than 2/5 of the world makes in a year and drinking a cup of coffee that cost more than what 1/5 of the world makes a day.
It is enough to make your head explode.

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