Día de amor y amistad

Happy Valentine´s Day! Here it is the ¨day of love and friendship¨, which I dig because of it´s inclusivity.

I celebrated Valentine´s Day with great people and vicious parasites. But, internal friends aside, my Rostro community and I commemorated the day with a Battle of the Sexes trivia game. Organized by our own Nate Radomski, each person recevied a questionnaire with three personalized inquiries. Complete with a Jeopardy-style game board, Nate set up the categories: Family; Ancient History; Pet Peeves; Recent Tid-Bits; and Things No One Should Know. As it turns out, Dre brought 11 pairs of shoes to Ecuador (and the boys somehow knew this) and Frank´s worst GI emergency took place in Bosnia (which we did not). A first-round tie brought us to the lightning round, in which the girls prevailed to take the game. Well fed, slightly wined, and victorious (the girls, at least), we headed to bed.

To celebrate the day in true RdC style (ie. no exclusive relationships), we picked names out of a hat to choose our valentines. I got our host, Nate, who I graced (cursed?) with a poem and a few coupons for simple, but valuable things. He, in turn, left me a dozen tomatoes in the form of a heart on my bed, as well as a fly swatter for easier mosquito killing. What a gentleman. My actual valentine also managed to surprise me via his Ecuadorian connection, who happens to be our director. It´s a bit strange to receive flowers from your boss, but I appreciated both counts of thoughtfulness.

My work here confuses me. I´ve written already about my lack of direction at work. Semillas continues to grow and change weekly, though always with big questions of structural change and best practices in the back of my mind. My morning work with Hogar bores and tires me, mostly because it isn´t work. Now I´m halfway through the year and trying to find my footing all over again. Even in the first half, Santi and I served as test dummies for a new work site, and our first experiment failed. I don´t want to throw in the towel. I don´t want to give up on them. Still, I see no place where a 4-hour-a-day volunteer fits into this organization, and Hogar supervisors refuse to give better instruction because they want their volunteers to choose their work so they´ll be happy. It´s an admirable mentality, and something I would appreciate if geography didn´t rule out most of the Hogar work options (their main office is an hour and a half from my house, so I´m confined to the tiny Durán office). They don´t need me. And maybe that´s good - they´re on their feet and don´t need my help. But then, why am I there? Why do I sit for four hours in an office, asking what needs to be done and how I can help, but always being told there´s nothing to do? It gave me plenty of time to compose last week´s pair of epic updates, but I didn´t come here to write in my journal. I could be in the neighborhood, or visiting families, or teaching a morning class at the local tech school, or offering a tutoring study hall when school starts again in April, or helping to cook at the soup kitchen - the list goes on. To be fair, these are fresh thoughts. I need to bring them to Kevin to get his thoughts because nothing can change until I open my mouth. He listens and he acts. We´ll talk.

I´m currently reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, which takes me to the Congo in 1959, just as the Congolese were acheiving independence from Belguim. The story follows a family of six from Georgia who travel to Africa to serve a year as missionaries. The absolute absence of openness to cultural and religious difference on the part of Southern Baptist, headstrong, and charismatic father Nathan Price gives me plenty to think about. I look at him and see the extreme of ethnocentrisim and bigotry, and it´s easy to criticize and even pity him. But narrowness of belief doesn´t come in black and white. ¨There are more words than yes or no¨, one of the characters, Anatole, reminds his young friend. There are shades of narrowness and prejudice, even shades of bigotry. I´m no Nathan Price, but there´s certainly a hair of him in me and in all of us. When do I close myself? When do I assume difference means the other is ignorant? How can I listen better? Good questions. I recommend the book.

Today´s prayer intentions: For Brian, Joanie, Matt, and Kat, and the whole Farrell clan, as they struggle with illness; and for Belén´s mom, that she finds the support she needs.