Above is my man Cristofer again with the beautiful heart that we made out of puzzle pieces. He's been in the clinic for a few weeks now, and he has been absolutely loving all the individual attention he gets there. He hasn't even seemed bored despite the fact that he's watched Toy Story 2 in the clinic about 3946782 times. They're trying to ease him back into his regular schedule by taking him to the small boys' house from dinner to breakfast and keeping him in the clinic only during the day, and he's cried every time they take him out of the clinic because he loves it so much there. The other child that's been in the clinic a lot lately is a girl named María. I'm fairly certain that every volunteer that's worked in the clinic is working on adopting her, because she's pretty much the most adorable little girl ever. Here's a nice picture of me and her right after I finished the night shift where I had to wake up four or five times during the night to give kids medicine, got about five hours of sleep, and hadn't taken a shower:
On second thought, I think I like this picture a little bit better:
When I first tried picking María up, she wouldn't stop crying because she wasn't used to being held by a guy, but she eventually got used to it, and I even (almost) mastered the art of putting her back into her crib without her crying.
This is Eduardo, but he's better known as "Pimba." He's one of the special needs children, and he's called Pimba because he does this thing where he claps his hands three times and then thrusts one hand into the air and triumphantly bellows, "PIIIIMBA!" The cool thing is that most of the kids actually take care of him instead of making fun of him like you would expect. Pimba is kind of allowed to do whatever he wants (within reasonable limits), so he always plays soccer with me while the other boys have to be sitting down silently somewhere. The thing is though, Pimba has his own dialect of Spanish that I've had to learn. Instead of pelota (ball), he wants to play with the mota. Instead of going to the cancha (the court they play soccer on), he wants to go to the mancha. At first it annoyed me that he always wanted to kick the ball around and that he always had food all over his face and hands after meals and got it on you, but God has helped me to really love him and enjoy being around him. He actually got moved to the medium boys' house about a week ago, so unfortunately I don't see him as much. I miss being around him and playing with the mota with him, but I still see him from time to time so it's ok.
Ok so this is kind of cheating as far as pictures go since this is a picture from Emmanuel's website, but we'll just ignore that. This is Terrez, Candice, and their son Jeremiah. Candice is the English teacher that I'm taking the place of, and Terrez is the math teacher in the high school. Terrez also works at the medium boys's house and Candice works at the big girls' house. They've been at Emmanuel a total of three years now, and they're actually returning to the U.S. in about a day or so. They're really cool people, and Candice has helped me a ton in getting accustomed to teaching the English class here. This past Saturday, all of the teachers in the high school (which is like eight people including me, Candice, and Terrez) got together for a going away lunch at one of the teacher's houses in Guiamaca. It was really fun because all the other teachers are very entertaining, and I got my first taste of authentic Honduran cuisine! We had tortillas and meat and this salad stuff and beans and cheese and avocado and fried plantains and it was delicious. The best part of all? I got to take home leftovers and some mangos from the tree outside the teacher's house! And in case you haven't tasted a Honduran mango before, which I'm guessing most of you proooobably haven't, they're pretty much amazing and you should be feeling pretty jealous right now.
In other news, we've actually gotten a few new guy volunteers for once! One of them actually grew up here in Emmanuel but was adopted by a family in Tennessee five years ago, and now he comes back to visit everybody. Right now we've got a total of five guy volunteers, and we'll be getting two more sometime soon. The girls will be getting eight more volunteers soon, putting them at a total of about twenty girls in one house. Preeeetty ridiculous. Unfortunately, we also had to say goodbye to Jordan this past Sunday, who was one of the guy volunteers who had been here for about a month before that. Jordan's a really good guy, and he strives to be a man who lives biblically. I had a great time getting to know him, and he's definitely going to be missed here at the house.
A lot of groups from churches come to Emmanuel for about a week on mission trips, and the group that was here last week did a "piñata" with the kids. The reason I put that in quotation marks is because it was actually a brown paper bag with rope tied around it. But hey, the kids loved it, and that's all that matters.
In order to cause the smallest amount of chaos possible, we told the kids not to move when the piñata was busted open. We spread the candy out all over the ground, and then counted to three and let them loose. I took pictures as they rushed the candy, and I've gotta say, it kinda looks like a zombie attack or something.
There are a lot of Danish volunteers here, so the other night all the volunteers decided to get together to celebrate the Danish witch-burning holiday called Sankt Hans Aften! It has something to do with John the baptist's birthday being the next day, but we never really reached a conclusion as to why that got paired with witch-burning. Regardless, we decided to celebrate by burning our very own witch! I've gotta say, I'm pretty proud of how good our witch turned out.
Sadly for her, I wasn't proud enough of her to keep her from being burned at the stake.
(insert awkward transition into the serious part of the post)
I feel like one of the big things God is teaching me at the moment is holiness. To be holy means to be set apart from the world for God's purposes. I've been reading the book of Numbers lately, and one thing that I specifically noticed was a thing called the Nazirite vow in Numbers 6. It's basically a vow of complete dedication to the Lord. They had a lot of rules that they followed to set them apart to be totally dedicated to the Lord. For example, they weren't allowed to drink wine. Not only that, but they also weren't allowed to eat grapes or raisins. Not only that, but they also weren't allowed to eat anything that came from the grapevine, not even the seeds or skins. They also had a lot of other rules like not cutting their hair for the entirety of the vow and not going near a dead body, even if it was their father or mother or brother or sister, because that would make them unclean. This isn't to say that we need to grow our hair real long and stop eating grapes, but as Christians, we should be set apart from the world. We should be dedicated to the Lord's purpose. One of the practical ways this affected me was through my music. I was looking through my music, and there was a lot of stuff in there that wasn't glorifying to God at all. It's incredibly easy to just tell myself, "Oh this song's ok because it's funny, this one's ok because I don't actually agree with what it says, this one's ok because it has a lot of memories attached to it, this one's ok because I really like this song, etc." However, I just couldn't shake this feeling that I needed to do some deleting in my music library. I started off just deleting some songs that were just ridiculously/obviously bad, most of which I didn't actually enjoy listening too so it wasn't that big of a deal. The problem is, God doesn't just call us to give a little bit, He calls us to completely dedicate ourselves to Him. The guy doing the Nazirite vow couldn't even eat the seeds or skins off the grapevine, and that meant that I needed to give more. It was really tough and I hesitated a lot, but I eventually ended up deleting a good bit of songs that I actually really liked. Not all of them were blatantly bad songs either. Some were just songs that I knew that I listened to when I'm in a really bad mood in order to dwell on my anger and put myself in more of a bad mood. That kind of stuff doesn't glorify God though. I'm sure I still need to find some other songs to get rid of, but hey, it's a start. Holiness isn't just about the music you listen to though. It has a ton to do with the way that you act. I know that there are so many times that I act exactly as the world expects and encourages me to act in certain situations (wanting to retaliate if I've been wronged, being prideful if someone compliments me, wanting to receive all the praise for any good thing I do), but I also know that God is working on me. He's helping me to be set apart from the way the world thinks and behaves in order to bring glory to Him. It can be really hard to be set apart sometimes. If everyone's making fun of someone, it's ridiculously easy to just join in because you want people to think you're funny or you want to be liked. It's ridiculously easy to just snap at a person who's trying your patience, whether they're doing so intentionally or unintentionally. However, God calls us to a higher standard to that. Not only that, but He's also right here with us and gives us the ability to live lives worthy of His calling, all we have to do is ask.
Another thing God's been teaching me about lately is recognizing Satan's attacks. If you read my last blog post, you know that I was going through a bit of a rough time a couple weeks ago. A bunch of different little stressors were getting to me, and I was just exhausted. I was constantly having thoughts like you can't be yourself around your students because you aren't fluent so you can't show your personality or you're not really making that much of a difference in these kids' lives and I would get in bad moods and just force my way through the day. Thanks to a letter from a friend (that I know God had me read at that time for a specific purpose), I began to realize that that wasn't my voice or God's, but Satan's. I'll give another example: So there's this kid named Cristian who's about 13, and a couple weeks ago he told me that his brother, who lived outside the orphanage, was shot and killed. I was taken aback at first and thought maybe I heard him wrong, but I said I was sorry and then he kind of walked off by himself. A few days later I was with his sister in the clinic and she told me the same thing with some more details. Apparently their brother owed a lot of money to some drug dealers but didn't come up with it on time so they killed him. I felt horrible and wanted to do something to help but didn't know what to say. I couldn't get the picture of Cristian walking away by himself out of my head. When he told me about his brother's death he just looked so.. ..empty. I prayed for him and his siblings every night, but I felt like I needed to do more. I felt pretty clear leading from the Holy Spirit to write Cristian a letter, so the next day I did just that. It wasn't anything major, just a few bible verses and some encouraging words. However, the next time I saw him, I chickened out and didn't give it to him. I started to have second thoughts. Maybe it's too cheesy to put bible verses in his letter. He's probably already gotten his brother's death off his mind and me bringing up again will just do more damage. I waited a few days, but then I read the letter from my friend. I realized that those thoughts and my hesitation were coming from Satan, who was trying to prevent me from doing something that I clearly felt God leading me to do. "For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love, and self-discipline. So do not be ashamed about the testimony of our Lord" (2 Timothy 1:7-8ish). We have no reason to fear doing something that God leads us to do. I gave Cristian the letter, and he hasn't said anything about it, but I trust that God used it how He wanted to. I've been doing a lot better now that I've been recognizing Satan's attacks and realizing that they're not true. I'm actually starting to enjoy teaching sometimes, and I've been able to show my personality despite getting tongue-tied or not understanding everything. I've gotten to know a lot of the students better, and God has been renewing my strength every day so that I'm not just exhausted and in a bad mood all the time. In conclusion..
God is good.
