You are so eleven years old…

Boatswain’s Log. November 10^th.

 

The title is what goes through my head 95% of the time I interact with my host brother Yeiner. The kid is often irritating. If we did a poll of people who thought he was eleven…all of them would say he was. He cannot be silent for any length of time, he is obnoxious, he pouts, and generally makes me wonder what I was like when I was eleven. I think I wasn’t as obnoxious, but it is quite possible that I was…I hope at the end of time we get to watch our lives in retrospect. I would like to see how I became who I am and the other possibilities that could have been. I think it would be fun. All the same. Yeiner is just like so many campers I had 2 summers ago. Not a chatterbox, but full of “let’s do something” energy. I think that I am ready to work with High Schoolers when I get back.

 

Yesterday was Sunday and I went to church with the fam. It wasn’t as long as a Pentecostal service and because my host dad sat a lot of the time, I sat down a lot too. 2ish hours of standing on hard cement isn’t a barrel of monkeys. The pastor gave a great sermon that challenged a lot of standard Latin American cultural views by referring to the bible. Which was wonderful. Very nice man as well. I talked a bit to the people at the church, that girl Jennifer that I mentioned earlier…I am pretty sure she was flirting with me for the whole time I was there. She is also 15. It thus ensues that regardless of her flirtatiousness, she is overly chatty, and still 15. 15 is just too young. Game over. She wanted me to help her teach the little ones something about Jesus, but I wanted to hear the sermon and avoid her flirting. So I stayed and heard the sermon. We also had communion. I like communion. It makes me feel like home wherever I am. Unless I am in the catholic church. Then it makes me feel like I don’t love Jesus enough or something like that.

 

After church we headed over to the grandparents’ house. The way there is one of the most breathtakingly green hilly sights you have ever seen. It is like the shire from Lord of the Rings. I had no idea such places exist. If heaven looks like that I will be pumped, however I hope heaven isn’t quite as hot.

 

At grandparents’ house we sat around. Old people are hard to understand. I sat and listened, then lots of us took naps at various times, then we came home. Dinnier (pronounced Dig-ner, the host brother who goes to college) and I headed over to Heyner’s house because he had said that he would show me how to drive a motorcycle. That’s right, first surfing, then tortillas, then motorcycle. Someone is becoming a badass. He wasn’t actually there though…Another time. We hung out with the ever-entertaining Maria Celeste and her mom for a few hours and I helped Noemi (mom of Maria Celeste and wife of Heyner) do some English homework. I also talked with Dinnier in English. It is hard to talk in English with people who don’t know English, my head doesn’t let it work. While I was there I developed a migraine. Damn. Note to self: drink water before the day starts.

 

I went home afterwards and watched some of “The Gods must be Crazy” with almost my whole family. I wanted to stay up and watch all of it, but my stomach hurt and I had a migraine. So I went to bed. I felt lame, but staying awake with a migraine is in fact lamer.

 

Today dawned, and started later than usual with some more harvesting of bainica. Not as bad the second time around. There wasn’t much to pick, so mostly we hung around and ate oranges. Oranges are drank rather than eaten here. You peel most of it with a knife (or machete like we used), then you cut the top off, then you suck out what is inside. It is pretty frikkin’ awesome.

 

Then after bainica time, it was lunch time. After lunch we (Nano, Dinnier, and I. Yeiner went to school.)went to see a milk farm on a nearby hill. The cows do not like to be petted, milk is sucked out of them by a machine, and I got splattered with cow poop. It is strange to think that cows make milk that we drink. They are really smelly, also apparently just 1 cow makes 20-30 kilos of milk a day. That is roughly 50 pounds of milk a day. That is a lot of milk.

 

After that Nano, Dinnier, and I took a tour of the river out back by the farm. I wore my boots and we ended up walking around in deep water. I got almost entirely soaked, but I got some great photos and spent some good bonding time with the host brothers.

 

After all this fun time I got home, finished my book that I had to read for class, got frustrated by it, and watched Maria Celeste get really fussy and need a nap at coffee time. Why was I frustrated by the book? Well…

 

Duder (author of book called Reading the Bible Through Third World Eyes) is a touch frustrating. He talks about Liberation, but makes it an almost entirely political and social liberation. The idea of Liberation that Christ brings cannot be solely social and political, it is also spiritual. Ponder this with me. Christ died on the cross instead of solving the problems of world hunger, bad government, or a variety of other issues. His point while alive was to show us how to live, and in dying He reconciled us to God for a relationship with God. Now, a significant part of that relationship is indeed a focus on living out radical justice within the context of the world and being the voice of the voiceless (like Oscar Romero)…however, if Christ had meant that this was all we needed to do then why did He die on the cross? Ah, yes. He loves us. Henri Nouwen said in an interview I read that our quest for justice needs to flow from the love of God abounding in us. Interestingly enough duder used a quote from Christ with regards to those who say “Lord, Lord!” but don’t make the cut. They were doing all the things, but didn’t know God. Similarly his focus on doing stuff may make a lot of socially conscious Christians whose consciousness isn’t founded in the love of Christ. I think that while both justice and loving and being loved by God are interrelated, I do not believe that they are exactly identical.

 

Yeiner and I are gonna watch a movie now. More later.