When You Can't Breathe

They say smells gently waft to your nose, ticking your senses and awakening your inward desire to not only smell more of the deliciousness, but to become consumed with it.  What they don't describe is how a smell can hit you so hard that it seemingly knocks the breath right out of you, leaving you gasping for fresh air and unable to find relief.  I remember the sensation all too well as my 14-year-old self sat on a bus on my first time in a foreign country.  When I had exited my first plane ride the day before, I had noticed that Ecuador had a scent of its own, not a bad one, just a distinctive, different one.  But this....this was a horrid smell.  This smell made me want to cover my nose and curl up into a ball to try to protect myself.  This smell made me yearn for home, where the worst smell I had encountered was walking into the bathroom after my brother had just exited.

Our bus pulled into a trash dump and opened its doors.  And while I thought that the smell couldn't possibly get any worse, I was very, very wrong.  It was about to get much, much worse.  We gathered our bags of soap and small toys and exited the only familiar, safe thing in the area.  And though our leaders had tried to prepare us for what we were about to experience, there are not adequate words to explain the heart-wrenching scene that we beheld.

Stepping off of the bus, we were instantly overtaken by a mixture of body odor and rotting food.  The dust from the street was stirred up by a breeze that seemed to intensify the hot, sticky smell that clung to the back of my throat and entered every orifice possible.  I tried to smile and use my minimal spanish vocabulary to greet the people who came out of make-shift houses, eyeing these newcomers.  They quietly clung together, unsure of the white-skinned strangers who had just rudely trampled through their front yards in our tennis shoes that cost more than their entire life's possessions.  It was in the next few moments, as my eyes feasted on the scene around me, that I was choked less and less by the smell of decay and more and more by the sight of despair.  It was in those moments that I changed forever.

We were there to present the gospel through a play, which was more or less a ways of street evangelism.  We set up to perform and people cautiously came out to see what the ruckus was all about.  Afterwards, we attempted to engage with the people. There were men giving cat-calls and little boys and girls who wanted nothing more than to run their fingers through my hair.  I tried to be gracious as several filthy children flocked to me to not just see, but to handle my golden locks.  "Don't worry about lice," I tried to remind myself as I forced a smile.  "People are what's important here, not me."  Kids tried to play soccer with a piece of trash that they had balled up, but it only lasted a few kicks before it would unravel and they would tire of balling it back up.  I handed out some soap and toys to the kids around me.  One little boy was wearing pants that were several sizes too big for him, held up by nothing other than a wrapper from a plastic water bottle.  I was invited into his "home", which was simply trash piled high on each side and a piece of plastic to make a roof and keep the birds out.  Water was so scarce that when a truck drove by the water the street to keep the dust down, a man ran behind to collect some for his family.  After all, a little more dust in the air is a fair trade to keep a family alive.

It wasn't long before we traipsed back inside the bus, full of grime and dirt and heavy hearts. As I washed my hair from the luxury of running water in our hotel, I shuddered at the thought that something was probably making its new home somewhere in my scalp.  And I held back tears.  Instead of lice clinging to my head, the images from the day clung fast.  They anchored themselves in my brain and worked their way to my heart, changing my very make-up.  I knew I wanted to do more than simply present a play and give people soap.  I knew that I NEEDED to do more.

But I left Ecuador a few days later, as scheduled, and returned to my home in suburban America.  I was greeted by people who were so happy to have me back, but had no idea what I had experienced....and I had no idea how to explain it.  I tried, only to be met with a few "uh-huhs" and then an inevitable change of the subject.  My experiences made people uncomfortable.  I made people uncomfortable.  To be perfectly honest, I made myself uncomfortable.  I was processing everything I had experienced and seen to the extent that my 14-year old mind could, but it was full of confusion.  It seemed as though I was back at the trash dump, grasping for air and being suffocated by the intensity of what I had seen.  What more could I be doing?  I knew that street evangelism wasn't my thing.  I wanted something deeper.  But what changes could I make?  How could I help people, not only in a physical sense, but in a deeper spiritual sense?  I longed to make some changes in my life to be the hands and feet of Jesus, but I was unsure of how.  Unfortunately, my passion seemed to frustrate people, as I was not good at effectively expressing what was going on in my heart, and so I quit talking about it and life slowly went on, more or less, as usual.

That is, until about eight months later...

This is NOT my photo, but a photo from extremeresponse.org of a similar trash dump.

New Blog!

For those of you who don't know, I have moved my blog! My new blog is....

www.alexandelizabethminium.blogspot.com

:)

Engaged!

While this news is a bit old (about a month old in fact)...

I'M ENGAGED!!!

That's right, I'm getting married January 1st to Mr. Alex Minium. I'm so excited to have found someone who shares my heartbeat. I could gush....but I won't (partly because I just don't have the time to right now).

Legalism

I've been home for almost three weeks now, about to go to Idaho for a friend's wedding and then Pennsylvania to start working at Wayumi and I'm really excited for that. But I wanted to share with you something God's been revealing to me lately. More exposing the truthfulness of my heart and trust me, it's not pretty. But it helps me to write about it so here goes:

The last class I finished up as a junior at New Tribes Bible Institute was Galatians. Now my summary will fall quite short of doing it justice, but Paul talks a lot about the truth of the Gospel apart from works, apart from legalism, apart from US. How it's not about what we do and who we are, it's about what HE did and who HE is. Really cool book. And so naturally it caused me to look at what I was trusting in and why I did the actions I was doing. Am I trying to prove to God that I'm worth something? Am I doing things with wrong motivation? Sometimes I can answer those questions no and sometimes I can't, but I now know to ask the question. I now CAN ask the question. But today I was reading through Philippians and trying to ask questions and things and understand the tone of the book. Now, to be honest with you, I only made it halfway through chapter two and then I thought I had better sit down and type my thoughts because if you know me then you know if I don't do it now, I won't spend the necessary time stewing over that thought I had and miss out. So here I am. Sorry...sidetrack....back to Philippians. So I'm sitting there thinking "Okay, so Paul is saying all of this because he truly cares about the people. In 1:8 he makes that so clear. Really in the whole intro he makes it very clear how much he truly cares about the people." So then a little later, he starts telling them how they ought to act. And I asked myself why. He does it because he cares for them and their relationship to God. He does it out of genuine concern. That's completely evident if you look at the first chapter. And then I realized something....while I may not be legalistic in my living, I am in my "teaching." My motive behind sharing truth most of the time is based out of "they need to know the truth" not "my desire for them is to know and understand their Savior and have a relationship with Him that is grounded in truth." Now if I would have read that sentence like, two years ago I don't think I would have been able to make a clear distinction between the two motives, but as God has been showing me the depths of my own heart and the depths of His (okay, so I'm really just starting to scratch the surface of that one...but I'm scratching) it all becomes a lot more clear. And looking at the example God gave us in Paul really opened up my eyes too. I want people to know and understand their Savior and to be able to have the relationship with Him they were created for. I want the same for myself. But I don't want to share truth with people because it's the right thing to do. I don't want to share truth because I know it and they don't. I want to share truth trusting in Christ the whole time. And I'm thankful for a God who is patient with me to show me what that looks like and how that's done. I'm excited to learn. :)

The Answer!

Tomorrow we will eat sweet potato.

For those of you who have been looking for the answer to what "Yabelewa nanimama anya namale" means, there it is! It's not really that great of a saying....but now you have some Malaumandan language to toss around out there! :) If only you knew how to pronounce it.....

Summing it up

I always have such high ambitions for updating my blog and then....well, then I fall short. I enjoy writing on here because it helps me organize my thoughts right after things have happened and causes me to really focus on what I've heard/learned throughout the day instead of just listening, thinking something was great, but forgetting it days later. But instead of writing every day while I was at Wayumi, I only wrote a few times. So I'm writing now. :)

Wednesday was the day we talked about preparing people for the Gospel. It's interesting because here in America, God is fairly well known. Most people have a general idea of who you are talking about when you say "God" and can describe Him fairly well. We, of course, should always make sure this is true, however, and not just assume. But in tribal cultures, their idea of God is often very different than ours. Sometimes they have no words for certain concepts. Most people living in tribal settings feel that God is an impersonal being who really doesn't care about them. Try telling them John 3:16 (For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only son, that whosoever believes in Him would have eternal life") raises too many questions to answer. So to prepare them for the Bible, you have to figure out their understanding of God, understand their culture and what drives the things they do, and then start from the very beginning. You want them to CLEARLY understand God's Word....doesn't HE? So that's our goal too, as the church. We want all people to clearly understand God's message to man and have the opportunity to respond to it. And we learned about that on Wednesday, which was also the day of the infamous hike. We drove to...some mountainous part of PA and participated in a four-mile hike. Kayla was my hiking buddy and it was really a gorgeous hike. We saw waterfalls and lots of green trees and crossed steep terrain. By the end, I had a HUGE blister on my left foot and a significantly smaller blister (but still a blister) on my right foot. Having holes in your socks apparently leads to that... So that was an adventure! It was fun and well worth the blisters! :)

Thursday was our Mumu. Mumus....welll, honestly, I'm not really sure how to describe it. Is mumu the way the food is prepared, the event as a whole, a noun, a verb.....I don't know! But what I DO know is that it encompasses an event where we prepare a pig, along with potatoes and sweet potatoes (pronounced cow-cow in Papua New Guinea), and stick it in the ground on these blazing hot rocks and it basically sits in the ground for hours and hours until the food has been adequately smoked to perfection. And then it comes out and becomes our supper. YUM...kind of. It's a cultural experience because it's traditional in Papua New Guinea. :) And it's fun of course. That day we also did skeet shooting. It was my first time shooting a gun and honestly, I was pretty nervous for that infamous kick I've heard about. But really, it wasn't that bad. I didn't even hurt afterwards. And I broke one of the clay disks!! That's right, my very first one. One out of two isn't too bad....I was pretty pleased. :) Onto my hunting license!

Thursday classes were more learning how to present the gospel. We talked a lot about the chronological teaching and it was great to learn and hear about how it worked and how God's Word truly does illuminate our darkened minds! Our Savior is so awesome! The next day was our last day at Wayumi. In class we learned about the Big Picture...what it takes to get a missionary into a tribe and what the process of sharing the Gospel looks like. You have to remember that the goal is not to share the Gospel, but to make DISCIPLES and for them to become their own indigenous church functioning without the missionaries. You want to work yourself out of a job. And so you teach them and teach elders and watch them as they take the Word of God as truth and apply it to their lives. You let HIM teach them. How cool is that! And you translate the Word into their language so they can have it for themselves. OH! And one of these days we did this exercise where we basically "learned" to read a different "language." It's both easy and hard. We learned that tribal people have never looked at something 2-dimensional and made sense of it in their heads before, so when they see a picture, they don't see it as we see it. That's something we TRAIN ourselves to do! Now here in America, that happens at a young age so we don't remember or even realize that we have done it, but tribal people who have never seen paper or a picture can't focus on the image as we can. It seems to me that it's the same concept as learning how to see those pop up 3D images (which I haven't been able to train my brain to see yet)...you literally have to LEARN how to do it! Anyway, so they have to train themselves and prepare themselves to see 2D images and then they learn how to read their own language and it's just the coolest thing ever! So awesome. :)

Okay, well I think I may have overloaded you with all my thoughts, so I'll let you think and show you some 2D images instead. ;)

This is what we do in our free time....make a Laz-e-Girl chair. :) Kayla is pretty comfy. :)

This is the Mumu. Those are cabbage leaves that the food was wrapped in so that it didn't get all dirty. Technically it was supposed to be banana leaves...but what American grocery store stocks up on those? :) (Actually, there are a few in the pictures believe it or not....but only a few...)

Here was my bunk mate and one of my best friends in the world: Jamie. I love this girl. Her and her nose ring. :)

The Village

Yabelewa nanimama anya namale.

Five points for anyone who can correctly guess what that says. I'm guessing you won't be able to...unless you have been to New Tribes Wayumi program or you can speak the Malaumanda tribal language of Papua New Guinea. I learned this sentence today when I went into what they call "the village." Sounds intimidating, huh? Well....it kind of is. Let me set the scene for you.

You walk through two double doors into a dark, smoky room. Lots of high-pitched noises come from all around you, all words that you do not understand. You're in some sort of a grass hut and there's a tribal man in traditional headdress and facepaint sitting on the floor sharpening his machete. Is it safe to sit? If you do, you're sitting close to this tribal man who, mind you, is SHARPENING his machete (cannibal???) and the only place to sit is close to the fire on the floor. Not really typical American greeting. The only phrase you know is "How are you?" and that won't really get you too far learning the language or building a relationship with this unusual fellow sitting by his fire. He looks up, sees you, and mumbles something in a language you don't understand. You sit down and he goes about his business as if you weren't even there. How do you build a relationship? How do you learn his language? How do you learn his culture? What are you supposed to do?

Thankfully we were given the phrase "What is it" so we could correctly elicit a list of words from this man. But today when we went to visit the village, we had to elicit sentences. The tribal man played pretend for a bit and actually understood some of our english for a bit, and so we were able to write down some sentences (mind you, this is all phontetically....so they looked like this "Yah-bey-leh-wah nahn-bah-mah ahnya no-wah-ley"). After we had sentences, we then were given the correct spelling of the sentences (so no longer phonetic) and then we set to the task of breaking apart the sentences, identifying words, phrases, tenses, pronouns, question markers, and other parts of speech. This is something I found out I LOVE! I love being able to break apart language and find patterns. I love figuring it out. It's really enjoyable for me. Challenging, but enjoyable. Phonetics and linguistics is really a cool thing. God constantly amazes me the more I learn about different cultures and different people. The fact that we are all so different and that we all speak such different, complex languages is totally a sign of God to me. How incredible is the God we serve!!