Mission

so today I went up "in the hills" to a poorer area of santa isabel's neighborhood with some of the members of the church. First we shared a brief bible reflection, and then we gave out clothes, toys and juice to a group of kids and families who live there. Since it's a relatively "middle class" church, I'm glad that some members of Santa Isabel are starting to get a sense of mission. I am also excited, because I see this as a place where my presence and experience could definitely help them, since the whole community service idea is relatively new to them.

The whole thing was a kind of controlled chaos. I read the bible passage in Spanish using a megaphone, which was made more difficult by the fact that I was reading it from someone else's bible, and that bible happened to be basically the equivalent of the King James Version in Spanish. Meaning that it had a lot of antiquated, elevated language, specifically with the vosotros verb form everywhere, which I've NEVER had to read/use out loud, outside of verb drills in Spanish classes in the US. Then another church member used the megaphone to preach a short sermon about the passge that I read. And finally, we lined them up to get their clothes/toys. For awhile, they actually stayed in line, which really impressed me. The main problem was most of the toys were actually bundled in little bags, and at first we started handing out one bag of toys per person. We ended up with enough toys for about 1/3 of the kids who were there... which wasn't good. Then we started giving out the second hand clothes. This was made complicated by the fact that all of the clothes, regardless of size or gender, was all mixed together. One of the church members was handing out specific clothes to specific people based on size/gender while the other just handed out the clothes to whoever was there, and told them if it didn't fit to give it to a parent or sibling. Finally, we gave out juice. This was probably the most successful part, because we did end up with enough juice and cups for everyone. Again, the line worked for about a minute or two before it just became a free-for-all, but in the end everyone got served.

I didn't know much about what wer were doing until we actually went. I just knew we were going to give out clothes, toys and juice to kids up the hill. As we walked back down, we all talked about ways it could go better next time. I told them that my experience in the US shows that these type of things require a lot of previous effort/organization. Next time, I said, we should go through and sort the clothes by male/female and child/adult/baby. We should also count to see how many articles of clothing and toys we have beforehand. One of the church members also suggested that we create a list of all of the names of the kids who come next time, so we can have an idea of who/how many kids we're dealing with.

All in all, I'm very excited to continue doing this in the future.