Disclaimer: These daily blogs are based on journal entries during my two and a half week trip broken into seven installments. Over the next week, you will learn more and more. The idea behind doing it this way is so you can go through the process of experiencing a portion of my experiences in the same progression of events that I did. The goal is that by the end of the seventh blog, you will have the context to understand why and how I intend to continue serving these people.
Cabbage Patch Kid Unity: Day 6 -- August 9, 2013
It is a fresh day; I got my hands on some shampoo and really showered; in our time in London, I showered with water, but there is something about not using soap that makes a shower feel useless. Amidst the humid blast that hits you as soon as you wake up, the cold showers were a blessing in disguise. After staff devotional and breakfast, we went to the Gypsy village.
I died and came back to life today, so it seemed. After four straight days of 120 degree weather, not to mention the extreme humidity, I about lost it. After returning home to America to do some calculations to determine how hot 47 and 49 degrees Celsius was: it is 116 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit respectively, and at the time of checking (3am Ukrainian time) there was 77% humidity, just to give you a little glimpse.
I died and came back to life today, so it seemed. After four straight days of 120 degree weather, not to mention the extreme humidity, I about lost it. After returning home to America to do some calculations to determine how hot 47 and 49 degrees Celsius was: it is 116 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit respectively, and at the time of checking (3am Ukrainian time) there was 77% humidity, just to give you a little glimpse.
I sat in a cool building during the morning program to cool down my body; unlike my fellow teammates from Fresno living with 4-5 weeks of nearly consecutive days of 100+ degree weather, I live in northern California where the high is around 90 with consistent medium-high winds. Although I lived in Fresno for three and a half years, I am not accustomed to this kind of heat and it got the best of me. After morning program, I slept with a fan right next to my head. After lunch, rather than going back to the lake with a majority of the staff, I went back to bed, but this time with a Ukrainian remedy. My teammate Tatiana, who grew up in Ukraine, noticed that my entire head had “swelled” and was bright red, so she wrapped my head with cabbage. I do not know the science behind it, but it lessened the swelling on a Ukrainian team member’s wasp sting earlier in the week so I thought, “sure, why not.”
Unfortunately, when evening program began I could not participate because I was still so overheated, so I sat in the church building with the team members practicing the skit. Thankfully, though, I was able to lead worship, although by the end of the fourth song, I was fading in and out, and slurring the words to Hosanna, sung in Ukrainian (the link takes you a YouTube video from the Hillsong Church in Kyiv). I quickly exited the building to a chair in the shade where I continued to fade in and out. Next thing I know, my team had wetted my sweat cloth and placed it on my forehead and they were flicking the Gypsy water on my face and arms, and were feeding me their water bottles since I had already finished mine. All I was physically able to do was stare at the sun as it inched closer to sunset; after the sun sets, the temperature quickly drops to about 32 degrees Celsius; I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to a high-humidity, 90-degree Fahrenheit night more than today.
All day, we have been teaching the kids the Biblical message of community working today with an emphasis on the topic of UNITY. What we did not realize until after was that in real time, the unity of our team would have been a great example to show unity to the kids. Had I tried to go through the day on my own, I would have lost control of my body and perhaps even collapsed, but because my team came together to help their teammate in trouble, I was able to persevere through the heat. It is a good example showing how Jesus never wanted us to go through life alone but in community so in our downs, we can be lifted, and in our ups, we can lift up others.
After evening session, rather than go back to our in-field host’s house, the team broke up into mini-teams of three, and we went to individual houses to talk to families. I went with Tatiana and Kolya who is the financial director for the organization. We went to a home of a mother (32) and father (34) who had six children, a seventh that died at one year old with a brain tumor and an eighth that died as a miscarriage. They also had two other children living with them frequently who were orphans in the village—this type of orphan/family situations was very common in the village. Neither parents nor their kids could read or write in any language. This is because Gypsies are abused in Ukrainian schools due to their dark skin. These parents introduced a desire to me, echoed by parents I would meet and talk to later in the week, that they want their children to learn to read and write in Ukrainian, not the Gypsy dialect. Their hope for this is that when their children are older, maybe they will be able to interact with the rest of the country to make a better life.
The second major need these parents introduced to me, echoed by nearly every parent I met, was keeping their children safe. The roads near Gypsy villages are not maintained by the government nearly as much as regular roads, and are therefore incredible unsafe. The father told us a story of when he was a child, his friend and he would throw rocks at cars that drove by. One day though, his friend through a rock the size of his palm at a car and it got caught in the car’s tire and flung back and hit his friend square in the head. The blow to the head was so severe that it knocked him completely off the ground backwards and when he hit the ground, mixed with the blow to the front of the head from the rock and back of the head on the ground, his friend never got up. He died. That day has haunted this man since it happened, and he says he spends his whole day worrying about the safety of his children. When asked if he would be willing to work on the field if he knew his kids were safe, even if it was only for a few hours a day, he said “most definitely” and his wife said she would work the field as well.
The mother is skeptical about going somewhere to work, even though she enjoys working, and is excited about the farm because it is in their backyards and she cannot be scammed. Many years ago, the mother went away for a whole year to the Russian border of Ukraine above Kyiv to bake and cool in a factory at the promise of $2,000/month, which is a big deal. Sadly, though, at the end of the year, they only have her $100 for the entire year and harassed her to leave at risk of being killed all because she was a Gypsy. Moreover, Gypsies are falsely prosecuted against and are victims of the corrupt Ukrainian police’s refusal to protect.
The mother is skeptical about going somewhere to work, even though she enjoys working, and is excited about the farm because it is in their backyards and she cannot be scammed. Many years ago, the mother went away for a whole year to the Russian border of Ukraine above Kyiv to bake and cool in a factory at the promise of $2,000/month, which is a big deal. Sadly, though, at the end of the year, they only have her $100 for the entire year and harassed her to leave at risk of being killed all because she was a Gypsy. Moreover, Gypsies are falsely prosecuted against and are victims of the corrupt Ukrainian police’s refusal to protect.
I could not help but think of the spiritually hazardous world of political activism that God called me out of after hearing this story. The word discrimination is thrown around way too much in American political discourse. The problem though, is Americans have an “I deserve anything I want because that’s the American Dream” attitude, so when something does not go their way they cry discrimination. People in my generation are not willing to work at something for a long period of time. The American Dream is about struggle now to thrive later, but people in my generation’s threshold for how long they will struggle is so low. I remember hearing fellow political science students saying they would accept the first job they got offered that paid over $80,000 and they thought I was crazy for saying I was looking for a job that paid $36,000, hoping for $24,000. In the competitive job market, mixed with the poor economy, you received a basic BA with a less than stellar GPA, held no internships, or leadership positions in college, and after not receiving any job offers prior to graduating you cry discrimination?
There are children in this world denied entrance into school because of the color of their skin. There are people in the world who are given work with promise of a certain pay, and shooed away with a mere fraction of that promise all because of the color of their skin, and because they know the Gypsies cannot go to police either because the police refuse to protect them: that is discrimination. Stop complaining when you do not get your way, because like the principle of The Boy that Cried Wolf, it lessens the credibility of the legitimate cases of discrimination in this country and world when you abuse that battle cry. Sorry for the rant, but this is one of those things I think everybody is thinking but too afraid to say--and I admit, it is easier to say behind the safety of my computer screen. However, whenever somebody cries discrimination, I have a standard of discrimination in mind: this, and the many other, Gypsy just trying to feed their children and family. I have looked discrimination in the face, and it overwhelms me with grief.
There are children in this world denied entrance into school because of the color of their skin. There are people in the world who are given work with promise of a certain pay, and shooed away with a mere fraction of that promise all because of the color of their skin, and because they know the Gypsies cannot go to police either because the police refuse to protect them: that is discrimination. Stop complaining when you do not get your way, because like the principle of The Boy that Cried Wolf, it lessens the credibility of the legitimate cases of discrimination in this country and world when you abuse that battle cry. Sorry for the rant, but this is one of those things I think everybody is thinking but too afraid to say--and I admit, it is easier to say behind the safety of my computer screen. However, whenever somebody cries discrimination, I have a standard of discrimination in mind: this, and the many other, Gypsy just trying to feed their children and family. I have looked discrimination in the face, and it overwhelms me with grief.
After talking with families, we returned to the home of our in-field host where we had dinner: burgers! The team has been careful not to ask what we were eating at risk of hearing something "unfortunate." Well tonight, my fellow American teammate Greg jokingly asked if the burgers were Gypsy cows or non-Gypsy cows and the response was neither. “Those burgers are from a horse that died near here several days ago.” Our jaws dropped, and of course, this was after we had already eaten them. Yes, we ate horse. I know what you are asking your computer screen right now, and to answer that question, it was quite tasty. After dinner, I went straight to bed with another dose of cabbage patch forehead which my fellow American guys I shared a room with thought was hilarious enough to take this picture--it is pretty funny.
Tomorrow's blog post is entitled "A Place the Government Prohibits the Gospel." Come back tomorrow to read about the orphanage we visited that day and our nerve-racking experience with the orphans.
Tomorrow's blog post is entitled "A Place the Government Prohibits the Gospel." Come back tomorrow to read about the orphanage we visited that day and our nerve-racking experience with the orphans.
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