Project Serve: A Labor of Love
SABRINA JONES
Staff Writer
Aching. That’s what it feels like right now. Not the kind of aching you feel when you hit your elbow on the kitchen counter and it stings for a few minutes until the pain gradually dulls. Not the kind of aching you feel in the gut of your stomach when you haven’t eaten in a few hours and you smell something sumptuous cooking in the distance.
No, this is the best and worst kind of aching. It is rooted in an insatiable desire, but not as a result of lacking a certain property. Quite the contrary, it’s an overflowing of fulfillment. A pang that cones from the outpouring of love and the desire to live as purely and divinely guided as possible.
Everyone that’s been on a Project Serve mission trip will tell you that even though it encompasses just one week, it is a week that will forever change you. For some, it is a chance to test their physical strength as they conquer seemingly insurmountable terrain. Others weather their hands in the pursuit of laying physical and emotional foundations so that a family might experience the rapturous moment in which their house becomes a home. And others still, will hold the hands of the orphans and read stories with them, and if nothing else, for one week, give their faces smiles, their eyes the chance to sparkle, and their hearts the chance to receive the love they have become accustomed to being denied.
But neither of these categories fit the nature of my first experience with Project Serve. In my time spent at the San Carlos Apache Reservation with my fellow team members, a somewhat unorthodox genre encapsulates my spring break experience.
For me, Project Serve is a love story.
After a trying 9-hour caravan to San Carlos, Arizona last Saturday, our 13-member team arose on Sunday morning to begin our orientation day before working at the local Boys and Girls Club for the duration of the week. Driving into the heart of the San Carlos Reservation, I was immediately taken aback the abject conditions of the homes along the way and the inescapable remnants of shattered alcohol bottles that littered the highways.
Glass gardens, they resembled, as if some farmer set out to engineer a bottle flower and sprinkled chips of glass on every square inch of soil the in the hopes of a bottle growing in its place. For a reservation that is home to 13,000 Apache, with the general unemployment rate settling in at a staggering 73%, it is an inescapable truth that one of the most debilitating realities of reservation life is the epidemic of alcoholism in San Carlos.
In San Carlos, 75% of the population is living at the National Poverty Level. The average education level of a typical adult on the reservation plateaus at the 9th grade level. All of this stretches across 1.8 million acres of cacti and brush covered soil. All of this pain in the midst of some of God’s most breathtaking topographical creations. One of my team members, junior Lisa Brooks, put it best, “What we are encountering is an invisible minority.”
But no matter how dire the numbers look, the most powerful emotion I experienced this past week was not of pity, or fear, or mistrust. This week, a class of fourteen 7 and 8 year olds taught me something. And it wasn’t long division or grammar lessons, or even Apache. They taught me about love.
I want to be able to love the way that Dana does. Dana is in the 6th grade. Significantly smaller than the other boys in his year, he keeps his dark hair shaved to a militaristic buzz-cut, a contradiction to his delicate, schoolboy reading glasses. I tutored Dana in mathematics one day. He mastered page after page of division of decimals and fractions. At one point, all of the other kids decided they wanted to play kickball baseball at a nearby park, but Dana wanted to stay until he’d finished his homework.
Upon completing his homework packet, Dana and I began our trek to the local junior high’s park. As we made our way, he started telling me about what he wants to be when he grows up. Dana wants to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a policemen, but not before becoming a teacher and pastor first. He wants to work with inner-city youths and adolescents living on reservations.
Dana moved to San Carlos about a year ago because his parents divorced. His mother still lives on the Hopi Reservation, but Dana and his two brothers are not allowed to interact with her. She is a Meth addict. The courts have allowed for a monitored visitation schedule for Dana and his brothers, but the visits are not as often as Dana would like. “I miss being able to hug her,” Dana said, on our walk, “and I hope that she gets better.”
I want to be able to love the way that Alizay does. Alizay lives with her grandmother and doesn’t have very many material possessions. When she speaks, it is barely above the noise of a whisper, but she is always polite. She struggles with grammar and telling time, but she never disrupts class. Her teacher thinks she is one of the trouble makers in class, when really, she just happens to be getting a drink of water or sharpening her pencil while the real mischief-makers are at work.
In my final 10 minutes at St. Charles, Alizay sat rummaging through her desk, while the other kids frantically tried to hold my hand or hug me for the last time. When she was done, she walked slowly up to the crowd that had gathered around me and held up a Rubik’s Cube.
“I want you to have this,” she said.
But how could I take the only real toy she had? Yet, there she stood, no more than 4’5, imploring me with her tiny hands and enormous heart to take a toy she loved more than anything in the world. I looked down at my sweatshirt, one of Kelly green ones that the Pepperdine bookstore had brought in for spring. I had gotten it the day before I left on Project Serve, and she had been tugging on it all day. Green was her favorite color.
Without even thinking, I slipped off my sweatshirt. “Okay,” I said, “I will only take your Rubik’s Cube and never forget about you, if you promise to take my sweatshirt and never forget about me.”
Instantaneously her eyes lit up, like when the first stars appear after sundown. She promptly snatched the sweatshirt from my hands and slipped it over her head. Alizay beamed.
I didn’t take that many photographs this past week in my time at St. Charles. And while all of the children I was blessed to encounter had the most precious of faces, I knew that a single snapshot couldn’t capture the strength of their spirit, the warmth in their smiles, the kindness in their eyes. The most important memento I have taken away is a desire to live and love differently. The kids in my class all wrote me notes begging me not to forget them. What they aren’t quite old enough to realize is that there are some people you meet in life that are impossible to forget. Their tiny faces and excited eyes are forever burned into my memory.
To love and perceive love in the way that a child does is one of the simplest and most difficult things to do. But I hope to learn. And if nothing else, I pray I can keep that feeling of unconditional love with me in remembrance of the tiny lives that touched mine in such a grand way.
I hope I never lose that feeling.
A feeling of aching. Aching, yes, that’s what I would call it.
And I wouldn’t change this feeling for anything in the world.
03-18-2008