the paint underneath my fingernails

this photo was taken by Alison Jiles and I stole it without asking because she was asleep and I am impatient.

When you make plans, it rains

I was playing soccer with a kid at the work site today; he tumbled backwards nearly hitting his head on the door: be careful, I thought. 
A man stood on top of scaffolding two stories high, painting the roof of the school they are building. The scaffolding is raggedy, unstable; it creaks, the wind blows: be careful, we say. It’s dangerous, we say. It almost fell on someone today. 
The two girls that live in the house connected to us were running around the room recklessly, near misses showering every movement: be careful, we thought. 
“If anyone really wanted to, they could get in here no matter how much barbed wire we put up.” This place isn’t safe, we think: we must be careful here. 
We see the places daily, where we’re told we shouldn’t go and we encounter moments every day where we have to decide whether or not something is safe. And we think to ourselves, be aware: be careful.
Before we came here we had group meetings, there every other bit of advice was don’t go anywhere alone, along with don’t go anywhere at night, and yet here I am on the verge of alone about to taste its worries or cheers, and I think to myself: be careful. 

-----

We all wear shoes in the house, but our professor goes barefoot. I don’t know why that struck me, but I think maybe we’re worried about keeping ourselves clean and he knows there are far more important things to keep ourselves clean. 

-----

We know our feet are dirty with our sandals on, but we feel safer with our shoes on, so we wear shoes. Safety is key. I wonder if being afraid is making us miss the point here, if constantly clinging to safe defers the immersive intentions of this course. And then I wonder if being afraid and aware is part of living life here. My teacher at school talks about how the gangs respect Americans, but for Salvadorians it is significantly less safe. And I wonder what it’s like to really live in fear, not the don’t go anywhere alone fear but the you don’t have a plane ticket to leave in ten days this is your real life fear. The fear that lets the gangs stay in control. 

I think we take the idea of and word ‘gang’ lightly. I think it gets joked about a lot, I think we make less of it than it is. I don’t say that to stay afraid, I say that we have to respect the danger enough to admit it’s evident. 
And it is. 
I dislike being afraid, I dislike the idea of it. My trouble is admitting that I am afraid, legitimately worried about something that is plausible, instead of blaming it on a bad day. Or a bad moment. We aren’t always going to be safe all of the time; we are never safe all of the time. That is an okay thing to admit. It is an unsafe thing to admit, and we are afraid of that. 

-----

In my head I never thought of this being a separate entity than the Honduras trip. I never imagined the investing that inevitably comes merely from existing alongside living, breathing human beings. I didn’t prepare myself to care; I don’t know why I thought I wouldn’t, I always do. 
We’ve been working on construction at a school here; we’ve been working with extraordinary people and in turn have been working on becoming extraordinary people. Sometimes we missed growth, flourishing right under our noses as we painted, in the midst of tension that comes from living with people you already know. We didn’t see that when we should’ve always, but it’s evident now, that people we didn’t think would be have been affected by being here. That makes the tension worth it, I think. 
They were all saying goodbye today to the women and men we’ve been working with, and I was thinking how sad it would be to have to say goodbye. Thinking how lucky I was to get to know these people longer, better, deeper.

-----

Early on in the trip, like the second day, I sat with Bryan, our missionary contact here, talking about life here I guess, I don’t really remember what exactly we were talking about but what I do remember is that his honesty was refreshing. Somewhere in the un-recalled refreshingness lived the phrase: if you make plans, it rains. I.e. your plans will inevitably be screwed up so live your life accordingly. 
Bryan is the husband of Ellen. Every time I talk to her I wish I could talk to her more. She used to walk to work every day, until the gang activity got so bad she had to start driving. We asked her if she felt like she was living half her life, she told us she didn’t feel constrained. 
They’re adopting a ball of light and laughter and wonder, the process is long and irking. Ellen said that they know inevitably someday she will be used against them. In the, ‘If you don’t do this, we’ll do this to your daughter’, way. 
We asked how they found her, but they didn’t find her at all. She found them, and she stuck. 
It poured. 

-----

My plans for these moments here pretty much translates exactly into nothing. I had no plans, no intentions, no expectations. The extent that I thought about this trip was to prepare for language school. This trip was to be the stepping stone to the real thing, the real trip, the real experience. The one that’s four months and means something and looks like the dream that is the rest of my life. Yeah, that one. That is the one that is meant to change me, and this trip has already molded me in ways I didn’t intend at all. It’s pouring actually, I’ve forgotten what plans I made. 
And it’s the paint underneath my fingernails that makes it that way. The construction workers and school teachers and the little girl that picked me a flower to put in my hair. These things are never as simple as we intend them to be. 

-----

I think I almost thought, 'be careful', there, at the end of that sentence. 

This trip will change you for life, we think. We must be careful.

-----

It will pour. 

It is pouring.

-----

The very first night Alvin set us down for our debrief, he said: there are a lot of things that will change us on this trip, things that will make us grow but our goal here is to serve. 

I think I'd forgotten to think of missions trips like that, because I know that we will change inevitably. Because honestly we know the construction workers could get the job done a thousand times faster if they didn't have to teach everything to us, especially if they didn't have to translate it all along the way. Trips like these make us look inward while we're here, and skeptically outward when we're home. 

Of course the goal has always been to serve, always, but his words reminded me to look outward. This trip isn't about changing me. It is changing me, but that is not it's purpose. The purpose is to serve. The purpose is to serve. 

-----

Secondly, he told us to serve as if we are not going home. 

It is the night before they leave: there are mixed emotions, there always will be, people are here for different reasons they will have different feelings about goodbye. And amidst the 'really miss home and my dog and food I prefer's' are people already making plans to come back. 

 I don't know if we know how to exist in each moment, in each individual second, without thinking of the next one coming. I don't know what it looks like to invest like that, but I do think it means to stop checking off the days or comparing here to there. 

We are not going home. We are here, forever, in this moment. This one, right here. There is no next week or next month or next semester. 

I wonder who we would love and where we would go and what we would say if we really believed that. 

We are constantly thinking about being careful in order to protect ourselves from the next danger or next moment where we have to choose where we place our feet, but this moment too belongs to us. What happens if we accept each moment as it comes instead of thinking about going home, about the next day and the next week? 

I was thinking a few days ago, the first time I rode in a taxi alone, how do I know that the driver is going to take me where I asked him to go? I do not know the routes or the signs or the landmarks. And I was thinking that I don't, I don't know that he will take me safely to the house. And you can't. There's no way to know that, anywhere really, not just here. Then I thought how much of a paradox it was to always be put in positions where you have to trust people that you are being told to fear. We cannot always be so careful that we keep the good ones at arms length. The ones who we paint for hours a day for, the ones we build alongside— the ones we will forever think of whenever we have paint under our nails.