Hey y'all.
The Rundown.
On the 21st of June, at 4 in the morning, me and 11 of my "eh, sorta close" friends went off in a fleet of two vans to Nashville, Tennessee for a week of missions in the city. We slept over at the church (not really, we just played Uno and froze to death because we cranked that thermostat down to a cozy 65). We did manage to set both the regular alarm and fire alarm off, at the same time. For a nice ten minutes straight.
There I am in my Ferris Bueller shirt. The reason I slightly resemble Princess Leia is because my hair was in a braided ponytail. PS, my absolute favorite 20-something-year-old ever is the short guy on the left bottom, Joe.
Life is a Highway (goodness I hate that song)
The rest of the stay at the church wasn't all that funny, until the sun came up and we started complaining for McDonald's poopfest food and we had to all go to the bathroom because we drank 3 Gatorades a pop. We stopped at some mountain-town in Virginia (I have no idea where, I was uncomfortably asleep most of the ride there) to eat some breakfast. Now, normally I hate on McDonald's with all the flaming passion in my heart, but I was hungry and Lord knows I am not eating protein Special K bars.
Walking into this McDonald's, you immediately figured out two things: it had to be the only fast food joint in a ten mile radius, and that it had more flies than all the employee's teeth combined. The toilets were overflowing and you had to hack your way through a swarm of bugs to get to a stall. Not to mention my sandwich tasted and smelled like one of the stalls. Classy.
Around hour 11 of the 13 hour drive, we reached Tennessee. I've never driven that far into the Southwest, so I made this.
You know you're in/on your way to Tennessee when...
- you can't drive 5 miles without seeing an ad for McDonalds, Cracker Barrel, or a fireworks superstore
- "Jesus is Lord" and "We buy guns" are appropriately placed side-by-side on a warehouse.
- every city on a roadsign has been referenced in a country song.
- there's more Confederate flags than American ones.
- caverns...so many caverns.
- people actually still smoke pipes
- billboards are always borderline politically incorrect.
Monday: the first day.
After a night of extremely painful and pointless orientations and housing Vietnamese food, we woke up the next morning drowsy and hot. We were staying in a church in East Nashville in dorm-style rooms. It was hot. The air conditioning really didn't do its job well and we only had one fan in our room, which was hogged by the room behind us. I volunteered to sleep on the top of a bunkbed, where I slept without covers and with my shirt pulled up so I didn't sweat that much overnight and was disgusting by morning. That night I also made the horrific yet moderately hilarious discovery that I had forgotten my towel, so I used the T-shirt I wore on the way down to dry myself off. It honestly wasn't that bad. But anyways, Monday Funday.
We started out at a place called Project C.U.R.E. in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Project C.U.R.E. takes donated medical supplies from hospitals all over the country to send to developing third-world countries. The Nashville branch was the second biggest, right behind the branch in Denver. We had a choice to work inside or in the warehouse, where there was no air conditioning and lots of physical labor. I was in a really good mood and just ready for a week of serving, and I was the only one of 6 girls who chose to work in the warehouse. It honestly wasn't bad at all. We moved shelves, placed boxes of supplies all around the warehouses, and rearranged them for shipping so they could fit more boxes in an area. If you'd like to find out more about Project C.U.R.E., visit http://www.projectcure.org/ to see what they're all about!
After that, we ate lunch at a park called Centennial Park in the city, where we sat on the edge of an extremely large and beautiful pond and ate our sack lunches. I didn't take my camera or phone with me on this trip, and the only one who did take pictures hasn't loaded them onto facebook for me to mooch off of yet, so Google Images is my best friend.
Holy instagram photo, batman.
After that, we did something called a Prayer Tour. A Prayer Tour is a tour, but you're in a state of prayer the whole time. It was around 2 and a half hours to finish, and it wasn't really about how amazing Nashville was or where Johnny Cash spit on the ground or Elvis took a picture. It was more for looking at where the struggles of the city were, and bringing them to light as we prayed in various locations all over the city. We prayed in locations such as Jefferson Street, the state capitol, and the Rose Park Magnet School overlooking the city.
We had a quick and early dinner following the Prayer Tour at a Thai restaurant where they served cafeteria style dishes. I completely forget what I had, but I only remember the women who work there were so hospitable and kind. A girl in my group had a stomachache, and they gave us a Sprite free of charge, and then they let us play on this huge xylophone thing they had sitting in the corner. It was cute.
Our last activity for the day was with an organization called People Loving Nashville. PLN is a bunch of volunteers, most of them younger and very stylish, that make dinner and receive donated clothing to give to the homeless/needy on every Monday night (at least that's when I think it is). Some of our group worked in the kitchen and probably around 4 or 5 of us went to a storage unit a couple blocks away to pick up some clothing. Since I worked at a thrift shop, I was almost obligated to sort clothing at the storage locker. Oh well.
We took all the food and clothing to a place in downtown Nashville that I really don't know the name of but it was beautiful. I was a person who handed out the food to the visitors, so I got to interact a lot. Some of them were very thankful, some didn't even want to look at me. I didn't really mind. After we served the people, we had to walk around and talk to some of the visitors. After talking to a guy who was pretty boring and didn't really want to talk to me, Joe and a few other people met up and we walked over to two men that had a guitar and were playing. As we approached, we realized the song the one was singing was about weed. It was kind of like making eye contact through a bathroom stall crack. Insanely uncomfortable and you try to not let it get to you. Both men, referred to as Guitar Mike and Guitar John, were very friendly. They played Wagon Wheel where I sang along, then they each played a song they wrote. Including the 5-verse long weed song. So if you're in Nashville and hear the weed song, say hello to Guitar John for me. It ended up that we left early because two girls got in a fistfight. We were told that if it happened we were to leave, and it was right behind us. One of the men working for PLN rounded us up just before they started flailing limbs. Working with them was a fantastic experience, and they are a great organization with even better motives. If you'd like to check out PLN for yourself or even volunteer a night, check out http://peoplelovingnashville.com/. They are incredibly friendly and willing to serve through God.
End of night 1.
Tuesday: dude where's the water?
Tuesday was a brand new day. On this trip, we only repeated an activity two days, which luckily was my favorite thing to do while on the trip. Before we went to my favorite site of all, we did an activity called "Beat the Heat". It was also referred to as "Operation Hydration" but at that point I really didn't care. The point of this was to hand out bottles of water to people who looked like they needed it. It was surprisingly hard, but if someone you didn't know handed you a bottle of water, would you drink it either? That's what I thought.
My favorite site however was called Project N.I.C.E. Don't ask me what it stands for because I have no idea. But the motive for this is to help struggling refugees in countries all over the world adapt, live, and work in a new country. In this location, we were working with children that were either refugees straight from Egypt or their parents were refugees and they were born in America. What we were doing was helping for 2 lessons of an English class taught by a local 2nd grade teacher from Nashville with the kids, with them speaking Arabic as their native language. Most of them were already in school, but since it was summer vacation and they only spoke Arabic around the house, their English speaking ability would plunder through the months of vacation and being out of school.
As we pulled into the development of apartment complexes, we were looked at. A lot of people were hanging out on their porches or kids were out playing and just stopped to watch our fleet of 2 drive over the dozen speed bumps. The building we were going to was at the other side of the development, so we drove a while through it. Halfway through, a kid started running alongside the van's pace from the sidewalk. Okay, maybe he does that a lot. He'll just get tired and stop.
He didn't.
Before we knew it, there was a kid on a tricycle following behind with even more kids running behind him. When we parked our vans, ours was swarmed. There were probably at least a half dozen Egyptian kids telling us to put our windows down, open our doors, climbing on the back and front, looking/banging/clawing at our windows....ever see the State Farm Rate Sucker commercial? It was exactly like that.
So we got out of the vans and immediately the kids wanted to play outside with us. One kid got really good at using us for his own personal jungle gym, just running and jumping on our backs. I couldn't really tell if he was really badly behaved or just super excited. We then had a lesson where we sat down and helped the kids come up with answers as they learned about the beach. The kids spoke decent English, enough that you could understand them but they may not necessarily understand you. The lesson of the day was learning about the beach, where they'd read clues and say what each item they'd use at the beach was, and using the 5 senses at the beach. It was surprising that some of the kids didn't even know what the beach or ocean was, and some of them have never seen/felt sand before. Those kids had a hard time grasping the subject of what to bring to the beach, especially when it came to things like sandcastles, goggles, and sunscreen. In my reading group, I had 3 kids: a boy and 2 girls. The two girls were wonderfully behaved and spoke fantastic English, and had very little trouble writing and comprehending their questions. The boy however needed me to spell basically everything he put on his paper. He was a fantastic artist, though.
Sitting there and have these kids just rattle off to each other in Arabic while I sat there not having a clue what was going on was a newsflash to what Italy may be like. Let's hope it's not that much of a language barrier for me to comprehend simple things!
That night we ate at a Turkish restaurant called Istanbul, where we ate rice with lamb and chicken with vegetables and some form of cucumber sauce. They served it and it was pretty good, but the definite highlight was their homemade hot sauce that they served with it. I'm not one for spicy foods, but that stuff I housed with everything on my plate.
In my Dollar General journal my youth leader prepared us all with at the beginning of the week, I wrote a few rants about how there's a difference between being a Christian who spreads the Word and is easy to trust/follow/love and being a "Bible Thumper", who shoves it down people's throats and doesn't communicate with you if you don't go to church. I've encountered quite a few Thumpers through the years, and let me tell you from a standpoint with both believing friends and non-believing, that there is nothing that steers a person away more from God than a Bible Thumper. In the wise words of Cody, don't be that guy.
End of day 2.
Wednesday: woah, what?
We started out this hump day in an air-conditioned room. Big deal? YES.
Within this air-conditioned beauty was a seminar from Nashville Cares on HIV/AIDS. We sat for an hour and listened to a woman named Eva talk about the disease(s) while we ate the snacks and sodas they provided for us. It was just like the health class I had a month and a half ago but with adults that giggled more than the freshmeat I was stuck with back in May. This seminar didn't tie in until Thursday.
After we ate all their snacks, we went to a park where we wrote letters to people we have met over the past 3 days. I chose to write mine to a man named Tony that was at Project NICE as a teaching assistant (I'm actually not quite sure what his real title was, that's just a shot in the dark). I made sure to tell him all about how amazing it is to give the gift of language to children that need it, and how they will remember him and the language all their life. I was so thankful to be a part of that organization for 2 days (Tuesday and Thursday). We also played on a giant baby swing and walked for gourmet popsicles up the block.
After that, we went on an excursion called Urban Exposure, where we were supposed to find out more about the city and the people inside it from the firsthand sources: the people. We were supposed to do things like give a lunch to a person and then eat with them, ask random people questions about homelessness, talk to a person selling the Contributor (the newspaper), etc. We tried...sorta. After 45 minutes of unsuccessful attempts we gave up and went to do tourist stuff. We shopped and tried on boots, got ice cream, and just wandered around Broadway.
We did that for around 4 hours, and when we got back, a girl in my group had become extremely dehydrated and was unresponsive on the floor as we walked into the market where we started. Not going into that much detail (there isn't that much) but she was eventually taken to the hospital and released later that night, and woke up fine (but weak) the next morning. Thank God!
With her in the hospital for the remainder of the evening, we were stuck with 1 leader out of 3. Jen, who is kinda like that one relative that lets you do anything that you really want, took us on a late night adventure to the Wal Mart across the street to get ice cream and liters of soda. Funzies!
End of day 3.
Thursday: sweat, work, sweat, love.
Thursday began with the tie-in from the awkward AIDS seminar from Wednesday. We were going to a Nashville Cares participant's house and did some yardwork for her, like weeding, trimming hedges, cutting grass, and weedwacking. We were done in a little over an hour because it was a small lawn and we weren't the first people to help her out in her yard, so we got to play with her cute little doggies and then go eat lunch back at the housing site.
After finishing our mediocre bagged lunches we hopped in our van and went for our second run with Project NICE. I was pumped because of all the fun I had there on Tuesday, and I was really hoping the little Rate Suckers would be back for more van-attacking fun. Not many showed up at first, but there were so many new faces at class that day, including mah girl, Youstina. Youstina immediately became my favorite person to work with and I'm pretty sure I became hers. Throughout the whole lesson, I was the only person over the age of 10 on the carpet because she wanted me to hold her hand the entire time. The teacher was reading a book on the water cycle, and every time a vocabulary word was mentioned, there was hand motions. We'd do hand motions, and then she'd just grab my hand again. I'm not around little kids like, at all. This was absolutely amazing for me to do and kinda made me tear up a little to know this kid actually liked me.
We went through the same written sheet, snack, and craft routine as Tuesday and I didn't have to spell every word because the boy I originally had attached himself to a boy in my group. It's alright though, I only cried for 20 minutes because he hated me. (;
After that, I discovered my long-lost love: Indian food.
Even though curry looks like vomit, it tastes like mush of the heavens. Housed that stuff, yet again. See a pattern?
That night, my youth leader and a few of us devised a plan to go exploring through no-man's land of the church. This church was MASSIVE. It was also a secret mission to retrieve a freaking fan from another room, because the girl's room was sweltering. So three girls and four boys from my group all come up with a plan, with Joe being our ringleader. The absolutely genius youth leader I'm proud to be a student/friend of made a plan where we all left our rooms in 1 minute intervals to leave and meet up outside the hallway where it wasn't completely obvious we were doing something we weren't supposed to be doing. So we sneaked out and pretty much almost got caught the full 30 minutes we were out there. Who cares! We didn't get caught and
End of day 4.
Friday: it's the final countdown duh nuh nuh nuh.
The last day, we started out at an Adult Day Care, where we sat around and talked to all the people there. I sat down at a table next to one of the volunteers at the site, and said a lady who was in the bathroom was coming to sit next to me who was named Mary. When Mary came out of the bathroom and I saw her, she was definitely the retired version of me. She came out in a bright tye-dye tee shirt and her frizzy hair up in a pony tail with the underneath part still down. I introduced myself, and she introduced her self as "Trouble".
My day with Trouble.
Trouble has a bug collection and loves nature, so we went on a long walk with her and the most boring man in the world who worked at this daycare. While he went on about oak trees and crabapples, Trouble would grab sticks and hit us in the butt with them and talk to me about life. On the road, while we were paying no attention to his 12th spiel about some sort of bush, Trouble pointed to the ground and pointed out a penny. I just agreed and walked over it, but she forced me to pick it up. So I picked it up, and she looked at me and said "it doesn't matter if it's heads or tails, you're still a penny richer."
At this point, I knew my grandmother (who died in January) was within
At the end of the day, after our walk was over, we danced to some motown, and we did some arts and crafts, I had to say goodbye to the woman who I saw my grandmother in. I started to tear up as I told her I had to leave. Just like my grandmother, she picked up on the fact I was on the verge of crying. She asked me why I was crying, and I just said I wasn't so I didn't have to say anything. She told me, "well, you know if you ever start crying, they can always be happy tears".
My penny from a day with Trouble.
After that emotional few hours, we went to an organization for homeless, wounded, disabled, or poor veterans called Operation Stand Down. I sorted clothing for their thrift shop they had that employed veterans and sold good stuff very cheap. I got a good job, because everyone else was doing janitorial work. We then got a tour from the epitome of a southern lady named Tami, who was amazing. At the end of the day, we were given hats and patches with brochures for Operation Stand Down. http://www.osdnashville.org/
Friday night was our final night, and we had it off. We had dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown outside, with really loud, obnoxious live music. Everyone was beginning to annoy each other, so at the end, 3 of us went shopping for dumb little trinkets for gifts while everyone else walked around. I had a great time and came home with a T-shirt for my mom, a snowglobe, and three post cards. I was very pleased.
We left the housing site at 4 in the morning on Saturday and I slept a of of the way home. Everyone was tired and slightly grumpy because all we wanted to do was go home and with all the traffic on the Washington-Baltimore Beltway and the numerous bathroom stops because people drank way too much for small bladders, it was around a 14-15 hour drive home.
BUT I GOT A HOST FAMILY.
To be continued.
Ciao, il miei dolci amici.
