humility that brings freedom

I think about my students a lot when I'm not with them, when we don't have school. Especially my little guys - my first graders. I worry about them - will they eat enough during these three weeks? Will they wash their hands and brush their teeth (I can tell you the answer to that one - NO!)? Will anyone read them stories? Who will tell them they are important, make them feel loved? Will their parents have work these three weeks? What if their only pair of shoes breaks and we're not in school for them to get another pair? Will they remember anything they've learned in my class or in Bible class? What if they get sick - who will give them cough medicine and tylenol and bandaids?

Then I remember: I don't actually take care of these kids. I can't take care of them. God is the only one capable of caring for them. And honestly, I'm pretty sure he does a much better job of it than I ever could. So as I live in Pennsylvania for three weeks, in a warm, dry house with more than enough food and a loving family, I am humbled by the thought that the only work I can do is that which God does through me. I am blessed and thankful that he lets me help him do something he could easily do on his own, and I am humbled as I remember that he could do the very same work without me - I am not irreplaceable, I am not the one saving or even loving these kids. I am simply putting myself in a place where there is a lot of need and asking God to use me as a channel for his love and work. And while I am not there, before I was there, and after I leave, God will take care of the children of Caraballo and Villa Asencion. When I remember this, it frees me to love and serve as well as I can without measuring myself by the world's standards of successful ministry. It frees me from expectations and results-oriented thinking. If I leave no visible mark on the Dominican Republic, it doesn't matter, because it's not my work. I will ask God for opportunities, for humility, for freedom, and most importantly, for him to continue using me, and I will wait in expectation for God to do marvelous things!

cualquier cosa...

I'm living in the apartment alone right now, since Lauren's already back in the States. I thought I would be more, I don't know, anxious, afraid, lonely. But I have realized this week that I am by no means alone here. I live in a community of incredible people who take good care of me. This morning I went to worship team practice with good friends from my church community who picked me up and dropped me off so I would only have to pay for one public transportation ride. Then I paid my rent, and my landlord sent me home with gifts for Lauren's parents and my parents. (Car air fresheners with the scent "Black Ice," but it's the thought that counts, right?!) Then I sat for a while in the fish store that our old neighbors, Aladino and Jhoca, own. I chatted with Jhoca, ate some of the banana bread I had just given her as a Christmas gift but that she insisted I eat, and tickled their son David. Aladino reminded me to turn the gas off in our apartment before I leave for Christmas and made sure he would see me again before I left for Christmas. Then I went out to Caraballo to deliver some sponsorship things for kids. My moto driver drove me all the way up the hill in Villa Asencion, and when I offered to pay him extra he said ok but that if I didn't have any money that that would be ok, too. I spent an extra half hour in the village because so many of the kids from my school were outside playing (the first not-rainy day all week) and shouted my name. A group of kids took me to all the houses I needed to visit. Then I went to the copy shop before paying my electricity bill. On my way to pay my bill, the man who drove me out to Caraballo pulled up and offered me a ride. I said I was going just down the street to pay my bill, but he insisted he would take me - a "bola" - which means free ride. Walking home, I ran into More, our "do-it-all" friend. He said he had stopped by my apartment in the morning to check in on me, but I wasn't there. I asked him to get me some drinking water when he finished running his errand, which he did. He made sure I didn't need anything else and told me he would stop by Monday morning to say goodbye. Then he said some of my favorite words, as Aladino, Jhoca, and my moto driver had:

Ya tu sabes, cualquier cosa, me llama. - You already know, whatever thing (comes up), call me.

These words mean that any time, day or night, if anything goes wrong in the apartment, if I need help with anything, if I get stuck somewhere and need a ride, or if I wake up in the middle of the night and feel like something's not right, all I have to do is pick up my phone and call. Yes, I first trust God to take care of me, but I am incredibly grateful for the people he has placed in my life here. I'm not anxious about living alone for a week because I know that "cualquier cosa," someone (or a few people!) will rush to help me. A beautiful, tangible picture of community.

Tis the Season

I love Christmas, so there might be a lot of Christmas blogs this year... this one is legit, though. Another exciting feature of the first grade Christmas party was the Santa hat I found at the grocery store down the street. It turned into a pretty cute photo shoot with my kids - gotta love their adorable smiles! (Don't forget to click on the picture to make it bigger!)

Technology

To set the stage:  I don't exactly consider myself to be a "techie" person. When I was in Milwaukee in October, more than one high schooler asked me why I still have a flip phone. My laptop is a hand-me-down Dell. (though I dream of the day when I, too, can own a macbook!) My digital camera is 5 1/2 years old - ancient by today's standards. And my ipod. My ipod is 3 1/2 years old, 30 gig, has a giant line across the screen, some scratches - it's nothing fancy, but it lets me take my music with me.

So last week, I threw my first graders a Christmas party. No party is complete without music, so I brought my ipod and my speakers, which I bought at 5Below (aka they're cheap), to school. The following pictures and videos chronicle my kids' discovery of the ipod - a magical device that plays music that you can't hear without two other magical devices known as speakers.

Wander discovers the music comes from the speakers, not the ipod!

My FAVORITE!!  He used the speakers as headphones for a solid 10 minutes.

Monica and Nairoby take a turn - where IS the music coming from?

Monica and Wander share nicely.  Wander looks like an ipod pro.

And now, to top it all off, TWO videos (because I love you so much and am feeling patient with the internet)!

Alicia, then Nairoby, and finally even Wander, who has a speaker in his other ear, take turns discovering that you can't physically "listen" to the ipod.

Wander and Monica sing along to "Dame tus Ojos" by Marcela Gandara. They obviously don't know very many of the words... Wander discovers that pressing a button makes the ipod screen light up. He says to me, "Mira! Es yo que lo pone! ... Yo sabe!" And then returns to singing. He has no idea how many grammatical errors he has just made - none of my kids do.  This is a pretty good example of what I do all day:  a child tells me "Yo sabe!" and I reply, "Yo SE."  Wander should have said, "Mira! Soy yo que lo puse! Yo se!" But he didn't. So as I teach my kids to read, I am teaching them Spanish along the way... now that's a scary thought!

I hope you enjoyed my kids - they crack me up all the time!

O Christmas Tree

Back in August, Lauren and I won a promotion at La Sirena, the local super-Walmart.  A few weeks ago, we decided to use the Sirena points we won to buy ourselves a Christmas tree!  So we are now the proud owners of a 160-branch, 4-foot Christmas tree!  We also bought lights - flashing ones by accident - and ornaments - mostly red and gold, with matching reindeer ornaments with our names on them and an orange ornament that says "War Eagle" for Auburn.  I thought we should also write on it "Summon the Thunder," but Lauren didn't go for that... It's amazing how much a Christmas tree can put you in the Christmas mood. Even though it's still around 80 during the day, it cools off at night.  So sometimes in the morning (or before we go to bed) we'll plug in the tree and sit in our pj's and sweatshirts, drinking coffee, watching the lights flash and listening to Christmas music.

We've been teaching our students the Christmas story over the past few weeks, and it never ceases to amaze me.  The Logos - the supposedly unknowable force that holds the universe together - became human and intimately knowable.  The Word that created the universe chose to bear the pain and debt of my sin in a physical body.  The Incarnation really is a great mystery.  I hope that I show that to my kids this week.  Jesus was born as a baby so that we might believe in him and have the right to be children of God.  Amen.

why I listen to Corelli

Lately I have been listening to a lot of early, Baroque, and early Classical music. Mozart, Corelli, Byrd, Bach... I have avoided Brahms and his Romantic contemporaries. So I thought I would share with you all (whoever that is that reads my blog!) a quote by Madeleine L'Engle from her book Walking on Water:

"Wagner is fine if the world around one is stable. But when the world is, indeed, in chaos, then an affirmation of cosmos becomes essential."

I find that often in this country, in this life, the world is in chaos. So I listen to music that seems to put the pieces back together. I know (pardon my music-nerdness) that at the end of every four bars, Mozart will give me a nice cadence. I can predict where a Bach piece will go next. There are few surprises; there is a lot of stability and familiarity. There's something comfortable and soothing about listening to a Corelli trio concerto after a long day of feeling incompetent in this culture and language. I know the language of the music. So maybe, in a way, this "affirmation of cosmos" music has become a safe place from which I adventure out into the Wagnerian, Brahmsian, and sometimes even Glass-ian world in which I live.

Food for thought.

Teaching First Grade

(Warning: this is a long post. But read it - it's worth it! And there's a picture if you can make it to the end...)

This year I became a first grade teacher. Funny, right? That's what I thought, too, when my boss first told me. I have 8 six-year-olds; they are the students the normal first grade teacher labeled as stupid or badly behaved, so they gave them to me! Also funny, right? These kids are at a kindergarten level, but they are NOT stupid. Most of them learn quickly and LOVE school - they're just the kids that couldn't learn by the Dominican system, which is copying words off the blackboard into your notebook all day. I'm pretty sure my kids got the better end of the deal: in my class, we have circle time, read-alouds, centers, crafts, and LOTS of fun! Thanks to wonderful friends and family members with years of experience and lots of resources, I have an amazing "classroom" in a corner of the cafeteria. We play with magnetic letters, tangrams, lacing cards, puzzles, pocket charts, sorting games, watercolors, playdough, and LOTS of books! We are learning phonemic awareness, letter recognition, handwriting, about the calendar and the weather, and counting.

Has it been easy? Absolutely not. Has it been a source of joy? Absolutely. I'm pretty sure I learn more than my students every day. I got a lot of supplies, books, and advice in Chicago in October, and jumped in with both feet when I got back to the DR. It has been a crazy fall, but I am so grateful for the chance to teach these kids and show them that learning is fun and that they can be successful in school. I love that every morning I get greeted with hugs and "Buenos dias, profe!" I love that my students are friends! Here are some great successes, things my students have learned in the past 6 weeks:

• to recognize their names and their classmates' names
• to read a book by looking at the pictures
• to read, write, and hear the five vowels
• to track words (put a finger on each word as they read it) as they read repetitive sentences
  
• Green Eggs and Ham. They have literally learned it - memorized most of it!
• what rhyming words are (they also learned this one through Green Eggs and Ham!)
  
• to think creatively and logically (still working on this one) with puzzles and tangrams
  
• to work quietly in pairs during center time, and clean up after themselves

I am beyond proud of my students, and I will be the first to say that what they have learned, they have learned by God's grace. I am learning every minute of every day, and I am amazed at how God has provided wisdom, creativity, energy, and patience for me.

Ok, time for "funny, right?" moment #3:

The first day I taught first grade, I had no resources, no schedule/structure, and no idea what I was doing. After class, I sat in the office with my journal, and God said, "Hey Emily, I think you're supposed to teach elementary school." To which I promptly replied, "Hey God, actually, I'm going to be a high school choir teacher, but thanks." End of conversation. The next day, God said, "Emily, seriously, you're going to be an elementary school teacher," and I said, "Um, no. Remember how I was a music major and love choir and am going to be a high school choir teacher? Yep, me too. Still what I'm going to do with my life." After about two weeks of this, I said to myself, "Maybe I really AM supposed to be an elementary school teacher... that's terrifying!" And I'm pretty sure God laughed a little.

So now I find myself in this position of being called to teach elementary school. I have discovered that I have a passion for making sure kids learn the essential skills they are supposed to learn in the first few years of school - basic literacy skills, math skills, behavioral and relational skills. I actually enjoy lesson planning, and I love reading books on teaching literacy - weird, right? And here's the kicker: I know without a doubt that there are kids in the United States who are missing out on these skills. It's not just kids in the 3rd world who don't learn to read. It's kids in North Philly, kids in DC, kids in inner cities across America. And it's kids whose parents can't read them stories before they go to bed, kids who use all their energy to survive, kids who fall asleep hungry. These kids live in the United States, not just the Dominican Republic, and they need teachers who will fight for them, teachers who will teach them to love learning.

Please be in prayer for me as I continue teaching these little guys. Pray for wisdom, creativity, patience, joy, love, and more wisdom! Also pray as I continue trying to figure out what God has for me and what my calling looks like.

So that's my story. If you've made it this far, you're a trooper! I wanted to tell it all at once so that from now on I can just talk about my class without having to give the backstory. To reward you for reading this far, here is the promised photo, plus some bonus! We did a class photo shoot the other day - have you ever tried to control 8 6-year-olds on top of a jungle gym?

In the "lineup" photo, L-R: Nairoby, Alicia, Monica, Wander, Keila, Ambiorix, Alidia, Cristina

Here's my "classroom": in the corner of the cafeteria (hence the plates of food on the table) with a tape square for them to sit on during circle time. That windowsill is my storage place during class where I keep all the stuff the kids aren't allowed to touch. The kids drew those self-portraits when we were learning our names - I think they're pretty cute.