"You just gotta come!" - Living the Legacy

For the past four or five years in a row, the Conference Grounds has held a dedication service after the evening church service during Memorial Day weekend. This year, instead of dedicating cottages (like the last several years), we dedicated the new deck and swings that overlook the beach. I thought at first that it would be exactly like the other ones: we all troop up to the site, the Director says a few things and thanks the donors, someone from the Board of Directors says a few things, we all sing a song, and then there are cookies and ice cream available.

This year was very different. First of all, we stayed in the Auditorium because it had been storming all day. Second, (and this is what I didn't realize), we were not only dedicating a structure, but we were dedicating the memories of people that have come to be very important to the life of the Conference Grounds. These people are...
Ade and Betty DeKorte: This couple was a pair of volunteers from many many years ago. Only a few of the current staff members actually worked with them, but they have still been involved in the legacy of the Grounds. Ade passed away last year (I think) and his memorial fund donated a lot of the money for the deck reconstruction.
George Dykstra: I don't know very much about George. From the way people talked about him, he camped at the Grounds and was very involved here for a long time, as are his children and grandchildren. He passed away while walking along the Lake Michigan shore. It was a very weird day. I was working in the store and I remember all of a sudden several staff members running in, saying that George had just been discovered on the beach, not breathing. They had to pull out the registry to figure out which sites his wife and family were on, and it was just a flurry of activity all day. Very emotional and confused.
Carol Kuipers: I worked with this woman for two summers and she was amazing. She and her husband Don were volunteers for the month of August and they always did more than they were asked. The one thing that stands out to me is that they always took the kitchen trash out for us. Normally, that's a job that the store girls do before mopping the kitchen. But Don and Carol always did it for us when they were here. I don't think I'll ever forget that.
Eileen Wiersma: "You just gotta come!" That's what I'll always remember about her. She devoted her entire self to promoting the Conference Grounds. But instead of waxing on and on about everything we have to offer, she'd pick one thing, say it, and then follow it up with "You just gotta come and see it. I guarantee you'll love it as much as I do." She passed away last summer after a long and storied fight with cancer. When the doctors told her that the treatment was no longer working and that she had 4 or 5 days left, a week at the most, she decided that she wanted to spend those days at the Conference Grounds. Seventeen days later, on the way to Hospice for permanent residence, Eileen passed away. I truly believe that the Conference Grounds kept her alive. It's not just a campground. It's a life-giving (and sustaining) community.

This year's theme song, "O Church Arise," seems to perfectly fit not only this year's theme, but the themes of the last several years. Verse 4 is my favorite and the most stirring to me.

So Spirit come, put strength in every stride
Give grace for every hurdle
That we may run with faith to win the prize
Of a servant good and faithful
As saints of old still line the way
Retelling triumphs of His grace
We hear their calls and hunger for the day
When with Christ we stand in glory

When I hear "As saints of old still line the way / Retelling triumphs of His grace," Eileen's face (as well as the faces of so many others) come to my mind. They ran with faith, and now they're cheering us on as we continue to run.

And one day, we'll be standing beside them, encouraging the saints that come behind us.

A Little Boy's Explanation of God

Written by an 8-year-old named Danny Dutton, who lives in Chula Vista, CA, for his third grade homework assignment, to 'explain God.'

'One of God's main jobs is making people. He makes them to replace the ones that die, so there will be enough people to take care of things on earth. He doesn't make grownups, just babies. I think because they are smaller and easier to make. That way he doesn't have to take up his valuable time teaching them to talk and walk. He can just leave that to mothers and fathers.' 'God's second most important job is listening to prayers. An awful lot of this goes on, since some people, like preachers and things, pray at times beside bedtime. God doesn't have time to listen to the radio or TV because of this. Because he hears everything, there must be a terrible lot of noise in his ears, unless he has thought of a way to turn it off.' 'God sees everything and hears everything and is everywhere which keeps Him pretty busy. So you shouldn't go wasting his time by going over your mom and dad's head asking for something they said you couldn't have.' 'Atheists are people who don't believe in God. I don't think there are any in Chula Vista . At least there aren't any who come to our church.' 'Jesus is God's Son. He used to do all the hard work, like walking on water and performing miracles and trying to teach the people who didn't want to learn about God. They finally got tired of him preaching to them and they crucified him. But he was good and kind, like his father, and he told his father that they didn't know what they were doing and to forgive them and God said O.K.' 'His dad (God) appreciated everything that he had done and all his hard work on earth so he told him he didn't have to go out on the road anymore. He could stay in heaven. So he did. And now he helps his dad out by listening to prayers and seeing things which are important for God to take care of and which ones he can take care of himself without having to bother God. Like a secretary, only more important.' 'You can pray anytime you want and they are sure to help you because they got it worked out so one of them is on duty all the time.' 'You should always go to church on Sunday because it makes God happy, and if there's anybody you want to make happy, it's God! Don't skip church to do something you think will be more fun like going to the beach. This is wrong. And besides the sun doesn't come out at the beach until noon anyway.' 'If you don't believe in God, besides being an atheist, you will be very lonely, because your parents can't go everywhere with you, like to camp, but God can. It is good to know He's around you when you're scared, in the dark or when you can't swim and you get thrown into real deep water by big kids.' 'But...you shouldn't just always think of what God can do for you. I figure God put me here and he can take me back anytime he pleases. And...that's why I believe in God.'

Come Ye Apart....and Don't Waste Your Summer

Guys, it's here. I am updating from my beloved Conference Grounds!! What's more, I'm updating from the comfortable green sectional in the girls' cottage, Amistad. With Internet. Oh yes.
So what have I been up to...
Well, I got out here yesterday around 9ish, JUST in time to see the sunset, which was amazing. My roommate Jessica and I wandered around for a bit, said hi to some people, and then joined my brother, Kevin, and Ben for a bomb-sized fire (just kidding, maintenance men). Then Jessica and I had a sleepover! Sort of. Haha. Her mom was already asleep, so we just went to bed.
Today, I worked for 11 hours. No lie. It was crazy, but that's okay. I got to see a bunch of the Memorial Day Weekend regulars, serve up some dinner, pie, and ice cream, and do the general store thang.

It's hard for me to put into words just how excited I am to be back. Whenever things were bad in Spain, I would think of being back at the Grounds. It's one of the best communities I've ever been a part of. The staff includes all ages, from high schoolers all the way up to the retired fellows. The retired people are some of my favorite people in the whole world. They share so much wisdom with us and some of them (like Jessica's grandpa) get into more mischief than my 3rd and 4th graders.

But mostly, it's great just to be back where I know I belong. I can always be sure that I'm making a difference here, and I love knowing that. This place will always occupy a big place in my heart.

It's good to be back. :)

La Ciega: An Update on the LASIK Option

Some of you (most especially the Spain crew) know that around April, my dad emailed me to say that he sent my file over to a ophthalmic surgeon to decide if LASIK eye surgery could be an option to correct my inSANEly terrible vision. The file checked out, and we scheduled an appointment for the week of my return in order to go in for some testing and scans and continue with this little process.

Well, that appointment was today. I had to get up way too early, had my glaze-y-eyed appearance commented on by a very chattery woman in the waiting room, and got checked on by an assistant. We did some of the routine stuff, like determining the shape of my eyes and measuring the thickness of my corneas (in order for LASIK to be successful, the corneas have to have a certain degree of thickness of shape. The worse your vision is, the thinner your corneas are). The assistant took those measurements out to the ophthalmologist to have him look over some things.

Let me take this moment to provide some background. I have been wearing glasses since I was 5 years old. I had a brief flirtation with contacts (5th-9th grade) before we found out that they made my eyes wayyyy too dry for daily wear. Around the time that I went back to glasses, the ophthalmologist told me that LASIK would be an excellent option once I turned 18 and my vision stopped deteriorating so dramatically. So basically, I've had this laser surgery thing in the back of my head for years. I had even heard some of the doctors saying that this surgery would be necessary, not just cosmetic, and that I needed this in order to start over (vision-wise). It had kind of become an inevitability in my mind.

The assistant came back in and said, "Andrea, I have bad news. You don't qualify for LASIK because your corneas are too thin. If it makes you feel better, Dr. Bennett wants you to know that you missed it by a long shot." Yeah, that makes me feel a LITTLE bit better; it's not like I missed it by a few months or a year. It sounds like I missed it by several years. And several years ago, I wouldn't have been able to have the surgery anyway because my prescription was changing too rapidly. I guess that's that.

The good news is that my eyes are completely healthy, besides the fact that they don't work. There is no degeneration, no disease, nothing like that. They just don't work. Kind of like a spinal cord injury: the legs still have muscles and bones and are totally healthy, but they don't work.

The other good news is that there is a piece of technology that Europe has been using for years that is still waiting on FDA approval (not surprising, since Europe sells whole legs of ham in the supermarket and boxed milk that has a shelf-life of 6 months). It sounds like a surgical implant, and it would correct my vision regardless of how bad it gets.

So I guess there's a little bit of hope there. I was really really really banking on the LASIK option. I was looking forward to being able to swim and see where I'm going, being able to shave my legs in the shower and actually see them, and being able to walk in the rain without having to constantly wipe off my glasses.

I guess we wait.

Things I Missed and/or Took For Granted About Home

Of course, my family and friends go at the top of this list. But here are the non-human things I missed about the U.S...
1. Driving and singing in my car.
2. Cheez-its. Mom sent me two boxes this past semester, but let's face it. They were gone in like, 2 seconds.
3. Cold water and drinks with ice.
4. Not being stared at in the street. Or at least if I was being stared at, it was because I was doing something silly, in which case the staring is legit. But in Spain, we all got the "up and down and halfway up again" stares. EVERYWHERE WE WENT.
5. Stores like Meijer, where you can find almost anything you need in one place.
6. My cell phone and unlimited calls+texts for $16/month, not 35c/minute/text.
7. Meat and pasta.
8. Leaving the house with wet hair and not being questioned. Seriously. The mamás in Spain would not let us go outside with wet hair because they thought we would get pneumonia. One of them went to so far as to put a bowl over her student's head so that she could watch something outside after having recently showered.
9. Memory Foam.
10. My purse. I carried all my stuff around in a shoulder bag while in Spain, but it wasn't nearly as cool or flashy as my purse. Also missed my awesome pink wallet.
11. The Conference Grounds - the people, the atmosphere, the community, the love.
12. Being smiled at (and sometimes even greeted) as you pass someone in the street.
13. Signs/directions/everything in English.
14. Being able to talk to people whenever I wanted to (without having to calculate the time difference and figure out where they would be).
15. Being able to plug any appliance or electronic device into any outlet at the same time as another. And not having to use an adapter.
16. Being able to express myself.
17. Being able to defend myself.
18. Throwing out well-timed sarcasm and one-liners. I was just beginning to master some Spanish humor when we left. :)
19. My electric guitar with its pink strap.
20. Pandora radio + Hulu + instant netflix.
21. Knowing I'm where I belong.

"I don't know."

It's been an interesting couple of days.
For one thing, I wake up every day before 8am, completely unable to fall back to sleep. I'm not wide awake, I don't feel rested...in fact, it's like waking up in the middle of the night. Groggy...disoriented. It's getting old. I just wanna sleep.
It has been great to be home. Don't get me wrong. But at the same time, it's very difficult. Everyone wants to know how the semester was, where I went, what I did, what my favorite part was...
But the problem is that even I don't always know. Tonight especially, on this little whirlwind of ups and downs and arounds. I don't know how to answer those questions with any kind of decent honesty. I can spout off the list of places I went to, or what we would do on the weekends, but if you're looking to know about the deeper things, the emotions of the journey, I'm afraid you'll have to wait.
I spent the evening with a friend who went on a semester abroad in the fall and she had some very wise words for me. She told me that it's okay to not know. It's okay to admit that. It's okay to say "I don't know" instead of saying what I know people want to hear.

It's okay to not know. Someday I will.

Americana Tonta: The Plight of the Foreigner

It took me a long time to realize that I couldn't effectively defend myself, my choices, my attitudes, and my beliefs to my host family and other Spanish people I came into contact with last semester.
It took me even longer to realize that I should stop trying and that it wasn't worth it to get frustrated.
Spain is way different from America. Duh. Here's what I'm focusing on: tact and expression.
When I was growing up, my parents taught me that it is not okay to say out loud whatever you are thinking. It's okay to think what you want, but saying rude things is not polite. Yeah, you might not like that person's haircut, or that outfit might make that person look ugly, or you may notice that that person is very overweight. But you don't SAY those things to their face, or to other people.
It's a bit different in Spain. People tend to be very blunt there, saying exactly what they think, not worrying about what others will think. And it works for them: words don't offend there as easily as they can here. They're not afraid to discuss anything or to say exactly what they think about it. You know how in the States we tend to stay away from discussing polarized topics like politics and religion in groups of people that we don't know very well? It's because we don't want to offend anyone and create a bad impression.
Now, it's not that this doesn't ring true in Spain; it's that Spaniards don't take offense at others' opinions. Everyone can blast their opinion in whatever forum about any topic they wish. It's kind of an inalienable right.
It took me a really long time to get used to this. For the first couple of months, I had the impression that all Spaniards are very rude and need to take a class or two about tactful interaction. But as I listened to/observed more conversations between Spanish women, I came to realize that they don't take offense. They dish it out and they take it like champs. The concept of what is considered rude in Spain is entirely different from what it is in the States. It was really hard to get used to at first and I had to actively ignore the things that were offending me. "Shake it off, don't take it personally" is what one of the girls here always said. I had to learn how to let people say and think what they would about me and keep it on the outside. Letting it sink into my mind and heart started to break me down and I wouldn't have survived. In a way, I became kind of hardened in Spain, but at the time, it was necessary. If I hadn't, I probably would have fallen apart.

The hardest part about living in another language is the inability to express oneself. It's easy to tell someone what emotion you're experiencing at a given time, but it's hard to explain why. I mean, that's hard in your native language sometimes! It's also incredibly hard to argue in another language. Arguing is a pretty complex process: you have to clearly state a point, think on your feet to rebutt the point, and in general, speak concisely and quickly. Doing all of that is very difficult in a language you're just starting to master. We began to discover that in 9 times out of 10, it's easier (and less frustrating) to simply agree and let it be. We would get nowhere in trying to argue with our host families regarding our actions, attitudes, or beliefs. We could never convince them otherwise because our Spanish wasn't quick enough. And we had to be okay with that. It was very humbling to know that we couldn't always stand up for ourselves; that we had to give in on a daily basis. That we couldn't always have the upper hand and the control.

Returning to the States has made me wonder how often we turn this mentality onto the non-native English speakers in our country. In Spain, we couldn't prove how much we knew and how intelligent we KNEW we were because we didn't know the words. In class, we could have had an entire argument mapped out in our heads, but we couldn't verbalize it. That's part of the reason the OPI was so nerve-wracking. I understood the questions perfectly, knew exactly what I wanted to say, but it was hard to put it into Spanish words quickly and effectively.
Now why do we do this to immigrants? All too often, we assume that they are unintelligent or lazy because their English is not very good and we can't understand them. The immigrant you see at the Secretary of State's office struggling to make the clerk understand that he wants to apply for a driver's license might be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher in his home country. But we assume otherwise simply because he can't prove his intelligence to us.

Being on the other side opened my eyes. Immigration was a topic close to my heart before going to Spain, and after returning, I understand their struggles (at least a few of them) more intimately. Please remember some of what I've written the next time you encounter an immigrant.

Have compassion.