Benefit Concert July 23

We are gearing up for Friday evening’s light-hearted, Latin-flavor concert to provide funding for Christian Arts Camps for Nicaraguan children.

·         Kathie Hoksbergen is creating a Nicaraguan-style staging and foyer displays. De Jong Greenhouse is providing baskets for the tropical plants.

·         Daybreak Bible Study from Faith Church has offered to serve coffee and goodies following the concert.  Of course, we accepted!

·         A short video about last year’s arts camps has arrived from the Nehemiah Center in Nicaragua. I think Pella will be its very first showing.

·         The list of performers, who range in age from 9 to 60+, includes:

o   Brian Nolder - piano

o   Brian Kolb - percussion

o   Chelsea Pierce - piano

o   Derek Fox -  guitar

o   Isaac Dorenkamp – piano (a fourth grader!)

o   Jason Pentico - trumpet

o   Kathryn Haug -vocals, conducting

o   Marlo Van Klompenburg - organ

o   Peter Bailey - violin

o   Rachel Cowman - piano

o   Steve McCombs - bass

o   Steve Norris - percussion

o   . . . and Joyful Noise Children’s Choir

Our goal is to raise $3,000 so 100 Nicaraguan children can attend a week of Christian Arts Camps. We are a little scared (will people come?)—and a lot excited.

Details: 7 p.m., Friday July 23, Faith Church, 215 University, Pella (across the street from Pella Community High School)

We invite you to join us—and to tell others about it too!

Hiatus

Another unexpected shift, besides those in my last post, has occurred upon my return home.

My blogging energy has evaporated.

I feel a need to focus, instead, on surrender and on drafting the book.

So, I’m taking a blogging break. I don’t know how long.

If I resume, I’ll announce it via Facebook and emails.(Become my Facebook friend!)

Meanwhile, I’d appreciate your occasionally  lifting up the Nehemiah Center, Nicaraguans, and the book project before our Father.

Signing off till we meet again, wherever and whenever  He brings that to pass.

Carol

Unexpected

I expected that, back home from Nicaragua, I would think longer before buying.

And I do.

I have decided not to replace the glass nail file that broke in two last month. I postponed ordering a new swimsuit, and after two days ordered one for half the price of my first choice.

I expected to appreciate open skies and open spaces.

And I do.

I inhaled deeply,  exhale slowly, as I take in wide ditches, open yards, and a cosmic bowl of sky.

I expected to bundle up more against the Iowa winter.

And I do, swathing my hands in leather, my face in fur.

I expected to study more Spanish, type my journals, begin work on the book.  These, too, I do.

I am also surprised.

I did not expect to start cleaning mildew from the cracks of my shower.

I did not expect to spend 30 minutes on the treadmill each morning.

I did not expect to organize my underwear, soak my combs and brushes, or empty the hutch drawer of its stash of outdated prayer guides and Today devotional booklets.

I do not understand.

Neither did I expect to rebel against my perennial need to understand, organize, analyze, find reasons for. . .

Has God has shifted my tectonic plates?

I know not.

He’s not asking me to control--

But to surrender.

Homecoming

I wake up scratching two welts on my ankle.

 I wish I had used Off after my final Nicaragua shower.

The sky is grey with impending snow.

There is no sun streaming through lace curtains.

No cool morning breeze through louvered glass.

No concert of a thousand  birds.

No smell of huevos rancheros (eggs and salsa).

No slanting dormer above me.

No splashing from an already-occupied shower.

I slip into fleece-lined slippers,

stir up a mug of Cafe Francais,

snuggle into my recliner with a fuzzy blanket,

and open the Pella Chronicle.


It is good to be home.

It was good to be gone.

Except for the bugs.

Commencement

It’s 4 p.m. and I’m in the Nehemiah Center wicker rocker one last time, staring up at an eight-foot “Bienvenidos!” (Welcome!)

It is totally inappropriate.

In an hour I leave the Nehemiah Center.


Tomorrow morning we depart Nicaragua.

·       We have been here 28 days.

·        I have conducted 25 interviews, taken 500 photos, and visited 12 different communities.

·      I have made 35 blog posts that were visited 385 times by 116 different readers.

Tomorrow it ends.

Or does it?

Maybe, as commencement speakers say, this is not an end, but a start:

·        A start to learning God will use this month to change me

·        A start to a longer relationship with the Nehemiah Center and Nicaragua

·        A start to launching a book

I had planned this blog would end today.

I have changed my mind.

For a season, I will continue.

Already impacted by Nicaragua, after a debate with myself I decide to let the word “season” remain—ambiguous, unedited. 

I reject my North-American impulse make that word precise.

So, blog readers, you may continue to check back once or twice a week for a season, to see how the commencement is faring.

“Bienvenidos”  still stares at me from across the room.

Appropriate.

And welcoming.

Points of Light

Today is our last one here.

On our first day, I found Managua’s tunnel-streets oppressive. I still do.

At 6 p.m. on winter nights, I find Pella streets oppressive, too. The Iowa sky has no right to be so dark so early.

Last night I remembered, how in the Iowa night, to combat the depressing black, I search for points of light— a street light, approaching car, or radiant window.

From the Managua taxi this morning, I seek Managua’s points of light, and find them.

-A row of blooming trinitario (bougainvillea).

-An eight-foot poinsettia.

-A brightly painted corner store.

-A collection of palm trees.

-A woman watering her dirt road to reduce dust.

It is hard work.

So is looking for points of light in the Iowa night.

But it is work I am called to by the Rose of Sharon, the Light of the World.

This is my Father’s world—every corner of it.

Peace, Be Still

Ten days into our Nicaragua trip, Cousin Gene Addink emailed from South Dakota.
His message began, “Congratulations, you have the best blog I have ever read.”

What a hook! It was the best lead sentence possible.

And he’s an accountant.

He described himself as “an aggressive businessman for whom getting ahead in business is what I think about most of the time.”

Then he wrote about his June trip to Dominican Republic:

I decided to go and taken on NO responsibility for the trip other than to show up where the leaders to me to show up and do what they told me to do.

It was a glorious week of no responsibility.

And when my mind was free, it allowed God in.


I had filled it so full of daily “duties,” that I had only allocated a small amount of time in the day to let him speak to me.


Since that trip, I allow myself time to communicate better with our Creator.

In business, I have always known that in communication with others it is better to listen than to speak.

In Dominican Republic, I learned that same principal applies to my communication with God.

I learned to listen more, speak less. . . .

Three weeks ago, I resonated with Gene’s email. In recent years, I too have learned the richness of listening prayer.

This morning I think again about his email. I realize that I’ve been    listening non-stop to God’s people in Nicaragua.

Not allowing time for my soul to catch up with my body.

Not emptying my heart and soul and mind in selfless yes to Him.

So, I sit in the wicker rocker.

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know.


Be still.

Be. . . .
By the way, my cousin’s concluding line was also a zinger. He ended:

Oh, and did I mention this before? Your blog site is also the FIRST blog site I have ever read.

Crossing Cultures

Catching a morning breeze in a wicker rocker at the Nehemiah Center lobby, I type a to-do list for the next three days.

Dave Boone, for whom Marlo did an engineering drawing, enters an an adjacent rocker. He asks how the book is going and says he’ll be talking with Marlo about some small additions to the project. 


Then he works on wireless Internet access for his Ipod.

I know Marlo’s first-love among his projects here has been the engineering one.

And he has been frustrated by a repeated delay in receiving the promised numbers for an accounting project.

 I eagerly offer, “Shall I get Marlo, for you? He’s in the office next door.”

Dave declines. He has to finish a couple of things first.

I smile wryly, and say. “I know—I’m still in North American mode. Marlo teased me the other day, “Empuje, empuje, empuje. (Push, push, push.)”

Marlo had said that last week when I asked our guest house hosts if the swing would be back in service by Tuesday—since the promised Monday deadline would be missed.

Dave, a Californian who has been in Central America for 18 months, smiled back. “You adjust,” he says. “What it takes is two or three projects where you get uptight when things don’t go as planned.”

“And then it turns out all right in the end.

“Last week we had a Canadian work team here, and one man said, ‘Come, on. Let’s move. Let’s move. Time is money.

“And I hadn’t heard that in so long it was a shock.

“Sometimes time is money. Sometimes it’s not.

“It’s not that one way is better, that one culture is right and the other wrong. They’re just different.

“And perhaps the ideal is somewhere between them.”

I nod and opt to stay seated.

But as soon as our Subway-sandwich-lunch is delivered, I eagerly summon Marlo to the lobby, alerting him to Dave’s presence.

Marlo can eat bread and have that conversation, too.

I've neatly maneuvered that one.

Now, if only that swing, promised last Tuesday, will be ready today. . . .

Heavenly Laughter

On our Leon trip with the Canadian team we learn that Leon is significantly hotter than Managua. Enroute to Saturday night lodging, fifteen of us sweat together, windows open, in a van that would max out at nine passengers in the U.S.

The hotel owner, a North American, has given our reserved-and-paid-for rooms to others. We make do with a bathroom shortage and two persons per bed.

The window has a broken pane.

The ceiling fan fails to turn.

The toilet does not flush.

A pancake-sized welt on my arm—a gift from a tropical bug—stings and burns.

I bed down with a Canadian woman I met yesterday, throw off the stifling top sheet, lie still, and try not to scratch. I fight for sleep.

And I remember Nigerian missionary Robert Recker speaking to my Iowa Sunday School class when I was eleven. He showed jungle slides and issued a challenge:  Maybe God is calling you to the mission field!

I was terrified. Please, God, don’t call me be a missionary to primitive and bug-infested Africa. Please. Please! PLEASE!

He didn’t.

He graciously called me to writing instead.

Now, fifty years later, he has sent me to primitive and bug-infested Central America.

Amid the Nicaragua night sounds, I think I hear Him chuckle.

--Written Monday, February 1, remembering Saturday night, January 30.

Place of Pain

“After great pain, 

a formal feeling 

comes.”

 -Emily Dickinson

At Casita Memorial Park, north of Leon, Ebelina tells her story.

In 1998 she lived in El Porvenir, a village on the side of this volcanic mountain.

Several days of torrential rains had followed Hurricane Mitch. Then on October 30, she heard a loud rumble and ran outside to look for the helicopter.

Instead she saw a roaring wall of mud.

It surged through El Porvenir, burying her waist-deep, crushing three ribs, and breaking her cheekbones.

“That was a hard day,” she says quietly, then chokes up and pauses.

When she speaks again, her eyes are wet. “All around me I heard people crying out.”

For two days she heard adults and infants scream and moan and die. Over and over she calmed a child trapped near her, trying to help conserve his energy and prevent deyhdration.

Rescued by helicopter, Ebelina, a daughter, and a son survived. Her husband, a married son, his wife, and three children did not.

Three surgeries, a month of hospitalization, and relocation to Santa Maria followed.

Ebelina narrates with the impassive dignity of a woman who has weathered great pain.

After her story, we quietly walk the grounds. Beneath us, we learn, are the unrecovered dead.  Each tree we see commemorates a family that is no more.

Coming down the mountain, we ask about her current life in Santa Maria. “I have a garden. I grow vegetables.” she says.

“What vegetables?” we ask.

“Maize  (corn) and papayas.” Yes, in the dry season, she needs to water them. There is a well. Her son and daughter live with her.

As she talks, she smiles. In fact, she glows.

After great pain 

has also flowed 

grace.

-Written Thursday, January 28, while traveling with a team from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. 

-Posted Sunday, January 31, upon return to email access.

One Tiny Fraction

“We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete which is another way of saying that the kingdom of God always lies beyond us.  –Oscar Romero, Assassinated El Salvador Bishop

Mike and Maria Saeli, who in their fifties left their New York farm for Latin America, talk about their vision for Nicaragua in their tiny Leon apartment.

“What gave me so much hope was the arts event,” he says. “Kids blossomed in those for days, learning to sing or dance or produce something beautiful.”

I’m suddenly aware he is describing an event funded by a Pella Benefit Garden Tour last spring.

Oblivious, Mike continues, “Each of those 50 children finished that camp thinking, ‘I have talents and gifts. God thinks I am special.’ I believe some of them will become movers and shakers because someone helped them see they are made in the image of God and have something to offer.”

I remember collaborating with Stuarts and Geetings for that tour, the plants from by De Jong Greenhouse, the guided tours by Dan Van Weelden, the generous donations of the tour guests.

Joel Huyser has told me those funds were crucial to funding the art camp.

Now Mike’s vision of its impact opens my eyes, too.

This spring, working on a book about Nicaragua’s Nehemiah Center, I’ll not have time or energy to for second  garden tour.

But last week, Marlo suggested we organize a Pella Benefit Concert instead.

Having heard Mike Saeli, how can we do any less?

Medical Update

John spent the night in the hospital. Nathaniel Hernandez did, too. He slept on a cot, kept John company, and provided translation as needed.

This morning John had stabilized.

The doctors wrote a medical authorization to change move his return flight up a week, and he has flown home.

The Hernandez family has reported these updates to us. We have not seen him since last night’s emergency.

We assume he is safely back in East Baltimore.

Medical Moment

I’m reading a devotional book on the front porch when fellow North American John sags into an adjacent chair.

He’s just back from an overnight adventure, sleeping on a hammock in the campo  (country).

He leans his head back, “I don’t feel well.  Not well at all. . .Ohh. . .I may need you to get my syringe. I have this thing called Addison’s disease. . . I need the bathroom.”

He rests on the bottom step with leg cramps, makes it to the second floor bathroom, and I hear a crash behind its door.

I call my husband. When Marlo opens the bathroom door, John has regained consciousness. We find his syringe. While Marlo helps John, I Google Addison’s disease.

An adrenaline insufficiency, I learn.

And he’s definitely in Addison’s crisis: vomiting, diarrhea, fever, leg pain, slurred speech, fever.

Wikipedia says “dangerous” and “requires hospitalization.”

I show the list to Nathaniel, the only Hernandez at home.

Shall we call 911?

It would be quicker to take him ourselves, Nathaniel says.

He calls his mother. She arrives, along with two women from Forward Edge ministries. Two North American doctors from a nearby medical team soon show up,

They call John’s endocrinologist in East Baltimore.  Yes, the hospital,  he says. Blood work. Rehydration. . .

That was two hours ago.

After a later-than-usual supper, I have tried to return to my devotional reading, but my adrenaline is more than sufficient.

Overflowing, in fact.

And now that I have let it flow across cyberspace, I shall attempt to return to my reading.

Different Eyes

When I ride the streets of Nicaragua’s capital city, Managua, I see block after block of poverty.

Then I visit El Limonal.

It is 200 huts in what the local people call  the “triangle of death” between a dump, a sewer system, and a cemetery. The residents of El Limonal were relocated here when, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch destroyed their villages.  Residents eke out an existence rescuing bottles, cans, and cardboard from the dump.

I assess it, walking the dirt streets with Maria Saeli of Food for the Hungry, and find a new category: extreme poverty.

Maria hugs three children selling from a food stand. 

She admires a puppy one woman is grooming.

She asks a woman hand-laundering clothes how many days' work are on the line behind her.

“Tres dias (Three days),” is the shy answer.

She says the town now has electricity and water. She stops to ask a man what plants he is watering in his new garden.

Where I see poverty, Maria sees progress.

While I despair; Maria hopes.

She also fosters hope.

Lord, give me Maria’s eyes.

For they are your eyes, too, I think.

And let my hands, like hers, be yours as well.

Taste of Home

We return to our the Hernandez guesthouse after morning worship to find Nathaniel and Josiel Hernandez stacking cement blocks in the side yard. They are making a grill. They laugh and say it’s a “Flintstones grill.”

Three Alaskans—grandmother Irlene, mother Martha, and daughter , Andrea,9,  are hosting a picnic before their Wednesday departure.

The Hernandez family cared for Andrea for her first three years while the Alaskans waited for her adoption to approved. This is Andrea’s first visit back to Nicaragua.

Soon the table is laden with homemade buns, grilled burgers and all the fixings, chips, cabbage salad, potatoes, and two-liter bottles of Coke and Fanta.

While our Nicaraguan host says grace, twenty of us hold hands around the food: a full-voiced 30—something man from Maryland , a family of five from Canada, a twenty-something redhead from Pennsylvania, a Sioux Center CRC pastor and wife, the Alaskan trio, and the Van Klompenburgs.

We eat and talk, sometimes with body language, sometimes in broken Spanish, sometimes with translation. The most popular consonant from the North Americans is “m-m-m-m.”

After dishes, the mother of five sets out a chocolate cake.

I didn’t know I missed North American foods until this feast.

And I haven’t longed for home until this taste of it.

Nicaraguan Miracle

We are at dinner with Pastor Diomedes in Somotillo, a town of 10,000 near the Honduran border. 

We have toured his dynamic ministry—a school, agriculture center, radio station, and a church—which has planted 30 daughter churches in the past 10 years.

A jovial man who loves a good story, Diomedes tells of his first trip to the United States for a Latin American Pastors Conference. At the first meeting, while ending his use of a toilet at a five-star hotel, he looked for the handle.

He hunted beside, behind, beneath—and found nothing.

He sat perplexed.

He could not leave this stall as it was. People would think Nicaraguans were unsanitary idiots!

So he raised his hands, looked heavenward, and prayed fervently, “Lord, I don’t know what to do. I have looked everywhere. I need a miracle. Please send a miracle.”

In faith, he stood up, and God sent a miracle. The toilet flushed!

He praised God profusely and returned to the meeting.   

Only later did he learned that God performs this same miracle each time that stall is used.

It was the miracle of the automatic toilet.

Sending you on...

Spent two days on the road seeing other communities.
Just back.
Interview tonight.
Interview tomorrow morning.
Meeting tomorrow afternoon.
No blog time.
But Marlo is writing an entry to his blog right now.
You can view it at: http://van-nicaragua.blogspot.com
I'll try to blog again on the weekend.

Nicaragua’s Beauty

After Sunday worship at Verbo Church, Luz and Manuel, a husband-wife psychologist team,  graciously took us out for Sunday dinner and a drive through the Nicaragua countryside.

It restored my soul with its open spaces and beauty.

Enjoy the beauty with me in the slideshow at right (the top one).

Mustard Seeds

Reading Suggestion: to understand today’s post, it will be helpful to first read yesterday’s.

Enroute to a youth Bible study in Mateares with Carl Most, we stop for Nelson.

He is waiting on crutches.

Several months ago, he outran a gang-member attacker wielding a machete, but his friend did not.

When Nelson ran back to help his friend, a machete blow nearly severed Nelson’s leg. Physicians later finished the job.

He has had a week of ups and downs, he tells Carl, adjusting to the loss.

This Sunday evening, the eight former members of La Tufalera (The Stench) study Romans 12: “We are all part of the same body.”

As the evening concludes they plan at next meeting to place a plaque on the graveside of a group member killed last August.

When we return Nelson home, his mother asks a favor. Nelson’s father, kidneys ailing from twelve years of toxic-fume employment, is in pain. Can we take him to the clinic?

Of course. 


The father rides in the front seat, his wife in the open pickup bed. Weak-voiced, he says he has been in pain for dos dias (two days).

The clinic blurs as I resist tears. Then I succumb.

I remember that Jesus, too, wept.

I wonder: 

Are tears—both His and mine—the seeds for a "theology of suffering?"

Tunnel

We taxi through Managua streets

roofless tunnels 

walled with shanties, fences, and shops, 

filled  by barks and honks.

Hungry children live in the city dump, 

attacked by flies and fumes.

Hospitals amputate legs 

for lack of antibiotics.

And in Haiti corpses rot.

I crash.

My God, my God, why?

Joel Huyser says we we need a theology of suffering.

At this moment, I have no such theology, 

much less a clever one-line wrap-up for a blog.

The Nicaraguan heavens above this raucous tunnel are

hauntingly,

disappointingly,

silent.

On the Lighter Side

OK, I lied. I’m posting before Monday.

Donna Biddle, the coauthor of our future book about Nicaragua’s Nehemiah Center ended  her  email today saying, “My daughter and I just came back from our mall.  Do you think your mall will be different than my
mall?  :) 

Having just returned from a Saturday shopping outing, I responded, then realized blog readers might also enjoy my  answer to her question. Here
it is:

Yes and no.

Our first stop was the Managua market Huembo (pronounced Wembo, not sure how it is spelled) and it is a polar opposite of your mall--outdoors, canvas covered, sprawling, crowded, vendors hawking from tiny shops, watching us with intently and speaking rapid Spanish or pigeon English whenever we indicated the slightest interest in an item.

We actually went to Huembo by accident--miscommunication with our taxi driver who speaks only Spanish. Our hosts had told us Huembo is not safe unless you have a local person with you. We had subsequently learned, though, that it has a safer tourist section with souvenirs and an unsafe local market section.

After we got over the shock of arriving at the wrong shopping place, we asked the driver which side of the parking lot had danger (peligro) and which part was "no peligro." He gestured. We headed toward the “no peligro” section. He parked the taxi in the shade (la sombra) and we shopped.

Children tried to sell us their crafts made from a local grass. A sad-eyed beggar with a young daughter held out her hand. Food vendors pressed us with samples.

When I asked for a skirt (falda) and the shop owner didn't have it, she called loudly to a friend six shops down that I wanted a "falda.” That owner beckoned me over, ushered me inside, and showed me her wares.

Yes, I did buy a skirt. It was made in Guatemala, sigh, but it was long enough (hard for me to find here) and a neutral crème color.  Nicaraguan primary colors and bright flowers look wonderful in context, but they would scream at people when I get back to Pella.

When we returned, one skirt and one scarf later, our shopping companion Christina—a North American woman staying at the same guest house we are—remembered that the name of the mall we had intended to go to was La Galeria. We asked if La Galeria was near here (cerca de aqui). "Si" it was. So we headed there.

La Galeria is Huembo’s polar opposite. Except for the Spanish names, abundant guards and policemen, it could have been a US mall. Many shops were US chains: Payless Shoes, Hallmark, etc. We hunted unsuccessfully for a deck of cards, bought three double-dip ice cream cones (doble conos) for a dollar each—one for Marlo, one for me, and one for Miguel, our taxi driver.

Final stop was a SuperMercado (supermarket) for a few groceries. It is like a US grocery store with a few clothes, plants, and pottery items thrown in. We asked about a deck of cards there also. The staff told us they had no playing cards, but could have a deck brought in 10 minutes--with the Beatles on them. Cost: $7. We declined.

That’s the news from Lake Managua where all the weather is warm, the children are grass artists, and the shopping is both below and above average.