So, the Youth Program. There was a pretty good turn out, and it was the first Friday night we had done this since we were on this hemisphere. Natali, Nico, Matias, Stephanie, and Natali 2, plus Abigail and I.

 

We started out by asking the kids if they got embarrassed easily, and then proceeded to explain the rules of Shoot. (If you’re drawing a blank, it’s one Daddy made up.)

Now, we warned them not to bite the thing, and we warned them not to swallow. Just hold the alka seltzer in your mouth and pour the soda in. When the chemical reaction happens, just keep your mouth shut for as long as you can.

Okay. I did not know people could spew that far. It was disgusting- I mean you would probably expect that, but EEWW! I, sadly, did not win this one (I exploded laughing maybe 2^nd or 3^rd.) But our friend Natali 2 did win.

 

If your wondering if we actually studied the Bible at this Bible Study, don’t worry, we did.

 

I’m actually looking forward to this coming Friday!

To hear wisdom in a fool’s words,

To find clarity in a drunkard’s mind,

To see purpose in a gypsy’s steps,

To hear joy on a mourner’s lips,

To find truth in a liar’s mouth,

To see life in a murderer’s eyes,

Is to feel love in the hurt, and healing in the pain.

(c) 2013 Madeline Studebaker

“You e-speak ing-less?”

Elijah nods his head, after checking with me to make sure it’s English we speak, not French. (Poor kid, he also thinks we still live in “the other America.”)

“Wu-at ez your name?”

“Elias,” he says, because it’s a whole lot easier for everyone else here to say. A whole lot easier.

“How, uh, oh-eld? Are you?”

“I’m four, and I have two sisters,” he replies.

“You e-speak ing-less?”

“I already told him that I do, didn’t I?” Elijah asks me, annoyed.

“Yes, five different times,” I whisper.

Now I know how I sound when I’m trying to speak Spanish.

Funny, I even ask the same three questions.

Over and over.

“Y que vestido?”

(And what should I wear?)

“Tu vestido mejor.”

(Your best dress.)

We had been invited to our friend Andrea’s birthday party.

Now we were asking all of the local women what we should wear.

The answers had been:

“It should be short”

“It should be long”

“It should be pink”

“It can be any color”

But in addition, always “your best dress.”

So. It was going to be easy- all I needed was a dress that was long, short, pink, and every other color. Simple.

 

We took a bus to Tena to buy dresses for me and Abigail the next day.

After going into about a million different clothes stores (okay, maybe closer to 9 or 10), we found the dresses we needed.

It was red- I told myself it’s sort of a shade of pink- short with long tulle, and with sequins around the waist. It was close enough to perfect to satisfy me, so I bought it.

I’m not a hoarder, but let’s just say I hope this dress will fit for a couple of years to come.

I bought some little red shoes, too. Flip-flops weren’t going to cut it, and although my converse knock-offs cost a whole $10, they had blue shoe strings and would not match. My new “church shoes” are uncomfortable, which is a sure sign they look great.

 

The next night, ready for the party, we missed our bus. Missed it by fifteen minutes. And it was the last bus that went to Tena that day.

With no other options, we squeezed our family of five into the back seat of a taxi. All five of us. Mr. Daniel, who was coming with us to show us where the party was, called shot gun.

Forty minutes is a long time.

We finally, finally got there, jumping out and gasping for fresh air.

It took a good seven minutes for it to sink in that everyone was wearing pants, except for Andrea and her mother.

“You look nice,” everyone said. But I not not feel nice at all.

 

It did not matter when I tried to elegant. I could not walk without tripping over the tulle.

It did not matter when I tried to walk with everyone else. Apparently I shouldn’t have hoisted the tulle up, either.

 

The birthday party was at a church, and Dad had been asked to bring the message, and Tyler translated for him. He talked about the for things you will do in your life:

1)Eat and Drink

2)Sleep

3) Open You Heart

and

4) Serve

 

After that, all of the girls were given a slip of paper and asked to read it aloud. From the stage.

I tried my best- I honestly did. I just don’t think anyone understood what I was saying. “Aaaaahhh… niiiii…. baaaa… hheeeee…. ooooowww….. ooooo!!!!” was all they heard. But they clapped at the end, and for all I know I told them all I wanted was to eat the cake.

 

At the end of the message, there was some music and then the meal.

It was rice with chicken and vegetables, and a small salad consisting solely of lettuce. It was not much, but we ate it, thankful that we were eating, even though it was already 9:00.

 

By 9:30 or 10:00, they brought out the cake. It was gorgeous… and two feet long in every direction! The icing was pink and yellow- with chocolate icing spelling “Quinceanera” and “Andrea”.

Alas, it was not to be. Our ride, which was Tyler driving the Davalos’ SUV, was pulling out.

“Feliz, uh, coop? Candle? Crumpet? Um… Andrea?”

“Cumpleanos,” she said.

“Si!” I said, vigorously shaking my head. “Esto!”

 

But I wanted to scream “Nnoooo caaakkeeee??? Not after all I’ve been though!!!”

The chicken problem I was telling you about?

It, uh, hasn’t really gotten any better.

I woke up this morning to a chicken being chasing out of the house. I groaned, rolled over, and pulled the blankets over my head. Like always.

But the chicken didn’t get chased out of the house. It got chased into my room.

And while everyone else was running around trying to find it, it was balancing on my face.

My habit of yanking the sheets over my head finally came in handy! (I’m just trying to forget that if I had gotten out of bed when I was supposed to, that wouldn’t have mattered.)

I tried to yell for help, but the chicken had its foot on my mouth. Chicken feet are popular here, in soup, grilled, and other stuff, but I wasn’t interested. No way.

Everyone came into the kid’s room, and I wondered why that was the last place they would look. While I was in there, suffering.

I wiggled my toes to announce my presence. Okay, I sort of kicked my feet, and hard. Had I not been using my hands to keep the blanket up and the chicken out, it would have been about a full blown tantrum.

“Madeline? Are you under there?”  Abigail shrieked.

Mom and Dad knocked the chicken off my face.

Elijah chased it out, screaming gibberish and flailing his arms.

“I can breathe!” I said, pulling the blanket away from my face. “Where were you?! I was dying! I had a chicken-” I paused, and smoothed my frizzy hair down. I proceeded slowly to help them understand how deadly the situation had really been. “I had a chicken on my head,”

And then everybody laughed.

Like it was funny or something.

-Madeline

We have some serious pest problems in this house.

We have cockroaches, sugar ants, snails, spiders, mosquitos, gnats, mice, rats, bats,

and chickens.

Yeah.

Chickens.

Our neighbors have very friendly and curious poultry. They just walk right into the house.

“The door’s open, so they must want company!” they must think in their little chicken brains.

We have to shoo them out every five minutes.

That, or close the doors, block the air flow, and suffocate to death.

I’m not ashamed to say it, just annoyed: we have a chicken problem.

“What we need,” says Mom, “Is a baby gate for the front door,”

I’m convinced either an electric fence or 12-15 extra-small shock collars would do the trick.

I’m not a very good babysitter.

I’m just not.

I’m impatient with them.

Baby-sitting’s just not in my blood or something.

 

I get annoyed when they knock over the towers I’m building.

“Hello!” I want to yell. “I’m immature sometimes, and, yeah, I’m building with your green and purple blocks, but, I mean, it was awesome and you destroyed it!” And then start crying.

 

And I want to scream at little kids who keep cutting the lights on and off.

“Woah, kid! Do you want to blow the lights or what? You know I’m not tall enough to reach the fuse box! I’ll have to hold you up and you’ll have to replace the light bulb and fix everything.” And make the bbbzzttt! noise when they touch the light switch.

 

Or when they start fighting with the one of the other kids I’m watching.

“All right, break it up, break it–”

Pop!

“Aaahhh! My nose! Why would you do that?”

 

I’m not going to tell you who the Demolition Crew is,

who the Strobe Light Master is,

or who The Kid Who Tried To Punch Me is.

 

Because, like I said, I’m the Best Babysitter in the World.

Only one week. Just one week until we go back to Ecuador.

I’m excited. I’m nervous.

I think I know people down there, I think I have friends, and I think there are people who I will become friends with.

But…

And doubt creeps in.

What if… what if I was wrong?

What if I was wrong about the jungle? What if I wasn’t really seeing how things were, and even if I was, what if they’ve changed?

Mom and Dad won’t be teaching at Antioch Academy, the school we were at last year. We won’t be on the school campus.

We’ll be in the village, really in it. In a different house. We don’t even know which one yet.

We’re going to be doing new ministries. We’re going to be reaching out to the community in some of the same ways, but many, many new ways as well.

We’re going to be meeting and working with new people, doing new things.

My head reels with so many different questions. And yet, it still feels like there are no answers.

With some things, I guess you never know until you’re in the middle of them. Like, right there.

I don’t really want to get off the bus and have no where to go.

Or greet someone I remember who then asks who I am.

Or find out that someone who we’ve been talking to about Jesus, someone who really seemed like they wanted to know more, is gone.

But, like a good friend once told me, He’s just testing my faith.

And I guess He is.

I won’t have all the answers to my questions as soon as I get there.

I won’t know what this next year on the Field holds.

But God does. And that’s good enough for me.

I prefer music with drums and guitar.

She likes music with piano and violins.

I like to blare it though the earbuds and rattle my brain.

She plugs in into a speaker and fills the room evenly.

I let the rhythm carry me away.

She lets the melody carry her away.

I let the hard, loud music fill my ears and my soul.

She lets the soft, quiet music fill her ears and her soul.

I jump up and down on the bed, breathing rapidly.

She dances around her room, breathing deeply.

I close my eyes and see everything that makes me smile.

She closes her eyes and sees everything that makes her smile.

I see myself jumping off of the bleachers and dancing like a chicken.

She remembers building a dog house and reading Charlotte’s Web.

The song ends, and I let out that final breath.

The song ends, and she lets out that final breath.

I let go of all the pain and hurt I held inside.

She lets go of all the bad things that happened.

I sigh as I turn off the MP3 Player.

She smiles and puts her CD back in its case.

And I forget about all of my problems.

And she forgets about all of her problems.

Just over a year ago, I said goodbye to my friends, family, and culture. I stepped onto that plane and there was no going back. I had no idea what changes that year would bring to me. It changed the way I look at things, the way I think about them. That year was the best and worst year of my life.

Flying to a country bzillions of miles away –a country I’d never been to.

The tiny clusters of villages and towns that became my entire world.

Learning the water we couldn’t drink versus the water we could—sometimes the hard way.

The hundreds of thousands of itchy bug bites that drove me insane.

The shower that either froze you into an ice cube or scalded you into a pressure cooked tomato.

 Helping build the cabin we stayed in—the dust, the blisters, and smelling like lacquer for days.

The trips we took to Quito, Banos, Ambato, Otovalo, Archidona, Puyo, Tena, Misahualli, Puca-Chicta, Pusuno, Pununo, Campa-Cocha, and Shirri- Puno.

The bugs—beetles, caterpillars, butterflies, cockroaches, spiders— everywhere, the stings, the stinks.

Going to the Sunday Night Bible Study, Girls’ Bible Study, and listening to Guys’ Bible Study from my loft.

My going from being home-schooled to public, from public to private, from private to home-schooled.

The people we made friends with: Ecuadorians, Italians, Peruvians, Argentinians, Americans, Australians, French, Columbians, the Chileans.  

Getting over the “cute” monkeys that stole our ice creams, lunches, sodas, and groceries.

Climbing up ladders into the tiny bedrooms of villagers with new babies and giving them diapers and clothes.

Hiking through the jungle to scout out another missionaries new land.

Having different families over to the cabin every other Wednesday for dinner.

Trying new foods—slimy and gooey, all of them: Cacao, Mangoes, Guanabaya, Guaba.

Putting together the Bible verse slides and being a shepherd with three boys, and three “sheep” in the living nativity.

The hours of canoe rides though the Napo and Misahualli rivers, and the tributaries that run into them.

The bottles of soda and boxes of pills we went through with the medical teams I went with.

The days spent inside during the Halloween, Christmas, New Years, and Carnival festivals and the drinking and gun shots outside of the cabin.

The one trip to McDonald’s while we were in Quito- the Big Mac, fries, and large Coca-Cola.

Drinking hot sauce, eating glue, skipping classes, having mud fights, and doing each other’s homework.

The visits to the Big Tree, hundreds of years old, hundreds of feet high, and hundreds of feet wide.

Going to the markets, making sure we got a fair price, and translating for my parents.

Talking to the waitress at our favorite restaurant—the only safe one in town—and eating Green Banana Soup.   

Helping in skits for the elementary school age kids, manning the technical problems, and running the slides on the big screen for the lessons.

Acting in the dramas in Misahualli and Tena, the practices, the costumes, the props.

Making chocolate—harvesting, drying, roasting, shelling, grinding, mixing, and eating.

Packing an average of sixteen people into another missionary’s SUV to go to Tena, and more than once.

Eating dinner at the chief of Shirri-Puno’s house—a huge honor—without plumbing or electricity.

Seeing all together about five or six boas and anacondas, and getting to hold two of them!

I made friends, and when one of us was going through a rough time, all of us were.

All the challenges, the struggles, the disappointments, the heartbreaks—it was worth it. I learned more this past year than I learned in all the years before combined. That year was the best year of my life.