The Ordinary Ones

We finally arrive at our house that we have been waiting for since we arrived in this country exactly one month ago. Pulling up in our van packed full with suitcases and belongings. Two guitars. Some kitchen items and storage. A yellow, blue, and green house. Smiling faces as we step out of our van. Women and children at the corner. A child hides behind his mother’s legs. Coming down the stairs from the rooftop. I walk around my friend who is staring over the wall at the neighbors, smiling. Pick up a coconut to see if we could find a tool to crack it open and drink the coconut water. I turn around again and see my friend standing in the same spot, still staring over the wall, still smiling. She hasn’t made a sound but her hands are moving. I stand on my tiptoes to look at the neighbors and their hands are moving too, smiling. - Days later, sitting on the floor of our living room. No furniture yet. Running water, check. Trying to eat our food before it goes bad since we don’t y

When I was 24 years old, I moved to Haiti, a small country in the Caribbean. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. To me, Haiti is a place where there is much suffering, but also much joy. I lived there for three years. Many times, I thought about how crazy it was that I was living my dreams in my twenties. Some people never get to pursue their dreams in their lifetime and here I was living it at my quarter century mark. What is next? I used to think. How could God possibly outdo Himself here? I thought that the Lord could be good to me only one time. My vision was so small. It took me three years after I left Haiti to trust the Lord for this next adventure. Now I am living on the other side of the world. A new community. A different organization. It is incredibly hard to be in a new place with a new community. But it seems that the Lord can outdo Himself. Not because this is better, but because once again, He has been good to me. He doesn't stop blessing

Making gestures with our hands. Three women in the family are deaf, so this is how we communicate. Somehow it has been easier than a foreign language. A fishing net. Shrimp. Their work is peeling or cutting shrimp after the fishermen bring them in. They ask us if we ate the shrimp they brought to our house. Not yet.. We try to communicate with our hands.. We don't know how to cook them. They try to tell us how with their hands. Put them in a pan with oil and spices. That's the best I can understand. Their mother is in her eighties, crippled and sitting in a chair. Her hands and feet are bent more out of shape than anyone I have ever seen before. They tell us that she had fallen and broken her shoulder at some point. Their father died in 1992. One of the women traces 92 with her finger onto the inside of her forearm. We are sitting in a two bedroom house, in one of the bedrooms which might be just an entryway. But it's where these three women, their mother,