wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Hello from hard times: A letter from a young adult

[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ECUNET.ORG>]

Note #8719 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05222
April 22, 2005
 
Hello from hard times
 
Young mission volunteer and poor kids 
'blossom together in warmth of love and trust'

by Kerrie Yarnell
 
WAPATO, WA - Over the long, gray winter here, I read Animal Dreams, by
Barbara Kingsolver, and discovered a paragraph that has helped me understand
what my calling is about:

	The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope
for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope ... live right inside
it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it:
elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that
kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.
Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the
walls on both sides.
	  
	I have the same hope: that the gospel of compassion will pervade my
actions and my thoughts, and that its infectious call will reach the ears of
others. Serving in Wapato over the past seven months has left me with more
questions than answers, and led to lots of surprises and new relationships in
this small, very diverse community.
	  
	Wapato is on the Yakima Indian reservation in the Yakima Valley in
eastern Washington. The town of Wapato, with a population under 5,000, is an
agricultural community that has been settled over the past two centuries by
Euro-American, Japanese and Filipino farmers.

	Most recently it has become home to settling Mexican  families, who
make up about 70 percent of the current population. Every community here has
experienced prejudice and challenges to its cultural identity. You can see it
in people's eyes, and hear it in their stories.

	The town is economically depressed - a reality demonstrated by
boarded-up storefronts and high rates of alcoholism, suicide and school
dropouts.
In the midst of all this is a struggling community center, a Presbyterian
church with a thriving ESL (English-as-a-second-language) class, a Native
American youth group and a bustling Catholic church with a mariachi band and
a large class of first Communion students.

	In this crucible of culture and faith, I have seen people working to
make a place here for themselves and their children. I see how my life is
connected to others, how understanding and compassionate service can
transcend cultures and nationalities. We have been entrusted with the hearts
of our sisters and brothers, and we've been asked to walk among them gently,
to love, to serve.

	I walk, love, and serve in a community full of hurt, distrust and
poverty. The Latino children with whom I spend my time find themselves in
rundown and overcrowded living conditions, with never enough food to go
around, in a world where they serve as bilingual/bicultural translators for
their monolingual/monocultural parents.

	With older siblings raising younger ones, the dearth of order and
attention in the kids' lives is almost absolute. They have begun the dark
passage of insufficiency; they know how to hoard food and to fight for
themselves.

	Every Monday in our after-school program, we set the table to share
pizza and Tang, in a kind of communion that sends the message: Have a seat;
there's time; there's enough to go around. We play kickball and collaborate
on art projects. We make field trips and play foosball. Along the way we
transform a Presbyterian fellowship hall into a haven where the kids have a
safe environment for relationship-building, developing life skills, and
enjoying the luxury of being kids.

	My task, my gift, is to create an atmosphere of safety and security
for these kids that I love, to welcome them in. It is in these basic things
that I perceive Jesus' call to us to serve and live. I understand from Jesus'
words that we will always find him among the poor - in the towns with the
failing community centers and the gang tags. He will be in the homes where
families of 10 share food enough for two, where there is not enough
employment to enable people to have lights and heat in the wintertime. He
will be in the prisons, at the shelters.

	"Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing
clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?"

	The most beautiful thing is that this caring and compassion is not a
one-way gift. Becoming trusted, being relied upon - being allowed to know and
see someone else's most precious dreams - is a gift I have received from the
children. I have been watching as they gain confidence, serve one another,
ask a blessing, learn to share, even choose a smaller piece to eat so a
larger one can go to someone else.

	We are all blossoming together in the warmth of this love and trust
we have built together. The simplicity of it is easy to miss - especially
when mainstream culture and our own fears and insecurities are screaming at
us to grab the biggest piece of the pie and hang on for dear life.

	I am thankful to God and to this community that in my own spiritual
poverty I have not missed out on this gift.

	It is the kids who teach me to resist that call to squander time, or
to value the time that we have. They have taught me that simple living is the
best, that I can enjoy the presence of another person fully in spite of
language and cultural barriers.

	I am realizing that there is joy in being fully in one place, fully
attuned to the task at hand: making egg-carton caterpillars with children, or
working in the garden. I am learning to listen rather than speak; I am
learning to be more attuned to the heart of a situation than with the black
and white of it. I find that it is better, though not always easier, to live
honestly and with a fuller heart in the face of hardship and the harsh
realities that the youth of this community face.
	 
	These realities are not going to go away anytime soon. There are lots
of wonderful people working hard in this community, trying to find ways to
put prejudice away long enough to unite for the good of the children, but the
wounds of prejudice and economic depression  are deep, and will take
generations to heal.

	In the meantime, as I walk here and learn how to be a part of this
place, I can tell that this community has not been forgotten by God. And I
know that these children are the vessels for the redemption.

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