Launch News: July 7th & 8th
(ish)
Well
we have been at launch for a few days and have been getting accustomed to the
Dominican Republic and have been introduced to what our ministry will look like
for this month. Here in the DR we have
(as a Squad) learned a lot! The last day that I blogged, one of the girls had
gotten her camera snatched right off of her while she was walking down the
street! (Not too uncommon but surprising
it didn’t take a little longer for something like this to happen) After that happened there was a boy named
Willy who was hanging around at our house (our house had a gate all around it)
and he was just playing with a soccer ball and enjoying getting some attention
from the “blanco’sâ€� but unfortunately we had to ask him to only hangout with us
when we were out of the house area just for precautionary reasons.
We
ended up going to lunch one day for some pizza and Willy saw us walking down
the street and wanted to play. He showed
up where the pizza place was and was talking with us all day (in spanish so I
didn’t know much haha) We were told to
be careful about allowing locals to become dependent upon us so we weren’t sure
if we should give him some lunch or not. We decided that it wouldn’t hurt because it was only one meal. Before lunch even arrived, we asked him why
he wasn’t hanging out with friends. He
said “I don’t have any friends!â€� Surely we knew this couldn’t be true. But Willy proceeded to say that he didn’t
hang out with his friends because they were “mal� bad and stole and were mean
and he didn’t want to be like that!
Can
you imagine at 14 years old being able to distance yourself from the norms of
your culture? YA right! I didn’t almost anything I could at the age of 14 to
“FIT� in. But this sweet child has made
a decision to love people instead of hurt or take advantage of them! I was
pretty shocked that he was being sincere because I remember the peer pressure
at 14.
After
we finished eating lunch we were chatting and Willy got up and cleaned up all
of our plates and took them up to the counter to help clean up without anyone
asking him…. Here we are providing this sweet boy with our attention and we
are trying to serve him through this and yet he turns around and SERVES US! I
find that amazing and truly touching that a young boy in the culture and
atmosphere in where he was raised, refuses to conform to social norms and have
integrity and I know God will bless his soul! 🙂
LOVE!
