While on this trip, I met Ellen. Ellen and I are the same age. She among the oldest of more than ten children from a family that lives in the refugee Haitain village. She is beautiful, graceful and loves fashion. My mission group connected with Ellen over her love for Twilight books and movies and her interests in the Seventeen and other magazines we brought along for girls in the village to keep.
Although Ellen and I had a lot in common, we were very different. I went on the mission trip during a difficult time in my life when I was mad about everything. Mad that my life seemed like it was a disaster. Mad that I still didn’t have a permanent job a year after graduating from college. Mad that I had spent the past year in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals being sick. Mad that my family and friends just seemed to be becoming more engrossed in their lives and ignoring the fact that I was struggling because. I was mad and frustrated and jumped on a plane to the Bahamas with a closed heart and full of self pity.
Unfortunately, I stayed mad and closed off on the mission trip until I met Ellen. Looking back, I wish I had opened up to her more. We went to help those in need, but the reality was Ellen was helping me and I don’t believe I gave her anything in return. At twenty three, Ellen was a stripper. She had just recently moved into the shell of the concrete house a mission team prior to us had built for her family. There were no windows, doors, walls inside, running water, or anything else. Just the shell and the roof. Ellen had managed to get a dirty mattress and couch inside. She slept on the mattress and used the couch as a dresser by placing her clothes underneath cushions. Before moving into the house, Ellen had been sleeping outside her family’s shack on two wooden chairs pushed together. She could not sleep inside because the small shack was already housing twenty three other people.
Our job for our trip was to put up drywall inside the house. The space in the house where Ellen’s “room” was is where we stored our water coolers and equipment. During the day, Ellen sat contently on one of her wooden chairs by the door space of the house to keep the small children out as we worked. She seemed almost relieved that we were there.
At one point, a crew leader from our team and another leader from the compound we
were living in took Ellen shopping for clothes to go to church. She had stopped going because all the clothes she had were provided by her “pimp” and were far from appropriate to be worn at the church she wanted to go to. Our team helped her choose two outfits appropriate for her to go to church in.
While she was gone, I helped a few of our guys install windows into Ellen’s room. The task only took about fifteen minutes and the windows were simple fixtures that could be opened and pushed out from the inside. At the time, I thought nothing of it other than it would prevent rain from coming in on Ellen while she slept.
The next day when we walked into Ellen’s room carrying our water coolers and tools, my mom pointed to the windows. “Look,” she said. “Ellen hung curtains.”
I looked up and there was one small set of curtains hanging from the windows we had installed yesterday. Seeing the curtains, I about broke into tears. Ellen had been waiting for the windows, just like she had waited for a room and a mattress and clothes to go to church. And in the midst of all the tools, the saw dust, the concrete and the alarming amount of garbage throughout the village, Ellen had found a set of curtains to decorate her room. Her room that most of us wouldn’t even dream of living in. She decorated what little she had to make the best of it.
I still tear up even when writing this over six months later because those curtains were the slap in the face that I needed to wake up from my own self pity. At home, curtains were the least of my concern, but so were having a bed, church clothes, and a nice place to live. Here, Ellen’s curtains were her dreams of making the best of what she had been dealt, but also having the hope that things could get better.
As soon as I got home, I shipped a box of Twilight books the compound’s church to give to Ellen. Although she will never realize what she has taught me, I’m forever grateful for meeting her and pray for her.
