by Roger Bruner
Ruts in the earth were numerous, although not necessarily deep. They were almost impossible to spot until we got right on top of them. The drivers, each an expert on “real” roads, must have felt like ship captains struggling to maintain control of their vessels on a stormy sea whenever they had to veer suddenly around yet another rut that popped up out of nowhere.
I quit counting the team members who got so carsick they threw the bus windows open and stuck their heads outside to keep from retching all over themselves and each other. The misery of their dehumanizing condition was so overwhelming I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them.
The few of us not yet afflicted felt desperate about our situation, though. So we prayed more faithfully for our drivers than for our peers.
Two tractor trailers full of building supplies followed us, although a truck crammed floor to ceiling with food, water, bedding, and clothing had taken this same route hours earlier. Even though the ruts didn’t trouble the trucks with their double tires, our ride couldn’t have been bumpier or jerkier without breaking an axle. Each time we rounded a curve without turning over, we shouted, “Praise the Lord!”
Navigating the ruts didn’t slow us down as much as watching for them.
When I stood up to stretch, I went up front to talk to Rob. Years of roller coaster rides at Six Flags over Georgia made walking on a wildly bumping bus seem like child’s play.
“For Pete’s sake, Rob,” I said with equal parts of helpfulness and youthful impatience, “let me off the bus and I’ll walk ahead to motion where the ruts are.” Walking faster than we were riding wouldn’t be a challenge.
Rob looked at me funny, and I wasn’t sure he’d understood me. When he didn’t respond, however, I shrugged and returned to my seat.
But a moment later, the bus stopped and Rob got out. He was gone five or six minutes. When he came back with Charlie in the lead, he looked frustrated. Charlie apparently won the toss for walking bus leader. According to the GPS, we were no more than two miles from our destination.
The first truck driver and his helpers had just finished unloading the emergency provisions when we rolled into Santa María. The villagers had already helped themselves to the supplies they needed most urgently. We’d expected and wanted them to do that.
Cardboard boxes—a few partially full, but most nearly empty—lay on the ground like gift boxes a bunch of little kids has decimated on Christmas morning. Just inside the truck’s open doors, a couple of boxes stood guard over the rest.
From what that driver told us, the villagers had been thrilled to receive the necessities they’d lived without since the storm destroyed their homes. Their homes, but not the small building Rob and Charlie had nicknamed the Passover Church.
Although Rob and Charlie tried talking him out of doing something so foolish, the driver—apparently the only Latino in our group—climbed back into the cab of his truck, insisting that he must leave immediately. Morning would be too late. He’d apparently left his motor running the whole time he and his two helpers—with willing help from the villagers—unloaded the truck.
“Call me superstitious if you like,”—he said through the open window in more cultivated English than I’d expected from a Latino truck driver—“but this unharmed building among the ruins of the village makes me nervous. I am unable to explain why I feel this way, but I and my helpers must not stay here any longer. We are going back now. Do not worry about us. I have a GPS, and my truck’s double tires did not fit into any of those ruts. Vámonos, chicos!”
While his helpers jumped into the cab, we told him we would pray for their safety. He smiled and winked. I can’t explain it, but I almost sensed his relief that we had reached Santa María safely and would provide the villagers with whatever else they needed.
Could he have had something to do with Rob and Charlie finding out about Santa María’s recent tragedy?
chapter eleven
Aleesha and I spent our first forty minutes in Santa María sorting through my four suitcases and putting my most essential belongings inside one. I bargained with our bus driver to take the rest of my stuff back to San Diego for safekeeping. I didn’t want to have it around, reminding me how I’d acted at orientation.
Since my little karaoke unit was battery powered, I kept it with me. Proud of myself for remembering the batteries, I thought somebody could probably use it. Nobody in this crowd of unforgivers would want to hear me sing, though.
But thoughtlessness was still my middle name. I forgot to keep the accompaniment disks.
Setting up a tentless camp in a field of trash—we assumed the twister left it—was tougher than we’d expected, especially with darkness closing in. The other girls didn’t waste any time staking their claims to a few square yards of dry, grassless ground each. They used the last of today’s energy to push litter out of the way so they could spread their sleeping bags out flat. Many of the girls were already asleep by the time Aleesha and I got there.
Although they’d chosen the prime spots, we couldn’t blame them. They’d gotten there first, and we weren’t fussy. Two slots near the deserted, far edge of the field were as fine as any.
A small jungle of basketball player-height cacti surrounded the field on three sides, with the bottom of the U facing the Passover Church. The abundance of cacti shocked me because the area didn’t seem arid enough to call desert. Then again, a man in my town had replaced the dirt in his yard with rocks and sand and grown nothing but cacti, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.
Despite the variety of other vegetation, however, I couldn’t see a single tree or bush anywhere.
Although I would have considered cactus too juicy to burn, Rob and Charlie somehow fueled a long-lasting bonfire with the cacti they chopped down to make an entrance to the girls’ field. It would be the nightlight in the “facilities” at the open end of the field.
Once he got the fire going, Rob gathered the girls together. He apologized for waking some of them up. “I’m almost old enough to be your grandfather, so don’t ask me to explain what I mean when I say ‘Use this shovel to keep your facilities clean and sanitary’ unless you really want me to tell you. But I’ll give you a hint. This is your litter box, and nobody’s going to clean it unless you do.”
Even in the moonlight, I could see the glow of blushing faces.
But when he added, “Just throw your monthly flammables in the fire,” Aleesha and I almost rolled on the ground. Rob was funny as well as practical.
I might learn to like him a lot.
chapter twelve
Aleesha, take a look. What’s wrong with this picture?”
I pointed first to her luxurious Tweety Bird sleeping bag, unzipped moments ago for the first time, releasing a beautiful smell that reminded me of a new-car interior. Her full-sized inflatable pillow lay on top of it.
Then I pointed to my unadorned section of dirt, painted in the dullest of authentic earth tones and overrun with a variety of little creepy-crawlers.
“Good thing your clothes are already filthy, huh, girl? If you plan to sleep on the ground right there, maybe you shouldn’t bother putting on clean nighties. And I’d plan on using plenty of bug spray before you go to bed.”
Then she gave a thumbs-up, as if her advice would make up for my lack of bedding.
I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be funny.
We’d already done plenty of laughing, and the joy of our friendship had more than made up for having to brush my teeth in the dark; rinse my mouth with bottled water only to have trouble finding somewhere to spit it out without spraying someone; and wipe my foamy mouth on my sweatshirt sleeve like I did when I was little.
Aleesha’s support today almost kept me from griping about having to go beyond the perimeter of the field carrying the shovel to “do my business.” She warned me in no uncertain terms that if I wandered too far in the wrong direction, I might end up entangled in a sea of seven-foot cacti where no one would find me until morning, quiv
ering painfully with a quiver’s worth of needles stuck indelicately in my tender posterior.
Being so slight of build has its disadvantages. I lacked the protective padding Aleesha had and wore so well. Those cactus needles would have struck several vital organs without taking time to introduce themselves to my skin on the way through.
Although Rob—father and grandfather that he was—had supposedly “seen it all,” I’d rely on Aleesha for medical attention on that part of my body. And how we would laugh about me getting into one more avoidable predicament.
But should I laugh now or not?
Once again, Aleesha read my mind—or my face, anyhow. “Girl, I’m just having fun with you. I’m afraid Tweety Bird wouldn’t approve of us sleeping together.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I wouldn’t, either.”
“But you don’t really plan to sleep on the bare ground, do you?” She must not have caught on yet that I didn’t have a choice.
“I’d rather sleep standing up.” I didn’t mean to sound so serious. I was just tired.
“White girls can do that?”
Aware that she was teasing me as much as I was teasing her, I gave her a “black girls can’t?” look that was pretty convincing if I do say so myself. “Only when we’re tired of sitting down all day. But it helps if we have something to lean against. We’re not cows, sheep, or horses, you know.”
I couldn’t keep from giggling then, and we laughed together. Several of our nearest neighbors peeked at us from their sleeping bags with an exhausted, “can’t you shut up and let us sleep in peace?” look in their half-closed eyes. But we were too tired to shut up, and they must have been too tired to verbalize their complaints.
“Girl, we gotta find you something to sleep on before you start sleepwalking and trip over somebody important—like me.”
I shrugged, clueless. For warmth, we could move closer to the fire, but the temperature wasn’t a problem. Softening the ground and making it clean enough to lie on? That was something else.
“Hey!” she said. “That first truck brought bedding for the villagers, right? Maybe they didn’t take it all yet. We might find something lying around on the ground where they unloaded.”
I had serious doubts about the villagers leaving anything usable lying around. Those folks wouldn’t be fussy. After all, they were starting housekeeping from scratch—without houses at that.
“Come on.” Aleesha grabbed my elbow with one hand and a small flashlight with the other.
If flashlights aren’t at the top of the list I’ve never seen, they should be.
We picked our way carefully among sleeping bodies that sprawled out this way and that. When the girls cleared trash to lay out their sleeping bags, they filled the gaps between them like masons slathering concrete between bricks in a wall. Stepping on the girls would have been safer for us, although not for the girls.
We must have spent ten or fifteen minutes reaching the cactus-less door to the field. I wouldn’t have wanted to make that trip without a flashlight.
We clasped one another’s hands—black fingers intertwining with white, white with black—and giggled all the way to the tractor trailers.
“When two friends hold hands while walking together,” Aleesha reworded the familiar scripture verse, sing-songing it in a little kid voice, “if one falls down and goes boom, they go boom together, and they can’t help one another up again because they’ll both be laughing too hard.”
We spent twenty minutes checking the boxes on the ground. Nothing.
The two eighteen-wheelers that had come with us contained building supplies. Only one of them was open, but we decided to check it anyhow. The floor of the trailer looked fifteen feet high. As short as I am, climbing up would be a literal exercise in futility. But Aleesha managed it easily, and she reached down and pulled me up.
Yep, just construction materials. If worse came to worse, I could borrow a sheet of plywood to sleep on. I wouldn’t have to lie directly on the ground then. But as difficult as navigating among the sleeping girls had been, I could just see the two of us carrying a heavy sheet of plywood without bashing one or more girls in the head.
Would I have to sleep in the truck? And be that far from the facilities? No way!
Then Aleesha flashed her light on a small box near the door. There we found it—one lone blanket nearly hidden in the shadows. Somebody had apparently tossed it there—a reject. What better choice for someone like me who felt like a total reject in her teammates’ eyes?
Will things be any better at the end of two weeks?
“You seem down now,” Aleesha said after we lowered ourselves to the ground. The blanket draped over my shoulders like a flag on the casket at a military funeral. “We’ll pray.”
She didn’t ask if I wanted to. She took for granted that prayer was the only cure for my mood. I was going to learn a lot from this girl.
So we cleared enough litter to kneel in the dirt and started talking to God. Although I don’t recall our prayer time completely, I remember begging God for peace and contentment. And thanking Him for His forgiveness.
I felt like He and I were looking at each other—eyeball to eyeball—and I imagined Him saying, People despised and rejected My Son, too. Let Him help you with your rejection.
We prayed for the other team members the way Jesus prayed for His enemies. “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.” But at least my enemies weren’t putting me to death. Not yet, anyhow.
Amen.
Once we got back to our sleepsite, Aleesha couldn’t stay awake long enough to help me unfold my blanket. I was just glad she spotted it. Watching that dark lump cuddled in a nearby Tweety-covered sleeping bag with her face turned heavenward and her mouth curled into a smile couldn’t have been more reassuring.
chapter thirteen
With Aleesha asleep, I was stuck with my own company. Exhaustion tended to make me irrational and pessimistic, but I’d never experienced those problems so profoundly.
My depression came back big-time. It was like Aleesha and I hadn’t prayed at all.
While flapping my borrowed blanket to unfold it, I responded to each loud report of the material with an unspoken curse. The wool felt rough and stiff after years of confinement in some long-forgotten closet or drawer—that’s how I pictured it, anyhow—and the mothball stench was a noxious gas contaminating air that had been pure a moment earlier.
Why hadn’t the donor used a sweet-smelling cedar chest instead?
When I was about to conclude she’d sewed the blanket shut as a cruel joke, it billowed to its fullest, and I spread it out on the ground. While waiting to see if the mothball vapors would make me barf or pass out, I wondered if I dared to sleep on it.
Although the stink would eventually dissipate in the open air, I didn’t expect it to happen tonight. What could possibly make my life more unbearable on the first day of a “life-changing” mission trip? Pastor Ron hadn’t warned me that “life-changing” might mean “life-giving.”
Kim Hartlinger, what are you doing in Mexico? What really? Will this trip be the second ministry of your summer to go sour?
I felt sorry for myself, and I detested that, but I couldn’t turn off the negative feelings. Where was that sense of peace God had given me half an hour earlier?
I dropped to my knees on top of the blanket—not to pray this time, but to lie back and try to unwind.
I landed faster and harder than I’d meant to. My right knee buckled under me, and I did a shoulder roll onto my back, jarring my head so hard on a rock hidden beneath the blanket that I thought my upper and lower teeth had jammed together permanently.
I bolted upright so fast my equilibrium went haywire. I covered my mouth with both hands to keep from saying several of my choicest swear words more than once.
Antagonizing the other girls more than I already had, especially in the middle of the night after such a long, exhausting day, wouldn’t win me any points. As much
at fault as I’d been, I needed to act civil—no matter what they thought of me.
Or I of them.
These eighteen-year-olds weren’t like the kids back home. I’d been naive enough to expect them to be similar—despite our denominational differences. Well, so much for love and forgiveness within the Christian family.
Christian unity? What’s that, Rob and Charlie?
As I sat on the blanket nursing my injuries, I breathed a quick prayer of thanks that my un-Christlike language apparently hadn’t awakened anyone, and then I added three postscripts of sincerest apology, one each to God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Although I detested my susceptibility to swearing, I was thankful God forgave that sin more easily than Mom and Dad ….
“Kim, what kind of example do you think you set for others—especially younger kids—when you talk like that? Do you want them to grow up thinking that’s the proper way for a Christian to speak? Yes, they’re just words, but are they the right words for a Christian to use? Jesus’ call to follow Him is an invitation to be your best. You never know whom you may offend or give the wrong impression to. You might even drive somebody away from Jesus with inappropriate word choices.”
I wished they’d reword that sermon. I’d heard it often enough I could say it along with them.
Oh, they were right about swearing being inappropriate, of course, although I thought anyone it might deter was in worse shape than I was. But I never argued with Mom and Dad. Not about swearing, anyhow. Why should I? Even I could see that it didn’t have any positive aspects.
But hearing filthy language off and on all day every day of my senior year hadn’t helped. I didn’t have the courage to complain to my schoolmates about the way they talked. So I let their words sink deep into my subconscious, take root there, and sprout as noxious weeds in an otherwise well-cultivated verbal garden.
Usually at the most inopportune times. Like at DFW this afternoon and just now when I bashed my head on the rock.