Ebenezer

 Here I raise my Ebenezer
Here there by Thy great help I've come

Above is a line from one of my favorite hymns, "Come Thou Fount". This idea of raising an Ebenezer, a stone to commemorate the great work of God, is important to me at this midpoint of my AmeriCorps service.

As I mentioned last week, my work has been difficult recently because I've not felt very connected to it. I often wonder what my loved ones pray for me because of how God gives me things I deeply need without recognizing the need until it's met. The need in this situation was to have compassion in my work; it's said faith without service is dead and service without love is meaningless. In the timeliest timeliness, the compassion in my heart for the refugee population I work with was awakened this week after attending a training put on by Catholic Charities Refugee Resettlement Service called, "In Their Shoes." The attendees and I went through a simulation of the refugee experience including the take-over of an opposing political party, choosing in 3 minutes 5 things to carry with you as you fled for safety, traveling around for weeks trying to find a safe country all the while having to give up these precious 5 items at various points, going through immigration and being told your papers were not real when they truly were, being separated from family, being imprisoned, the danger of being sold into human trafficking... it goes on and on. Following the simulation, we were presented with information about the specific services Catholic Charities provides for refugees resettling in Maine and what life is like for New Mainers.

When working with my students, many of whom lived in refugee camps, I often forget their history; they're like any average children and adolescents to me. Several of my students at the middle school recently won a poetry slam competition in which they performed poems about their refugee experience. I was honored to be able to hear them perform those poems again this week at a recognition ceremony for their victory in the competition. One boy talked about seeing his uncle shot while he hid under a bed; another about her father dying in the refugee camp after being sick for a year, leaving behind 10 daughters, 6 sons, and 3 wives; another about soldiers with guns entering her home while she and her baby sister hid under a couch. These are 7th and 8th grade students. I find myself wondering if it's a disservice to them to keep in my mind that they've experienced trauma or if it's a disservice to treat them as though nothing's happened in the attempt to give them a feeling of normalcy. What I take from this is a reminder of why this work is important beyond helping students perform well in school and go to college and get jobs and reach the American Dream; it's about upside-down-world justice for the foreigner and alien. I'm reminded of this scripture that my Guatemala Mission Team held as a central theme to our pre-trip study:

"This is the kind of fast day I'm after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I'm interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. . . If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims, quit gossiping about other people's sins, if you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight. I will always show you where to go. I'll give you a full life in the emptiest places- firm muscles, strong bones. You'll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry. You'll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You'll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community liveable again."

- Isaiah 58: 6-12

This promise is particularly invigorating in light of the homesickness, loneliness, and general difficulty I've been having lately. To have the knowledge that I'll have a full life in the emptiest places, which is how this place feels lately, is the greatest comfort. 

My homesickness led me to look through old pictures of good things that have happened in my life. When I got to my pictures of Guatemala, made all the more powerful by the fact that this year's Guatemala Mission Team is currently in Guate, I was reminded of why I care about working toward social justice and why I decided to do AmeriCorps in the first place. I'm going to make myself an Ebenezer photo album to keep handy for when I need to be reminded of how God has helped me so far.

In the struggle to find purposefulness, in the struggle to be a single young woman, in the struggle to be living in poverty, in the struggle to figure out where I ought to be next year, I am reassured.