When I assigned it a few years ago, I did the project alongside my students to give them an example. Revisiting it this month, it brought back some sweet memories, and so I've decided to post it here. Hopefully I can get students' permission to post a few excerpts from theirs as well soon.
Here's my dad's story, based on interviewing him about a topic related to my own story. I wrote in his voice, so "I" actually means my dad.
Feel Free to Invite Us Over
She thought I’d get over it.
My mom wasn’t crazy about me
spending a college summer break in Ecuador.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to pursue an engineering internship like my
friends? With only a year till
graduation, it was time to build connections with high-paying companies.
But my heart lay elsewhere. My faith had been growing the past few years,
and I wanted to act on it by telling others about Christ. I was also hungry for adventure: I’d never
left the country before, and I wanted to see something different.
You’d think my mom would understand
my passion – after all, she’d majored in romance languages and dreamed of
working for the UN as a translator.
Still, Ecuador made her nervous.
She hoped this would be enough of a taste to satisfy my curiosity in
time to start a “real job” and make decent money.
On my
team of five US college students, I was the only one with no Spanish skills – just
a few years’ worth of high school German.
Let me tell you, I spoke a lot of German to those Ecuadorians! Every night, in a little church in the big
city of Guayaquil, I taught the most advanced groups of English students. Students knew that along with grammar and
vocabulary, they were signing up to discuss the gospel message. In one of my courses, we even used the Bible
as our textbook: full of verb tense examples and new vocabulary, but also deep
philosophical questions.
A week
into our trip, the director came and made an announcement that Americans would
find offensive. “We want to get to know
you,” she told students, “so feel free to invite us over to your homes.” And they did!
There was a rule that we couldn’t go alone, so I visited many students’
homes with other teammates. We’d spend
hours with them, in English or Spanish depending on their ability, and at some
point we’d usually present the gospel.
Our hosts ranged from working-class
to quite wealthy. Their hospitality
varied accordingly, but usually included a sweet snack and Coke. Boy, did those Ecuadorians love their soft
drinks! Those were safer, though, than the
drinks people made us with fresh fruit and local tap water. So tasty...and yet resulting in so much
discomfort.
One time, instead of the usual store-bought
cake or cookies, a woman served us something unfamiliar.
“What’s this?”
“How you say in Eeen-glees? Cow een-test-teen.”
I shouldn’t have asked! Whatever it was, we always accepted it
gratefully and hoped for the best. Their
hospitality was so sincere and sometimes overwhelmingly gracious.
I made
it work without really knowing much Spanish, and yet it was sometimes pretty
frustrating. At those students’ homes
where they couldn’t speak much English, I was basically helpless. Reading was easier: I could figure out most
signs by the time I left. Sometimes we’d
visit churches with big youth groups, and the teens would come and try to talk
with us. I’d ask a teammate to translate
for me and a local, but the local would end up just chatting with the teammate,
while I was left out. I enjoyed practicing
the language, and I picked up a lot that summer, though not enough to follow their
more rapid conversations.
On
weekends, exotic destinations beckoned, like a river trip to view local
wildlife, or a village deep in the Andes Mountains where villagers hand-crafted
rocking chairs from leather and carved wood.
I took one back to the US and kept it for the next twenty years! In
those mountains, a missionary kid named Philip took us hiking. He tried to scare us with his wild driving
through the Andes, careening around corners and nearly flying off the
road. It didn’t work – we weren’t fazed
– but looking back, it’s probably because we were just as dumb as he was. Those mountain roads were awful, and a few
times, he lost control and lurched to a stop in the nick of time.
There
was plenty to see right in Guayaquil, too.
Iguanas would come up out of the river into our backyard. I can still hear the egg man coming down the
street with his sing-song call: “Huevos!
Hueeee-vos!” Other days, it would be the rattle of the trash collector
pushing a barrel on wheels. He’d
separate our heaps into bags: salvageable, food, just plain trash.
Going across town was an adventure
in itself. Those buses looked pregnant:
they’d take an old bus where the middle had rotted out, then build a
replacement middle, twice as big, out of wood or metal. I’d be crammed into the belly of the bus with
dozens of others, nervously watching for pickpockets slicing open my pocket so
my wallet would fall out. Good thing my
mom couldn’t see me on the bus. I would have been on the next flight home!
One
time, we visited Calle 25, a poor district where homes were on stilts over a
swamp. I was going door-to-door to
announce an evangelistic film that night.
I noticed a woman carrying a baby on her back, like a papoose, and
struggling to carry a large barrel. In
my broken Spanish, I asked if I could help, and she nodded. I ended up carrying it a few blocks to where
she was going, then used every ounce of my language skills to tell her about
the movie. “Tonight – come to movie –
hear about Jesus – please.” That night,
she came and found me there. Beaming, she
touched me on the shoulder and said, “Thank you for what you did. You helped me and I wanted to come see your
movie.” I was really touched.
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