Day Four--School's Out For Summer

We woke up at five-thirty on our ServantLife day. Since we slept on the ground, I had woken up three or four five times during the night. We pulled on our fluorescent-orange ServantLife t-shirts (I don't know what yahoo decided to make the shirts a color nobody looks good in) and rolled out to the convention center. We waited a long time, then got on the buses and waited some more. We struck up a conversation with the bus driver, Jack from Wyoming. He took us a mile or two out of town and dropped us off. All six busloads of orange-clad Lutherans got off and started swarming around the elementary school we were supposed to be painting. There was no one there to meet us or tell us what to do. The front doors were locked. I found a way in the back and Dad went in and looked around. There was no one in there either, but he said it was pretty rough, the worst school he'd seen, even. Finally a guy named Troy found us and took us to the playground (or, more accurately, the asphalt lot with a playplace sticking out of it) and gave us a motivational pep talk. We grabbed our brushes and went into our assigned classroom.

The school wasn't awful. It was workable, but not much more than that. It was kind of dirty and really old and run-down-looking. Wait, I know exactly how to describe it. My high school is under construction, and there are sections of it that are really old and about to be replaced. Because the kids and teachers know it's about to be destroyed and rebuilt all shiny and wonderful, they don't bother picking anything up, and they don't bother fixing any broken cabinet doors or desks or whatever. They just break everything and get everything dirty and don't bother fixing it up. And it was exactly like that.

We got up to the third floor and got to our room. First, we had to get all the staples and tape off the wall. That was more problematic than it sounds, because there were literally hundreds of staples in the walls and we didn't have any way to get them our other than our fingers. Some of them had been in that wall for decades and were not coming out in a hurry. We finally figured to used the corner of paint scrapers, but we didn't have enough scrapers, a fact that would haunt us for the rest of the day. When we got all the staplers out, we started scraping paint off the walls and doors, a task that took the rest of the morning. It was kind of boring and definitely strenuous work. There were at least six distinct layers of paint. And after it was all scraped, it had to be washed off so we wouldn't be painting dirt onto the walls.

We talked to Troy, the guy who was running the operation. He told us he used to be a ninth-grade science teacher, but he was attacked by a student in class and ended up waking up in the hospital. He decided to get out of teaching and started working on the schools themselves. He said that the painting was really important because the colors and the care taken in the painting made the school seem like a school and not a prison, hospital, or mental asylum like it used to.

We went to get lunch and they didn't have any veggie subs, so Troy's vegetarian friend took pity on me and gave me an extra PB&J she had packed. Then we got back to work.

We finished scraping and broke out the paint. I also went to the bathrooms (I couldn't see how those little girls in elementary school managed to write so high up on the wall, much less know the things they wrote about.) Then when I walked back, I saw no less than six kids scraping paint off one door. It made me want to crack a joke: "How many Lutherans does it take it scrape a door?"

We started painting, which was awesome, because we got to see the fruit of our labors. All the scraping started to seem less laborious when we saw how nice our classroom was. At two, we packed it in and started cleaning the brushes and straightening the rooms. A couple of people started a game of pick-up basketball with one of the volunteers. It was pretty awful--just the way I liked it. That was, I feel like I'm an asset to my team, rather than a liability.

After we got back to the hotel (Jimmy talked the bus driver into dropping us off at our corner), we hung out until dinner, when we went to a pretty nice place. The food was great. It was the first square meal I'd gotten since we've been in New Orleans--this city is really unfriendly to vegetarians.

Because we were running late, we had to take a cab, Jimmy's first-ever cab ride. It was pretty cool. The driver was very talkative. See, we're supposed to talk to people and learn their stories, then take it back home with us. So far, though, not many people have been real chatty.

The speakers that night were really good. There was a guy who had been raised in a hellfire-and-damnation church and started doubting his faith, but really discovered who God was and got ordained as a pastor. Then we heard from a lady from Africa who had started a program called 10,000 Girls, this really cool organization that helps girls get through school. It's doubled the graduation rate of girls in her country. How cool is that? Anyway, I think she was the best speaker so far, but they were all phenomenal.

We left the Superdome after hearing an awesome band called Group1Crew and headed over to what was called "the Fun Room" or something like that. It was at the Hilton (a fact that led to a spirited debate about the relative merits of Paris Hilton and her Disney doppleganger, London Tipton), and there were so many people trying to get to the same place that they shut down the escalators and made people walk.

I listened to the dueling pianos for the first twenty minutes, though the second half of the duel hadn't showed, so it was just piano. Then I went to find Emily and Jimmy. They were standing in line for mechanical bull riding. They were taking bets on bragging rights on how long they could stay on. I didn't want to do it at all, but then Jimmy remarked that it would look really bad if Emily, the dancer and volleyball player, went for it, but I, the black belt and rock climber, chickened out. I won't say they made me do it--I don't really believe people can be made to do anything--but I will say there was peer pressure involved. Anyway, after we saw a bunch of people fall off in what looked like horribly painful fashions, Emily went up and stayed on for 16 seconds, a very respectable score, considering that you were only allowed to hold on with one hand. I went into the ring and stared the plastic bull in the eye. Thanking heavens for my horseback riding experience, I got into the saddle with some measure of grace and gave the ride operator the thumbs-up.

After one close call, I fell off at 20 seconds, although I probably would have worked harder to stay on if I hadn't already beaten Emily's time. I gave my friends high-fives and Jimmy entered the ring. He stayed on for a full three seconds before falling off. It was one of the funniest things I've seen in my life. Sad but true.

Day Three--Stories

The first story the brothers told us was about a time they were building a school in the Andes and they ran out of time and couldn't finish the school in time. They told the elder of the town that they'd come back later to finish it, and she said, "it's no problem, I'll call a minga." They didn't know what she was talking about. She went outside and shouted "MINGA!" at the top of her lungs. People in other villages across the mountain range heard her and passed along the message. People from miles and miles around dropped everything they were doing, walked hours to get there, and helped finish the school without asking for so much as a word of gratitude. He said the closest way they could describe it was "a riot for good." He said our culture has words for what's important to it, like money and cars. How many synonyms do we have for the word 'car'? But we don't even have anything close for 'minga.'

Then he told us a story about a young man named Santosh. He was the student council president of his high school in Sierra Lione. Hi school was invaded by anti-government soldiers. They took the teachers out back and shot them. Then they took all the kids into the auditorium and gave them a choice. The first option was to join the militia group. To be initiated, they would have to come up on stage and get a small cut made on their temple. Then the militia leaders would put some brown-brown (a mix of cocaine and gunpowder) into the cut. The brown-brown would make them emotionally unstable. Then a member of the militia would take them to their home and force them to shoot their mother and father. They did this so that the kids could never go back home once they had joined the militia.

The other choice was equally simple and equally dreadful. They could come up on stage and have their right hand cut off by a machete. The soldiers did this so that the kids could never join a government army--they could never pull a trigger.

Santosh walked to the front of the auditorium and said, "Mr. Rebel Leader, I am the student council president, so I am in charge of these students." He put his right hand on the desk at the front of the auditorium. The rebel leader was so mad he chose a dull machete on purpose. It took two strokes to sever his hand completely. Santosh ran out of the auditorium and through the night to reach the border, where UN troops managed to save his life.

When they met him, they asked him how he could continue to afford school. He took them to the back of his house and showed him beautiful carvings he had made. He did them all left-handed.

Then they said, "Santosh, that must have been the hardest, most painful decision you ever had to make." He said, "no, telling them to chop off my hand wasn't the hardest, most painful decision I ever had to make. Last week, I saw the rebel leader in the market. Holding out my left hand to shake his right hand as a gesture of forgiveness was the hardest thing I ever had to do."

They told us if he had the courage to do that, we could have the courage to do all things.

Day Three--We Will Rock You

Mom woke us up early and we went into the city around nine-thirty. We checked in at the convention, a process that took several long hours. Our parents abandoned us for an hour for an orentation. We stood in an awkward semicircle for several minutes when we noticed a few people playing cards. Emily and I argued in hushed tones for a few moments about whether or not somebody should go over there and talk to them. Finally, I got up enough courage to give it a shot. They invited me to play and asked where I was from, but I didn't really start to feel like I was one of them until they started quoting Charlie the Unicorn. It was great. It seems like most Lutheran youth have exactly my sense of humor. Emily heard somebody call their cell phone 'a decroded piece of crap' a la Napoleon Dynamite. Seriously. These are my kind of people.

They gave us a pin for their church, and somebody else gave us Mardi Gras beads for telling us where we were from and what our church's name was. Not to mention, we got a free bag and Bible from the ELCA, as well as a t-shirt to wear on our ServantLife day. I think they gave us a t-shirt so we couldn't complain about getting our good shirts dirty. Only time will tell.

We ate lunch at Mother's Restaurant. We had a twenty or thirty-minute wait outside the restaurant in the blazing Louisianna summer sun, but it was worth it (for everybody else, at least. They didn't have any vegetarian food, because authentic Creole food is not authentic until smothered in seafood, so they gave me a bowl of rice. Our waitress did offer to make me a cheese sandwich, though. That was pretty nice of her.)

We went on a ferry across the Mississippi to Algiers island and I talked to a girl from South Dakota. She gave me a pin as well. Cool, huh?

EVERYBODY in New Orleans was wearing a matching t-shirt. EVERYBODY. Like, you couldn't look around without seeing thirty or so people in the same t-shirt. It was then that I knew we needed matching t-shirts. So, we went down to Walgreens and bought six for eleven dollars. I wanted to get them in a color, but all they had was plain white tees. Since we were using Sharpies to color them, white was probably the smartest choice for a t-shirt, but I was a little disappointed all the same.

I went back to the room and started making the t-shirts. I only managed to make two--Emily's and Mom's--before we had to leave, but they looked awesome. On the front, there's an arrow out of duct tape, pink for girls, green for guys. Underneath it says "I'm with Jesus." On the back, it has the name of the person, jersey-style. Below Emily's name, it says "Jesus, Justice, Jazz." Below Mom's, it has the logo for the event, with the cross standing out of the hurricane. They look awesome, I can't wait to wear them.

The opening ceremonies in the Superdome were beyond amazing. Even the walk there was awesome, swarms of people in multicolored shirts converging on one block. We had to wait a really long time to get in--getting 37,000 people in a building is no easy feat--but it was totally worth it. The place was packed. Picture the Coliseum. Now, picture all the seats inside. Picture people in every seat, cheering crazily. For Jesus. That's kind of what it's like.

One important detail--there were probably fifteen screens of varying sizes playing Bible verses, lyrics to songs, and close-ups of what was going on below. In the middle of all the screens, there was a cross, probably two hundred feet tall.

It started out with a couple of singers. My favorite song was "I Get Down." The lyrics went, "I get down, and He lifts me up" over and over again. The dance was crouching down, then throwing your hands up in the air on "He lifts me up." It was incredible to look out in the crowd and see a wall of people doing the motion.

The presiding Bishop came onto the stage in an automated bathtub, dressed in a bathrobe, ostenibly because he had been doing service work all the way down there and had been in the shower when it was his turn to speak. (It was hilarious. "Rub-a-dub-dub, our Bishop's in a tub.") He gave a speech about how important our work was and challenged us to take it home with us. A lady named Liz, who had built 220 homes for New Orleans residents, gave a speech about how important our service work was. A pair of brothers who ran a really cool program building schools in Africa told us two really cool stories. I'll put those in a seperate post.

Then all the lights went off and some bright strobe lights started flashing. We heard people doing "stomp-stomp-clap" ala 'We Will Rock You." Before three repetitions could go by, the entire stadium was doing it. The huge cross burst into light. A group came out and started singing a song called "We Will Love You." You can't imagine how powerful it was to feel the floor under your feet shaking from the vibrations of nearly forty thousand people stomping, clapping, and singing. It was the most intense experince I'm ever had.

We left the stadium en masse singing and laughing. We got into an empty Chinese restaurant and ordered before the placed filled up. Mom had some trouble getting her order, but apart from that, it was great.

Emily and I had to sleep on the floor because the hotel ran out of rooms with two queen beds, but we were so exhausted we didn't really care. It was a good day.

Day Two--On The Road Again

[FYI--we ran out of gas money, but we managed to fix the RV so it'll run off of comments. Help us along, won't you?]

We passed through Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Not much of great incidence happened on the road, I'm sorry to report. Dad, Jimmy, Emily and I played 5-card draw and Dad cleaned us all out. However, we did stop at a Southern convenience story in Alabama. It was a whole 'nother world. For starters, there was an ice chest full of beer, wine, and Captain Morgan's in the very front of the store. It was all in to-go cans...which only let us to assume that it was meant to be drunk immediately after purchase, which is creepy when you consider that it was a gas station.

But the wonders of the Southern convenience store didn't stop there. There was, once again, a walk-in beer cave. In the CONVENIENCE STORE. And this was a nice convenience store, too, not some creepy place with drug dealers on the corner. They also had a jar full of "semi-boneless" pigs' feet right next to the beef jerky. Probably because of all the beer, the counter was protected by a sheet of bulletproof glass with closeable windows.

Jimmy had some money burning a hole in his pocket, so he bought me a stick of chapstick and bought some poppycock to share. Poppycock is like crackerjack but it has caramel-covered almonds instead of chocolate-covered peanuts. Don't worry, it's not some kind of alcoholic beverage...although think he could have gotten away with buying it.

[We have some pictures of the wondrous Chevron gas station, which we'll share as soon as we can figure out how to upload them.]

Life was pretty quiet until we reached Lake Pontchartrain. Then I amazed Jimmy by reading 200 pages of 'Salem's Lot in three hours and told Justin off for talking incessantly about Mardi Gras and immediately felt bad about it (though not bad enough to flash him.)

Once we got into the city, things started to get more interesting. There were abandoned hurricane-destroyed buildings sitting side-by-side with new developments. It was weird. But the weirdness of that was far eclipsed by us seeing a hooker on the sidewalk four blocks from our campground.

The campsite was not the best. It was pretty much a parking lot with trees, and there were people towards the end of the lot who were definitely residents. The owner had a long conversation with my mom, only some of which I heard. Apparently, he returned to his house after the flood and found it burned and looted. With the money he got from FEMA, he set up this campsite/trailer park. He was a really nice guy, and I feel very safe leaving our RV in his care.

We ate dinner and wrote the first of our postcards. (For those of you who donated to the cause, you'll be getting one sooner or later.)

After much debate, we decided to go into the city. As soon as we were out of the car, Dad warned us all that somebody would come up to us, tell us he could tell us were we got our shoes, then tell us we had our shoes on our feet in Louisiana on Bourbon Street, then ask us for money. I rolled my eyes. Then we passed a knot of people with one guy in the middle saying, "...on your feet, in Louisiana on Bourbon Street!"

"Oh my gosh, he's psychic!" we whispered. Then he started following us, which really creeped us out.

We walked around for quite some time looking for a restaurant to get dessert in the French Quarter. There were plenty of options, but not many that would admit under-eighteens. Jimmy and I found what we here sure was a hash den. It was full of low-slung couches and people laughing hysterically for no reason. Suspicious.

Oh, just so you know--the place was TEEMING with Lutherans. Everywhere you look, Lutherans. You could tell. The men were wearing bright Hawaiian shirts and sandals, sometimes with socks. The women were generally shortish and roundish and had shortish, roundish hair. The kids...well, they all looked, talked, and walked exactly like me. And they outnumbered locals twenty to one. Lutherans everywhere. It was strange. It was like walking into a city of clones. For the first time, I started to get really excited about the trip. We also ran into the W-boro Lutherans by pure chance, which was kind of surreal.

We got dessert, and Justin got a half-pound of shrimp. Then we headed home.

Day One--Beat It

Jimmy is reading over my shoulder and will probably be making a lot of snide comments, so please excuse if this entry is weird.

We started out at the crack of nine o'clock, after everybody had hung around our house and waited for half an hour. Oddly, the trip got off without a hitch. We didn't hit any dogs or anything. After an hour or two on the road, Emily got out her laptop so I could get some work done on my new story. Unfortunately, she then felt that she was entitled to look over my shoulder and make fun of my characters. My ego irreplaceably damaged, I choked back tears, put the laptop away, and took up Jimmy on his suggestion to teach us how to play five-card draw.

Five-card draw took a good two and a half hours of our day, especially because Emily kept looking at my cards, but the whole game changed when we started betting. Of course, we weren't betting anything--we were using BananaGrams as chips, consonant worth five, vowels worth ten--but even betting BananaGrams brought out a whole new aspect of the game. It was fun... but I definitely can see how people get addicted to gambling. I think you'll never have a problem if you never bet anything more valuable than vowels and consonants, though, never fear.

We stopped and ate lunch, which was even less interesting than it sounds. It was, however, delicious.

Dad broke out the guitars and we spent another good bit of time playing guitar. Jimmy taught me how to play the intro to "Dueling Banjos." If you ask me, that is worth the price of admission right there.

I read a little and crocheted a little. It's funny how when you're traveling, the minutes drag but the hours fly. Before I knew it, we were in Tennesee and had been on the road for a good eight hours.

I complained about being bored, so Dad suggested we tell a round-robin story. It started off with a fictional Jimmy and his friends creating gold by burning old furniture and ended with the ghost of Michael Jackson facing off with *NSYNC. You want to know the worst part? It was still boring.

We four kids played a game called Blokus, which is like Tetris, only with four people and in reverse. Justin compared the relative merits of each of the five Resident Evil games and the weapons therein for the better part of the late afternoon.

Just when we were starting to get restless, we made it into the campsite. However, the fun didn't stop there. Our Subaru Forester got a dead battery and required pushing from the entrance to the campsite. (However, as Jimmy remarked, everybody secretly wants to push a car at some point in their lifetime, and we all jumped at the chance.) After that fiasco was taken care of, Justin and I scouted out the camping grounds. I was looking for some rocks big enough to climb and lamenting that I'd left my climbing shoes at home, and Justin was search for a game hall. A video game hall, to be precise. He seemed to be operating under the not-quite-correct assumption that the rural campsites of the American Heartland are teeming with video game halls. I thought it kinder not to correct him. Even if you never find the Holy Grail, isn't it the journey that counts?

Emily wasn't feeling well and Dad and I made a Tylenol run. We followed the TomTom past two different mini-mart gas stations that were built about thirty feet away from each other. I never understand when I see two gas stations side-by-side. That's like building a Target at the same mall as a K-Mart, it just doesn't make sense. The two gas stations were on opposite sides of the spectrum of the gas-station-niceness-scale, however: one was shiny, clean Mega-Star, the other looked like the kind of place where you could go in the back and buy crystal meth. It was a charming little dichotomy. I wondered if there was a rivalry between the two stores or if the coexisted peacefully.

We followed the TomTom, which led us down a dark alley of abandoned warehouses, restaurant-supply stores, and self-storage centers. I fully expected to drive straight into a Steven King novel, it was that kind of place--nothing in-your-face creepy about it, but a little off all the same. We got to the store in question and found it closed, so our only option was to go back to the convince stores.

"Which do you want to go to, the Mega-Star or the other one?" my dad asked.
"The other one," I answered immediately. "It looks more interesting."
"It looks a little seedy to me," he said, as he turned in and the entire wall devoted to alcoholic beverages came into view.
"That's what makes it interesting," I said.

I had to wait in the car while the engine was running because we had run into so much trouble jumping the battery once we pushed the car to the campsite, but I wished I had the chance to go in. I saw from the window something advertised as the "Walk-In Beer Cave." I think I'd really like to see some of the people who frequent a store with a Walk-In Beer Cave. I think it would have been quite the experience.

We got the Tylenol and went back to our campsite, and that's when we ran into trouble. We were in the middle of dinner when an RV drove up and a guy got out of it and told us we were in his campsite. The campsite we booked was two spots down. He asked us to move, which seems like a reasonable request on the surface, until you consider the facts. All he had at the campsite in question were three candles on the picnic table and two pieces of wood in the camp ring. My family, on the other hand, had to bring all our dinner dishes inside in a hurry, move Jimmy and Justin's tent, move our car, and disconnect all the wires to and from the RV, then reconnect them at the other campsite. Which we did.

Well. Um, I guess I should give the guy the benefit of the doubt. But when I meet a person who thinks it makes sense to make a family move their tent, car, and RV from Campsite 1 to Campsite 2 when all they would have to do to take Campsite 2 is move three small candles off the picnic table, well, I start to doubt the wisdom of holding popular elections.

Tell My Mother, Tell My Father

So, tomorrow is the Big Day. Tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, we are Moving Out. I have my packing done, mostly, but I still have some entertainment items to bring. I need to grab our RISK game board, a crapload of books, every Wii game we own, our chess set (Jimmy and I are planning to get really smart at chess over the trip and come back and amaze our friends and family), and put a bunch of new music and stuff on my Zune.

I've also been listening to Shinedown, Justin's favorite band, to try and get in the mood for the trip. Justin promised to bring several Shinedown CDs so we could suffer--I mean, enjoy--the band's best music all the way down to New Orleans. I don't know if Shinedown is prolific enough to have 16 hours of music, but I certainly don't think I want to find out. I've been listening to "Second Chance" by Shinedown--the only song of their's I have--to psych myself up, but the more I listen to it, the more I hate it. The lyrics are pretty cool ("even the man in the moon disappeard/somewhere in the stratosphere"), but the song has no real beat. That's all I really need out of a song, a good beat. That's the only common feature between my two current favorite songs, "Single Ladies" by Beyonce and "Smooth Criminal" by Alien Ant Farm.

Jimmy said that "Second Chance" is actually not one of Shinedown's better songs, it's just the most popular. I hope he's right. Sorry, Justin, but I hate your band.




Further Listening:
Compare:
Single Ladies
Smooth Criminal

Contrast:
Second Chance