Day Five--Mad Season

Mom, Dad and I got up early to go to something called Hip-Hop Worship. It was in a hotel down the street, so we grabbed breakfast and headed down. It was in their grand ballroom, and it was packed. I got a seat (on the floor, and I had to fight even for that), then spotted six or seven people wearing Save Darfur t-shirts. For those of you who don't know, I've been pretty seriously involved in the Genocide Intervention Network, 1-800-GENOCIDE and Save Darfur for about a year. I call my senators and representatives just about every week to ask them to vote for anti-genocide legislation, I donate, I sign petitions, that kind of thing. For my sweet 16, I had a Darfur-themed party and raised money instead of getting presents. So I went over and talked to them.

As it turns out, it was a youth group and their pastor from somewhere in the Midwest, but about 40% of their congregation (including the kids at the conference) are refugees from Darfur. I talked to their pastor a little and shook hands with a girl named Christina, who was from Darfur. She seemed really cool. Their pastor told me her father was shot in front of her at age five. In light of that, dedicating my silly little birthday party to the cause didn't seem as impressive as I'd always thought it was. That realization was definitely a much-needed lesson in humility.

Feeling that very weird feeling you get when something has just happened that can only be the work of God in your life, I went to go back to my seat. Then their pastor came after me and asked me to sit with them--they had saved a seat for a kid who decided to sleep in. (It was 7:30 AM, I don't blame him.) So I got the opportunity to worship with three kids from Darfur. I stepped on Christina's foot during one of the songs and spent a good part of the rest of the service berating myself for my clumsiness. The service was really cool, though, I bought the CD when it was over.

We got the rest of the group and headed over to the convention center. The Interaction Day is what we had been looking forward to for most of the week, and we weren't disappointed. We got into this huge hall--and when I say huge, I mean the size of an aircraft hangar--and it was packed with all these different things you could do. I didn't really see enough of it, because I kind of hunkered down in one place when I found something fun, so there's a ton of stuff that was there that I'm leaving out, but trust me, it was awesome.

So we all went our separate ways with instructions to meet back at the FEMA trailer (the room was so large that they could fit a FEMA trailer in there without batting an eyelash... then again, that's not saying much as FEMA trailers are tiny). I eschewed the climbable attractions and the ziplines in favor of the more subdued activities. There was a cool thing that Habitat for Humanity was doing where kids could help build walls and framework for a house that would be transported and given to a family. I kept going until I found what I was really looking for--arts and crafts. Yes, in the middle of a hall of wonders that the ELCA must have poured tens of thousands into, I spent at least an hour and a half sitting on the floor and making bracelets out of hemp. Whatever, they were really cool-looking and I got to talk to some cool people.

After I had made enough jewelry to bedeck the whole family, I headed down to see a big portion of the space dedicated to a store called The Old Lutheran that was selling all these cute Lutheran t-shirts. (Example: You Might Be A Lutheran If... and 'I Dig Organ Music.') I headed down further to see a place with a bunch of tents sent up. The tents had light lines drawn on them in chalk, creating a grid. We were supposed to paint cool stuff on them, and it'd be sent to Darfur for refugees. I spent a good twenty minutes painting little inspirational messages on the tents, even though I knew full well not many of the recipients would be able to read English very well. I was also a little amused by the number of people who painted crosses on their squares, seeing as something like 95% of the population of Sudan (the country of which Darfur is a province) is Muslim. Imagine if you were in a refugee camp and you got a bunch of tents that had crescents all over them. You'd probably appreciate the gesture, but think it a little misguided all the same. Well, I hope the paint job will brighten the camps they go to all the same.

I walked by a bunch of other cool things (one example--a display of how much water on the face of the earth is salt water, and how much is frozen, and how much is unavailable, and how very little is available for human use in the form of 100 gallons. So there was a huge tub of the salt water, three buckets of the frozen water, another bucket of the unavailable water, and a Dixie cup of the available-for-consumption water. Scary.) Then I checked out the FEMA trailer--about half the size of our RV, I can't imagine how people could live in one of a year--and found Mom and Dad. Apparently, I was a good half hour late. Whoops.

The speakers were Donald Miller (yay!), a lady who helped prostitutes get off the streets (yay, but she talked really slow), and another lady who talked about the Earth and how awesome God's imagination is. She was really cool. I thought from her little bio-thing in the guidebook that I wouldn't like her, but I guess you never know.

The Flying Karmozov Brothers performed--the guys who make Jerry's jacked 'disappear' on Seinfeld!--and so did the fiddle-playing girl from Hurricane on the Bayou. She was amazing. She made me want to play fiddle. (I am going to learn how to play mandolin next year, though. I've got it all worked out. Watch your back, Chris Thile.)

We went to an event called Gathering Idol at the Hilton and hung out for a while, then realized that this was the last night we'd have in the city and all felt a little depressed. But then we had a very meaningful Final 15 devotional and went to bed feeling a lot better. For once, I managed to sleep through the night.

Day Four—Rock You Like A Hurricane

We got a late start and went to the convention center for Learning Day. And, no offense to Learning Day, but it was kind of boring. We made some postcards, did a workshop about our aspirations and made plegdes to do some sort of good deed, and then went to a forum about how to be a Christian in a non-Christian world. That actually was pretty cool. I met a cool kid form Minnesota named Nicole and we prayed about situations in our life where we need courage. She is a lot braver than I am, I’ll say that much.

Because we got stamps from all three sections of our activies, we were entitled to a bandana from the ELCA. We trekked across half the convention center to get them and then took a picture with them to show how ganster we were.

It seems to me that the third day of a convention is the day when you start losing energy, and that was definitely true of our trip. I started freaking out because Mom and Dad wanted to eat in the convention center and I really wanted to go outside and get out of the freezing air conditioning. I think my hysteria was excacerbated the fact that I hadn’t really eaten a full meal in two days and I had woken up four or five time that night due to being cold. Mom, Dad, and everyone else pretty much ignored my freaking out and ate inside anyway. I got a hold of myself and maintained my composure until we got to Riverwalk and started looking at masks and other Mardi Gras stuff. Then I started to fall to pieces because I couldn’t see the point of us wasting our time in tourist traps when there was so much cool stuff to do.Then Dad said we were going to get some Hadgen Dazs, nevermind that we had just eaten less then twenty minutes ago and the ice cream line was at least 25 people deep. I sat down on the sidewalk and tried, ineffectively, to calm down. It didn’t help that Justin came over next to me and started telling me everything I never wanted to know about Resident Evil 4. I turned my face to the wall and feigned sleep to try to get a few minutes to myself, to limited success. I realized that I’d have to take it up a notch if I really wanted to be left alone, and pulled my hat over my face. I don’t know what it was, but then I just completely broke down and started crying in the middle of the Riverwalk mall.

After a few minutes, I felt a little better and was ready to rejoin the world at large. I took my hat off and asked the group if anybody really wanted to go to the Garden District, which was our plan for later that day. Nobody wanted to, so we went back to the hotel to hang out until it was time to go to the Superdome. Jimmy and I sat in the lobby and played a few hands of poker, but it was kind of boring because it was just the two of us. (Emily wasn’t playing because she was on the computer and Justin was swimming.) We decided to ask the bartender if he wanted to play a hand, seeing as he had absolutely nothing to do. He played quite a few hands with us and got us a bunch of waters and stuff.

The speakers that evening at the Superdome were awesome. The first was a guy named Spencer West who had his legs amputated at age five due to a muscle disease. He talked about how important it was to take your challenges as they come and the value of standing up for what you believe in. Then he asked us to stand up if we believed that we could make a difference in the world. Everybody stood up, and he jumped out of his wheelchair and stood on his hands. Then he said, “This is 38,000 people standing up for what they believe” and everybody cheered like crazy. He jumped back into his wheelchair (though it looked more like he was flying than jumping, his arms were that strong) and wheeled off the stage.

The next speaker was a former child soldier named Michel Chikwaine. He was pretty cool, although his story was very brutal. Then he said that when he first visited New Orleans right after Katrina, he was reminded of the refugee camps he had lived in as a child and how we needed to spread the wealth and take care of each other more.

Then this band Skillet started playing. Apparantly, they’re some big deal, and Justin loved them, but I wasn’t really impressed, so I left before the second set, along with Jimmy, Emily, and Dad.

Once we got back to the hotel (after a quick, desperately-needed bathroom break at the Holiday Inn), we went upstairs for the dance. We hung out for a little while, but the people there were dancing kind of… how can I say this…un-Christianly and we couldn’t really talk because the music was so freakin’ loud, so we went downstairs and Jimmy bought everybody nightcaps from our friend Eric the Bartender. (Jimmy cannot hold on to money. It burns a hole in his pocket. He’s bought Emily and I more gum, Chapstick, and Vitamin Waters in the past week than our parents have in a month. He is incredibly generous.) The kids got virgin Hurricanes, Dad got a scotch, and Mom got a beer. (Oh no, Lutherans drinking!) Jimmy then took a sip of water and made a face, commenting that the water tasted like mud after the Hurricane. We thought about that for a second. “The water tastes like mud after the hurricane,” he said. “Wow, that is really tragic when you think about it.”