Greece, Day 21: When is the Time

I am on the flight from Athens to Paris,
after 5 hours sleep the previous two nights,
and I just wish for quiet.

She asks me if I was in Athens, my neighbor does.
and I want to deflect, to end, to head off….
I know that my honest answer will fail to do so.

"I was in Lesvos",
prompting an immediate and vague understanding of why I was in Greece.

And we talked, reluctantly talked…
of my time in Greece, her adult children in Paris,
"we were so scared... It could have been them."

Acknowledging that the world is seeing the best and the worst of humanity. Acknowledging that no one is quite sure of the answers,
of how to handle the events we face,
events beyond our choosing.

My mind wanders to the mass of young children who came across the waters these past few days.
Toddlers and 6 year-olds who cannot swim,
being led by parents who cannot swim,
what would bring me to this state, this point of risk with my family?
A risk I don’t begin to comprehend, one I have never faced.

I take my first steps of processing what I was a part of,
what I saw.

When in the midst of my work, I am a taskmaster.
A problem solving engineer focused on
providing the background music,
helping with the setting…
around the refugees,
but not often directly engaged with them.
Focusing on the immediate needs rather than the situation.

But now I am here,
seeing the refugees in my mind's eye more clearly than when I was in their midst.

I don't want to think about this.
I am not ready to be an ambassador when I return home.
I have no more answers than you.

Maybe my experience helps me understand better;
maybe it blinds me in return.

I made it through the conversation with the lovely Parisian,
resolved to talk and listen with empathy.

Now is the time for me to be home,
to bring this experience home with me,
to let it be a part of who I am becoming,
as we are all becoming who we will be.

Greece, Day 16: Janitorial Engineer

If you had asked me to predict the top 5 things I would be spending my time on…
no, the top 10 things…
heck, if you had asked me to list my job responsibilities until late into the evening, the point of the day where you get silly, get creative, think outside the box…
even in this moment I would never have predicted that the most critical,
most time-consuming,
most obnoxious part of my days would center on my unplanned role as a Janitorial Engineer.

Imagine you’re a Syrian for a moment.
you make your journey through Turkey,
pay your money to a fly-by-night boat sales company,
land in a strange land, full of an even stranger assortment of Westerners, half hippy, half evangelical, half professional disaster-chasers,
get pulled out of the water,
grab a change of clothes,
get a banana, water bottle, and HEB (high-energy-bar),
and finally sit down for a moment to relax,
to breath in the safe air,
an incomplete trip to be sure, but one that has crossed a critical juncture,
and you close your tired eyes, relax, and breath.

Until your bladder interrupts. Or even worse, your colon.

You get up, take your bag of belongings with you,
and find the loo.
What is that!?!
How does it work?
Do I climb up on it?
Surely they don’t expect me to put my arse on it!?!

I don’t actually have video evidence to corroborate what is occurring behind closed doors, but I believe it involves something along the lines of this:

Which is not as easy at it looks,
as found out through the various broken parts and pieces damaged on our watch (well, not ‘watch’).

I’m not even going to mention the introduction of toilet paper, which, let me tell you, isn’t as intuitive as you may assume.

And given that our toilets are trailer-park quality plastic (literally a single wide of toilets), it doesn’t take much to break them.

Imagine if you had a giant box of cereal with a give-away plastic toy inside, except that the toy was a CPT (cheap plastic toilet).
You love cereal, so you eat lots of it.
You keep collecting these CPTs until they fill a corner of your house, 12 of them,
and finally your mom nags you to get rid of them,
because, seriously, why would you need 12 CPTs in the first place? Three, maybe four at the most.

So you donate your CPT collection to an Assembly Camp that has 1,000 plus different people each day run through the property,
people who have never seen a western toilet,
who have GOT TO GO, but don’t know how…

It is not difficult to predict how things turn out for the CPTs.
They are quickly reduced from the pride of one serious cereal-eating fool,
to a series of daily repairs,
daily phone calls from a dozen volunteers to the one person they know who loves toilets: their Uncle Alan.

So here I am, me and my WASH team, fixing what we can, ignoring what we can get away with, trying to keep the trailer park of CPT’s functioning, which turns out to be a full-time job for a Helluva Janitorial Engineer.

And as I write this, a newly-arrived refugee is opening a Western-world toilet stall door for the first time to find an elevated toilet. They will pause, decide if they really need to go, and be forced by the natural functions of their body to make do, climb aboard, and take aim.

Don’t worry, we’ll be there tomorrow morning to fix it.

Greece, Day 13: Bend Until I Break

Your willingness to adapt to your surroundings, and
be adaptable to the continual changes you face
is and always will be of value in life.

This is particularly true when you are placed in moments of
increased needs,
limited resources, and
an all-encompassing lack of time.

You plan,
you plan the day,
you plan the day the night before,
and again that morning,
and again when you receive the unplanned text,
and again when you answer the critical yet unwelcome phone call,
and again when you find yourself short,
short on cash,
or drivers,
or vehicles,
or the wisdom to intelligently act,
or patience.

You begin to wonder what the purpose of all of this planning,
of your failed attempts to comprehend the tasks before you,
knowing that the simple becomes ridiculously complex,
that which should take but a moment finds a way to take a day.
like tying your shoes with gloves on.

And for one who prides himself on efficiency and decisiveness,
regardless of my stubborn unwillingness to go down, get tired, be outworked or outmatched,
I can be bent until I break.

These few days have been unusually hard. I have faced one too many challenges, and somewhere along the way lost
my patience,
my flexibility,
my adaptability.

And in the fog, I countered this with
frustration,
pride,
self-importance, and
judgments toward others.

I get a lot of accolades for this work. People compliment and pat my back. It can puff me up and cause me to lose the reason I am here, the connection between who God made me to be and how that is borne out in my work.

But in a bit of brilliant irony, God humbles me from my heights, lets me fail in my person while succeeding in my actions, such that people may be served by God through me, while I am left beating my chest in supplication for requested forgiveness. Wicked smart.

A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out,
till he has brought justice through to victory.
In his name the nations will put their hope.