by Roger Bruner
Although mission trips should be a time of spiritual and emotional growth, hormones—even properly disciplined hormones—can block the way to more eternal goals. To poorly paraphrase a famous evangelist: On a mission trip, kids are apt to fall in lust, not in love.
And that’s not counting the impracticality of maintaining a long-distance relationship afterward. How many missiontrip romances have died from the truth of the song that says something about loving whoever a person’s with when he’s not with the person he loves?
If Geoff understood the dangers of mission-trip romances, he ignored them. Nothing kept him from using a contemporary version of the caveman-with-a-club method to attract my attention. If I’d met Geoff closer to home; if he’d been slower, subtler, and more subdued in his approach; if he’d shown some genuine interest in me as a person, he would have been irresistible.
Regardless of his low GWTW quotient.
If I had one reason to believe I meant more to him than fresh meat, I might have ignored my observations about mission-trip romances and fallen hard.
But he didn’t meet any of my most essential criteria, and I needed to make him understand I wasn’t the least interested in him. Until he accepted that, he’d keep misunderstanding me—just as Millie Q. had. He would never believe I wasn’t just playing hard to get.
I was impossible to get. For him, anyway.
I might just have to use that caveman club to make him accept my lack of interest. As troublesome as this issue had become, I needed to say something sooner than later, and I already dreaded it.
Boys, especially boys who are as outwardly sure of themselves as Geoff, are still sensitive about their feelings—even if they keep them hidden most of the time—and my Southern belle friendliness had probably encouraged him at first. I hated to admit it even to God, but I’d probably wanted it to.
But that was then. At our initial meeting. Not now, just hours into my first real workday in Santa María.
I hadn’t done anything else to encourage him. And now I needed to discourage him without rejecting him as a person. I was probably hoping for too much.
A club blow to the skull would make any guy feel rejected.
chapter thirty-one
When’s lunch?” I asked Aleesha later that morning in passing.
“You missed hearing that? We don’t have set mealtimes around here. When we get hungry, we stop and eat. There’s plenty of food. Just not plenty of variety. Same menu morning, noon, and night. Probably the same every day, too.”
“And nobody complains?”
“Everybody’s too tired to.”
“Even—?”
“Well, no, not Geoff.” She chortled. “At lunch yesterday while you were in San Diego enjoying pizza,”—I smirked—“I heard him say, ‘Not this stuff again. We just had this for breakfast.’ Of course, he doesn’t seem to get worn out like everyone else.”
We giggled.
The snacks inside the so-called church apparently never changed, either. I’d never thought of flexibility as a willingness to endure the unchanging. Not until now.
By midmorning, I discovered how hot the mess tent tables got. I wouldn’t have to do without hot food altogether. Just at breakfast when I most wanted and needed it.
I ate beef jerky like it was going out of style. I couldn’t get enough of it. Why didn’t Mom ever buy any? Then I remembered Dad’s often strange attitudes and dismissed my question as both irrelevant and unanswerable.
After all, if Dad didn’t like a food—or if he merely disliked the smell of it, the name of it, or even one of its least important ingredients—Mom never bought or served it.
He applied the same irrationality to movies, TV programs, concerts, restaurants, cars, vacation destinations, clothing styles, Bible translations—the list would reach the moon.
Maybe Mars.
I often wondered how Mom could be so patient with Dad’s prejudices, but the apostle Paul answered that question two thousand years ago. Love overlooks a multitude of quirks—that’s how I always read it—and Dad’s quirks were probably minor compared to some men’s.
Dad had an OCD—obsessive-compulsive disorder—uncle. Now he had quirks galore. No amount of love would have enabled Mom to put up with them. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Uncle Isaac remained a bachelor for life.
When Aleesha and I crossed paths again an hour or so after our previous meeting, we made a date to get together for lunch at noon.
One of the girls on team 3 had thoughtfully offered me a super-faded denim tote bag so I could manage everything single-handedly. I hugged her when she told me to keep it. I had an idea about using the bag to carry some pebbles home for an object lesson at church. In the meantime, it would be a big help in toting small items to the worksites. Things like snacks and water bottles.
The blond part of my brain hadn’t caught on at first why we kept water inside the church building. The temp there was almost as hot as outside. And because the water came in sealed, individual-serving-sized bottles—I snobbishly avoided that particular brand at home, but learned to relish it here—it wasn’t going to evaporate.
Then it struck me—duh!—that this building was the only shaded area in the whole village. Hence it was the only place where the intense sunlight wouldn’t superheat the drinking water to temperatures we could make tolerable coffee with.
Rob and Charlie wanted everyone out of the sun during their water breaks. At first the villagers had balked at the idea of going inside the ancient building. Just as I’d noticed from the bus the day before, they acted like they were terrified of it. Terrified and maybe even superstitious. But when they saw us keep going in and out without suffering any ill effects, their faces lit up in amazement and they followed our lead, though quite cautiously at first.
Being out of the sun for even a few minutes at a time was necessary. After a single morning outside, I could already see my skin darkening. Olivia, the blond who’d spoken out several times recently, had started out morbidly pale and burned horribly the first day. Although I sympathized with her, I couldn’t avoid smiling at the thought of her returning home with a universe of freckles dotting her face, arms, and shoulders like a galaxy of stars.
She thanked me repeatedly for the use of lotion from my mostly useless cosmetics collection. Such sharing was a small act of kindness, but I enjoyed helping my fellow team members any way I could.
I cared about them. And not just about my fellow team members, but about the villagers, too. Especially the villagers.
If I’d cared about the migrant children I worked with to an unrealistic extent, I thought—at least I hoped—I had a healthier approach for helping the villagers of Santa María. If not a healthier approach, at least a more realistic attitude.
My cheapie watch read 11:57 by the time I reached the mess tent. Aleesha hadn’t arrived yet. Rather than wait, I threw some beef jerky, canned peaches, green beans, and an almost-liquid chocolate bar into my denim bag and headed into the church for a couple of bottles of warm-but-wet water.
I picked my way among a few badly broken, handmade-looking wooden chairs; a small, rectangular, mahogany-finished table about the size of a communion table; and what looked like an eighty-or ninety-year accumulation of dust—breathing it was probably unhealthier than breathing the hot air outside—to reach the open boxes of water bottles. Whatever this building had been, it didn’t resemble a church inside, and the villagers apparently hadn’t used it in ages for anything.
Aleesha was approaching the church as I came out. Several lunch items nearly slipped from her hands, but she managed to hold up a forefinger … be back in a minute. When she came outside again, she had a full water bottle under one arm and another she’d already drained two-thirds dry.
I had two bottles, too. One was never enough in this heat. I hadn’t opened them yet, though, but I was tempted to pour some on my head when I did. I didn’t know if that would damage my cast, though.
“Wha’s up, girl?�
� Aleesha greeted me, water dribbling down her chin.
“Up? I’m up, girl. I’ve been up ever since you got me up at dawn today.”
“Ha. You should’ve heard yourself snoring this morning.”
“I slept much better last night than the night before. But where’d that sleeping bag, pillow, and air mattress come from? I was too out of it to ask earlier. I hope nobody gave those things up for me.” I would have felt horrible if someone had voluntarily made herself miserable to make me involuntarily comfortable.
“Kim, my sermon should’ve made everyone offer you a little of what they had. But Mr. Rob played Santa this time. He bought you a real sleeping bag.”
“It smelled wonderfully fresh and new.” No mothball scent, either.
“He also bought you an inflatable pillow similar to mine. And you must have complained a lot yesterday; he got an air mattress to keep his ‘princess’ from feeling any more ‘peas’ on this pebbly ground.”
“He didn’t have to do that. Any of that.”
“Don’t tell him that. He went to a lot of trouble finding an army surplus store. Just say thanks. He also bought you a small flashlight, extra batteries, and—would you believe?—a number of packages of plastic litter box liners. He cracked me up by pointing out they’d accomplish the same thing as using the shovel, but would be easier to use single-handed.”
So that’s what I’d found beside my sleeping bag. I’d put a couple of them in my pocket without knowing what they were for.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. He really loosened up some yesterday, but that …?”
“You two didn’t get back until well after dark last night, and—man!—did you both have pizza on your breath. Anyhow, you fell asleep on the bus coming back—”
“No wonder! Between being worn out the night before, full from an early supper, and knocked out by the codeine I took shortly after leaving the ER, I couldn’t have stayed awake coming back if I’d tried.”
“That’s what Mr. Rob said. He was so cute sneaking into the girls’ field and making sure he didn’t see anything he shouldn’t and finding me and asking me to help get you situated. He showed me the stuff he’d bought for you. He purposely kept it a secret. He wanted to surprise you. We left you on the bus while we set up the air mattress and put the sleeping bag on top. You should have seen us trying to tote those things to our sleepsite without tripping.”
I couldn’t keep from laughing.
“Then I borrowed your borrowed blanket to smooth out a small hole under my sleeping bag. Girl, did you ever notice the smell of mothballs in that thing? The stink kept me awake forever till I finally pulled the blanket out and threw it downwind.”
I treated Aleesha’s mothball question as rhetorical, although I had trouble keeping from giggling at her. Implying that the smell hadn’t bothered me was delicious fun.
“We brought you to your renovated sleepsite—you never woke up the whole time—dumped you into your new bedding, and zipped you in. Mr. Rob checked the directions on the prescription and woke you just enough to give you more.”
“Is that why I’ve felt so dopey this morning?”
Aleesha cackled. “Haven’t you ever been drunk, girl?”
I wasn’t sure if she was serious or not. But in my innocence—or was it my lack of opportunity?—I could’ve been mildly offended if I’d let myself be.
“No,” I retorted gently. Then I added in a robotic voice that emphasized each syllable equally, “People in my church do not drink. Not in front of other church members, that is.” I wanted to throw in, “Christians shouldn’t need alcohol to have a good time,” but decided that kind of self-righteousness was uncalled for, even though I thought it was true.
“Uh-huh,” she said with obvious disbelief after laughing at my antics. “And I believe in Santa Bunny and the Easter Claus.” She looked at me and narrowed her eyes. “But that’s okay. Really okay.”
Those last five words expressed an amazing acceptance of a naiveté that must have seemed foreign to her. Or maybe she’d stereotyped me because of other white girls she knew, only to land in a quandary when she discovered how different I was.
“Kim,” she whispered confidentially, “I’ve never tasted liquor myself—I can’t stand the smell—but don’t tell anybody. That would ruin my rough ‘n’ tough reputation.”
I smiled as I made a lip-zipping motion with my left thumb and forefinger.
“Anyhow, we had a whale of a time waking you enough to swallow those pills, but they got you through the night.”
“Did they ever! And halfway through this morning, too. I thought I was hallucinating when the kids started showing me they’d learned something from your sermon. You’re a miracle worker, gal!”
Aleesha sat there grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh, man!” I snapped my fingers.
“What, girl?”
“We spent hours in San Diego yesterday. Rob did all that shopping and didn’t once suggest buying work clothes.” She shook her head. “Men.”
I couldn’t complain, though. I hadn’t thought to ask him.
chapter thirty-two
Aleesha and I weren’t intentionally sitting by ourselves, but nobody else had passed by yet. We’d done a good job so far of avoiding cliquishness.
I was barely conscious of the young village girl who’d maneuvered discreetly into a spot three or four yards away, and I doubt that the sudden appearance of a space alien would have startled me any more than the discovery that she was staring at me intently. Her laughter at seeing me jump sounded weak. Perhaps shy.
She was probably eight or nine, although I wasn’t experienced at guessing children’s ages. I was more interested in her long black hair, smooth light brown skin, and dark brown eyes that didn’t seem to miss anything that was going on.
I motioned slightly to Aleesha and pointed to the girl while she was looking away. When the youngster turned toward us again, Aleesha and I waved our hands and smiled. Whether she was scared or still embarrassed, I couldn’t tell, but she didn’t wave back. She looked down at the ground for a minute before raising her head again to see if we were watching.
We were.
I scrunched my nose, crossed my eyes, and gave her a goofy-looking grin. This time she giggled the way only children can. Those giggles broke the ice—or cracked it slightly, anyhow.
I waved again. Although she barely moved her hand, she waved back. Aleesha and I motioned for her to come closer and join us. She looked around as if seeking approval from an absent parent, but her curiosity must have been stronger than any instructions her mother might have given her. She rose to her feet in a single flowing motion.
That’s when I noticed her arm.
Before I could point it out, though, Aleesha excused herself to visit the facilities and return to work.
“You want a litter box liner?” I said, and she cracked up. But when I pulled one from my shirt pocket like a magician pulling an endless kerchief from his hat and held it out, she took it.
“Rrrowww! Rrrowww!”
Sounding more like a tomcat at midnight than a lady cat at noon, she meowed all the way across the field.
I shouldn’t have stared, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that little girl’s right arm, which stopped just shy of where an elbow should have been. If someone amputated her forearm, the skin had recovered remarkably well. But it looked too smooth—too perfect—to result from amputation. As if I had any medical knowledge to base my opinion on.
She’d probably been born that way.
Either she hadn’t caught me glancing at her arm or she’d gotten so used to thoughtless staring that she no longer cared. If I saw my team members gazing at my cast, I knew their sympathetic stares were as temporary as my incapacity.
But this little girl’s condition wasn’t going to change. Whether a doctor in San Diego could fit her with a prosthetic arm, I didn’t know, but Santa María seemed to be on the opposite side of the world from San Diego.
Or maybe on a different planet.
How I longed to talk with this youngster, but our separate languages made that impossible. How could I even learn her name?
I pointed at the ground to my left, the spot Aleesha had deserted a moment earlier. The little girl sat down with a remarkably graceful motion.
“Buenos días.” Her voice was so quiet I almost missed hearing her.
“Hi!” I answered cheerfully, uncertain how she’d respond to my English.
“Hi!” she responded clearly enough, although with some uncertainty.
Could this young girl possibly know a little English? With a false sense of hope, I continued.
“My name is Kim. What’s yours?”
Her face went blank, and it struck me that hi was a simple word—obviously a greeting—to parrot back. Her English was as limited as my Spanish.
I repeated my question in French. I hoped my frustration hadn’t shown.
Her light brown face wrinkled and her eyes narrowed in confusion.
Definitely no French spoken in Santa María. But I already knew that. Why did I keep trying?
I pointed to myself. “Kim,” I said. “My name is Kim.” It was tough not saying extra words as if she might magically comprehend them.
“Kim,” I said as I pointed to myself again. Then I pointed to her and said, “You. Who are you?”
I might as well have been quoting Shakespeare in Sanskrit. I lost heart quickly. After all, my generation expected instant gratification, and my inability to communicate with this little girl was anything but instantly gratifying.
“Kim,” I pointed to myself once more. I unconsciously wrote my name in the dirt with a stick as I repeated it. I didn’t expect a response, but I couldn’t give up. Not yet.
“Keem,” she said clearly but hesitantly after looking at my name on the ground. She pointed at me. “Keem,” she said once again.
“Yes, yes! That’s it! You have it! I’m Kim.”
