05222
April 22, 2005

Hello from hard times

Young mission volunteer and poor kids
‘blossom together in warmth of love and trust’

by Kerrie Yarnell
PC(USA) Young Adult Mission Volunteer 

WAPATO, WA — Over the long, gray winter here, I read Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, and discovered a paragraph that has helped me understand what my calling is about:

       to eat, enough to go around. The possibility
       that kids might one day grow up to be neither
       the destroyers nor the destroyed. Right now
       I’m living in that hope, running down its
       hallway and touching the walls on both sides.

     I have the same hope: that the gospel of compassion will pervade my actions and my thoughts, and that its infectious call will reach

the ears of others.          

     Serving in Wapato over the past seven months has left me with more questions than answers, and led to lots of surprises and new relationships in this small, very diverse community.         

     Wapato is on the Yakima Indian reservation in the Yakima Valley in eastern Washington. The town of Wapato, with a population under 5,000, is an agricultural community that has been settled over the past two centuries by Euro-American, Japanese and Filipino farmers.

     Most recently it has become home to settling Mexican  families, who make up about 70 percent of the current population. Every community here has experienced prejudice and challenges to its cultural identity. You can see it in people’s eyes, and hear it in their stories.

     The town is economically depressed — a reality demonstrated by boarded-up storefronts and high rates of alcoholism, suicide and school dropouts.

     In the midst of all this is a struggling community center, a Presbyterian church with a thriving ESL (English-as-a-second-language) class, a Native American youth group and a bustling Catholic church with a mariachi band and a large of first Communion students.

others, how understanding and compassionate service can transcend cultures and nationalities. We have been entrusted with the hearts of our sisters and brothers, and we’ve been asked to walk among them gently, to love, to serve.

     I walk, love, and serve in a community full of hurt, distrust and poverty. The Latino children with whom I spend my time find themselves in

rundown and overcrowded living conditions, with never enough food to go around, in a world where they serve as bilingual/bicultural translators for their monolingual/monocultural parents.

     With older siblings raising younger ones, the dearth of order and attention in the kids’ lives is almost absolute. They have begun the dark passage of insufficiency; they know how to hoard food and to fight for themselves.

     Every Monday in our after-school program, we set the table to share pizza and Tang, in a kind of communion that sends the message: Have a seat; there’s time; there’s enough to go around. We play kickball and collaborate on art projects. We make field trips and play foosball. Along the way we transform a Presbyterian fellowship hall into a haven where the kids have a safe environment for relationship-building, developing life skills, and enjoying the luxury of being kids.

     My task, my gift, is to create an atmosphere of safety and security for these kids that I love, to welcome them in. It is in these basic things that I perceive Jesus’ call to us to serve and live. I understand from Jesus’ words that we will always find him among the poor — in the towns with the failing community centers and the gang tags. He will be in the homes where families of 10 share food enough for two, where there is not enough employment to enable people to have lights and heat in the wintertime. He will be in the prisons, at the shelters.

     “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?”

     The most beautiful thing is that this caring and compassion is not a one-way gift. Becoming trusted, being relied upon — being allowed to know and see someone else’s most precious dreams — is a gift I have received from the children. I have been watching as they gain confidence, serve one another, ask a blessing, learn to share, even choose a smaller piece to eat so a larger one can go to someone else.

     We are all blossoming together in the warmth of this love and trust we have built together. The simplicity of it is easy to miss — especially when mainstream culture and our own fears and insecurities are screaming at us to grab the biggest piece of the pie and hang on for dear life.

     I am thankful to God and to this community that in my own spiritual poverty I have not missed out on this gift.

     It is the kids who teach me to resist that call to squander time, or to value the time that we have. They have taught me that simple living is the best, that I can enjoy the presence of another person fully in spite of language and cultural barriers.

     I am realizing that there is joy in being fully in one place, fully attuned to the task at hand: making egg-carton caterpillars with children, or working in the garden. I am learning to listen rather than speak; I am learning to be more attuned to the heart of a situation than with the black and white of it. I find that it is better, though not always easier, to live honestly and with a fuller heart in the face of hardship and the harsh realities that the youth of this community face.        

     These realities are not going to go away anytime soon. There are lots of wonderful people working hard in this community, trying to find ways to put prejudice away long enough to unite for the good of the children, but the wounds of prejudice and economic depression  are deep, and will take generations to heal.

     In the meantime, as I walk here and learn how to be a part of this place, I can tell that this community has not been forgotten by God. And I know that these children are the vessels for the redemption.