“Wow!!!” That’s a rather nice thing to hear as someone comes into your house for the first time, right? Jil and I have always made something of a conscience effort to try and make our house warm and inviting to our guests. We love having people over, and want everyone to feel as welcome as possible. It’s not a matter of trying to impress anyone with fancy decor, the most up-to-date fashion, or anything like that. It’s just about making people feel comfortable and welcomed.
So last week, as I open the door to 7 eager first-time guests, and hear a resounding chorus of “WOW!” “This place is amazing!” (the Spanish equivalents, of course), you’d think that’d be a goodish feeling for me, right? Or at least not something that would set off a constant, unceasing feeling of angst, right? Wrong.
The problem is that these 7 guests, are part of a group of boys in a nearby villa (follow this link if you’re not familiar with the Argentine term villa miseria) that I’ve been spending a lot of time with recently, where I’ve been repeatedly choosing to put myself in emotionally and physically exhausting situations, trying to talk with them as best as my Spanish will allow, trying to connect with them and gain some level of understanding of their lives, trying my absolute hardest to build relationships with them, to show them that we love them and want to serve them.
And the great part is… THEY’RE RESPONDING!! For whatever reason, they are really into us, and love it when we go there. When I make the four-block walk to their villa, as soon as the first kids see me (usually the littlest ones out playing in front of their houses), they immediately start yelling my name and waving – “RICHARD!!!!” “RICHARD!!!” (Richard just works better in Spanish than Rich) “Come over here!!!” And, almost always, they immediately reveal the true reason for their excitement with the follow up “Did you bring the little ball? Can I see it? Can we play? Come on!!!” (little ball referring to a hackeysack that I almost always carry with me, and all of the kids love playing with, even though their play rarely conforms to established international hackeysack regulations) 
When I first started going there and hanging out with them, and seeing how drawn they all were to playing with the hackeysack with me, I sort of patted myself on the back, thinking “Wow, I really hit the jackpot with this thing. What a great idea!!” Since then, I’ve come to realize… pretty much ANY toy of ANY sort that I could possibly take with me for them to play with would illicit the same response. Sure, because it’s a ball that can be kicked similarly to kicking a soccer ball, they may be a little more inclined to play with it than, say, if I had a toy doll or something. But, for the most part, it’s just a toy, something they don’t have a ton of. And on top of that, it’s an older guy, likely around their dad’s age, who’s interested in them and willing to play with them and give them a few moments of attention.
These kids’ lives are so completely foreign to me, that I can’t even really begin to describe it. I could tell you about the shacks they live in, the communal toilet many of them use, the messed up families they come from, but the truth is, I don’t really have much of an understanding of all of that yet. I’m still learning. And what I learned this week (as I had 7 of them over for the first time, to start English classes in our house) is that our house is far and away the nicest house any of them have ever stepped foot in. It’s not that our house is some luxurious mansion or anything like that (it’s definitely nice and comfortable to us, but honestly, compared to any other house we’ve ever lived in before, it’s really pretty basic.) It’s not even that our house is the nicest in the neighborhood or anything like that (in the four-block walk from the villa to our house, the kids certainly would have passed homes much nicer than ours.) The thing is, these kids would never get into those houses. They’ve never seen inside them, and likely never will. But we’re inviting them into ours. We’re intentionally trying to bridge that economic gap, in order to build real relationships with them so that we might serve them.
So I guess the angst, the uneasiness that I haven’t been able to get away from since that moment, has a lot to do with a renewed/reinforced understanding of just how different things are for them, and consequently how difficult that could make it for us to really connect with them on a level where they trust us, and want to hear truth from us. Thankfully, even though we are the craziest, most incomprehensible lot they’ve ever met, I think they’re starting to realize that we care about them.
Recent Comments