The Dominican Republic. It’s a tropical paradise. The prominent color is green, and it’s a bright, vibrant green that plays off the clear blue of the clean sky, and the soft white of the clouds. It’s a dynamic land, always changing, always up and down, rolling, and each hill is different, yet no less breathtaking. In a word: stunning.
The air is never still, bringing with it the coolness from the sea, and also the moisture that is always prominent. It rained almost every other day we were there. Truly, no words can fully describe the beauty that I saw in that country.
The people are no less beautiful. Dark-skinned, dark-haired, high cheekbones and deep eyes that were most often deep brown, but sometimes were light hazel or green colors. With their beauty comes a boldness to vocalize beauty when they see it. Especially fair-skinned Americans like us. Everywhere we went it was “Ay! Americana! Ch ch ch ch ch!” And to the boys it was “Americano!” You get rather good at looking at the road ahead of you when you hear this every day. I’m not sure why the Domincans think hissing is a good way to flirt, but they do it, and with gusto. So we learned to ignore it somewhat. Though it became something of a joke to us when, while driving in our truck where we were in full view to the world, we heard the hissing as we passed, some of us would say, “Oh, someone’s hott!” Needless to say, that was one thing I was very glad to leave behind when we left.
The language in the DR is Spanish. Hardly anyone speaks English, and if they do, its broken and heavily accented. I quickly realized my feeble Spanish was… feeble. Not to mention pathetic. And the fact that I was put in a more isolated village called Los Higos, where the townspeople aren’t that welcoming to strangers, and I couldn’t speak anything more than a “hola” to them… was daunting to say the least. My job for the two weeks was called Social Work. I had no idea what this entailed, but I very quickly found out. Basically, you do crafts with the women and girls of the community, visit people, and generally build relationship and share the love of Jesus in that simple way. I was put with two girls in my class, Jenna Yee and Kristin Marlow.
I have learned that when you go on missions trips, not to go with hands full ready to give… go with hands empty willing to receive. I quickly realized how empty my hands really were. Los Higos is secluded, and some of it’s habits more primitive than other areas. The entire country suffers from proverty, but Los Higos especially feels that. It consists of families that live in clusters together. Seeing as most people don’t leave the village very often, they most often intermarry with each other. As a result, in this community of a few hundred people, there are only about 5 last names. The people marry young. Very young. If you are 18 and not a virgin, it’s strange. If you’re 18 and not married… you’re considered nearing too old to get married. Most girls are married by the age of 15, bearing their first child by 16 or possibly younger. You usually have 2 children by the time you’re 18. Hearing about it was one thing, seeing it was another thing entirely. I saw girls in this community years younger than me nursing their children. It was sobering and nearly broke my heart.
Our site leader, Heidi, is a native of the DR, but not to Los Higos. She’s been there for a year, teaching the women how to sew, some cooking skills, and other things. She was won their respect, but sometimes they still treat her more as a stranger. The children love her, however. They are always calling her name when she’s passing through the streets, wanting her to smile and wave at them, which she did eagerly. She has a quite strength and integrity that encouraged me… but she also doesn’t speak English very well. She understood a great deal, but had a hard time communicating herself. We had a translator, Sonia, though, and she helped a great deal.
Anyways, the people of Los Higos. While most are more quite towards strangers, some are very welcoming. I count this the work of the Holy Spirit in one woman called Mary. We visited Mary every day, and she gave us coffee, greated us with a big one to the cheek, and yammered away to us in Spanish. I think she fully knew we couldn’t understand her, but she talked anyways. When missionaries come to the DR for long periods of time to intergrate themselves into the culture, they stay at Mary’s house. She’s an energized spitball of a woman of probably about 70. We immediately fell in love with this woman and looked forward every day to spending time with her. She loved us with the love of Christ, and the Joy of the Lord was her strength.
Back to the problems of not speaking the language…
The first few days at the site at los Higos, I was at a loss of what I was doing there. I did the crafts with the women, but there was an awkwardness that settled in around us, a wall that wouldn’t let us interact much. That wall was the language barrier. They didn’t speak English, we didn’t speak Spanish, and even with a translator, it was hard. I was confused. How could I show the love of God to these people if I can’t tell them anything? This language barrier was making it nearly impossible to interact. I had never felt so useless in my life. “What am I doing here? I want to be used, God! I want to be a vessel of your love. But I can’t speak to these people. I can’t do anything except smile awkwardly and wave. The few times I tried to speak Spanish, I butchered it and fumbled terribly. What are you trying to do here, God?”
The answer came first on Wednesday of our first week at the DR. Instead of working with women, we were working with the young girls from ages 8-12. Children really are easier to communicate with. It doesn’t matter if you butcher Spanish, you are able to communicate. I can’t explain it, really. Because they were more open to us, we could be more open with them. We showered them with hugs and teased good-naturedly while helping them with the crafts. We would do something silly, and they would laugh. Then they would do something silly, and we would laugh. We communicated, though not with words. Kristin made a silly little crown out of fabric, put it on her head and called herself a princess. I looked to the girl next to me, quiet and reserved, though looking at the crown Kristin had on her head. Seized by sudden inspiration, I made one too… and put it on her head. “Princessa,” I called her. She smiled. I realized that was probably the first time someone had called her that. Children are not held in high priority. She had probably hardly ever had worth spoken into her.
As soft as the breeze, I heard God whisper, “You don’t need words to communicate value, to communicate My Love.”
That thought is was carried me into Thursday. And Thursday is the day I met Celi. She’s 20 years old, yet looks like she’s 15. Her movements are slow, deliberate, exaggerated. Her speech is the same, slow, as if it’s an effort to move her tongue. She can walk, but only if she’s leaning against something or someone is helping her. These are all the result of the disease that has wracked her body since she was 15, the disease that is slowing stealing her strength. The disease is Multiple Sclerosis. At 16 she got pregnant, and her son Roni is now 4 years old. Her pregnancy made the MS worse. It’s the MS that keeps this beautiful young woman trapped in a body that looks too young for her, a body that is weakening by the day, a body that is wasting away before her very eyes. I sat next to her as she told Heidi about some of the recent effects of the disease with tears in her eyes. “I’m losing my strength,” she says. When we looked at a picture of her from a few years ago and remarked on how pretty it was, she shook her head sadly and said “Not anymore… I’m not pretty anymore…”
I can’t fully explain what happened then, but I know it was powerful. A love for this girl swelled up in me. It broke my heart that I was seeing this beautiful woman in tears because of something that was utterly beyond her control. She is beautiful, so beautiful, yet she doesn’t see it. She doesn’t see how much God loves her. Yet I felt it. I felt in that moment just a small touch of how much God loves her, how beautiful she is to Him. After praying for her, I took her hands tightly in mine, and told her in the only words I knew that she was beautiful. “Muy bonita. Muy, muy bonita.”
God’s answer was delivered to me that day. “You and I both know that I love her. We know that she’s beautiful. She doesn’t. I’m using you to tell her that. And you don’t need words. You just need Me and my Spirit, and I will show her that love through you.”
That whole next week I worked on a project for her. I collected verses and wrote them into a scrapbook-type book. I wrote them in Spanish and gave them to her that next week. I don’t know if my gift or my words changed something in her. All I can do is pray. And I do. She’s always on my mind, and I’m always praying for her. Thoughts of her bring me to tears. I can’t tell you what the tears are for, but they come. Maybe it’s the joy of God using me to tell His love. Maybe it’s the sorrow of her pain and the yearning for healing in her. I don’t know what it is.
But this I do know: I serve a powerful God. He loves. And He yearns for everyone to feel that love. I think in this trip I gained a bit of purpose to my life… He wants me to love as He loves. If all my life accomplishes is to be a testimony of my Jesus’s love, then it’s a good life. It’s a life worth living, a life that stretches out and touches people.
I want Love to be my legacy.
May it be so.
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