The Benefits of Smoking

Ok this is important enough that I'm going to post it as my blog and the good deeds blog. It's long and complicated, so follow along. :)

 

We arrived in Loja after a 5 hour bus ride and had a quick meeting that we had hoped would land us some opportunities...it didn't. So we had a 5:30 meeting that our host was 30 mins late for and then she had to bail and reschedule for 9:30pm. She was an hour and 45 mins late for that meeting, only to take us to a loud, hot, smoke filled club. She has been incredibly helpful to us, but this atmosphere just wasn't working.

 

If you know me, you know that I can't stand smoke. It makes me angry. After about 20 people blew smoke in my direction, I felt like I wanted to punch someone, so we just took a cab and went back to our hostel.

 

We were supposed to meet with some orphanages the next day, but after the previous night, we were just ready to go in our own direction and find some places by ourselves. We heard about an orphanage, but the directions we had lead us to a Catholic home for seniors.

 

The nuns who run the place were less than enthused with our presence. They must not have read our blog about taking the other nuns to the mall, so there was no Sister Act 2. After a hasty tour of the place we were heading towards the gate, this woman screamed out in English (who are my peers?).

 

I should back up for a moment. When you're backpacking, you're limited to 5-7 days worth of clothes max, so every item is important. I had made fun of Cory for wearing an old First Baptist Youth shirt that had listed a bunch of people from the bible as our peers on the back. It's not that it's a bad shirt, it just wasn't very cool either.

 

So this lady asked us to come in and explain the shirt...and that's where we met Sarah. She was totally isolated from the rest of the population on the other side of the home and she is a phenomenal woman. Born in Austria, she speaks 17 languages fluently and has visited 127 countries and yet she was all alone.  Not being Catholic (or even a Christian) she was isolated from everyone...unable to move. She literally had no hip after receiving a bad operation 4 years ago.

 

She has been in movies with Elizabeth Taylor and even Shakira!  Craziness. During the Cuban revolution, Che Guavara hid some defectors at her farm in Jamaica on their way to the US. I would have absolutely thought she was crazy if I hadn't seen pictures of some of these things with my own eyes.

 

I was amazed that she immediately recognized that Jordan was Persian without him even saying his last name. She had lived in Iran for 3 years and said that it was her favorite country. She actually cried and sang him some songs in Farsi. She was so happy to be able to speak it one last time.

 

The moment she found out I was a pastor, she began to cry. She knew that her life was almost over and that she had lived it for herself. She had been asking the people at the home for THREE years to bring a pastor to her to tell her about Jesus, but they wouldn't do it. So, she asked me to tell her and I did. Today she decided to give her heart to Jesus and to try to live the rest of her days being a light in that dark place. And the only reason we were in that room was because I hate cigarette smoke, Elias asked our front desk clerk to give us (yet another) set of bad directions, and Cory wore that stupid shirt.

One of the other cool things is that we were able to go into town and find a pastor of a local church who was willing to start visiting her.  She had been suicidal and felt like there was no hope for this life or the life to come, so we felt like it would be really important to have someone follow up.  I have to admit that I was a little scared that we would leave the country and that she wouldn´t ever have another visitor again, but the pastor actually called her BEFORE we made it back to the nursing hime and agreed to start meeting with her regularly. I thought that was pretty amazing.

 

Thanks to gifts from Mercedes, Philip, and Donna, we were able to buy her prescription glasses (she had none and couldn't read anything), a large print bible, some groceries and hygiene items. I think the icing on the cake was a bouquet of fresh cut flowers for her room. Their gifts also went to buy medicine for a woman with muscular dystrophy, and food for her, her daughter (who is a single mom) and her young grandson (who also got a sweet soccer ball). We were trying to buy some medicine for the daughter, but we couldn't, so we bought tons of food so they could use their own money to buy the medicine.

 

So what started out as a terrible night followed by a lousy morning turned into the best day of the trip so far.

To see all of the other good deeds blog entries, visit http://yourfundsatwork.blogspot.com