All Ah We Dah Wahn

Hey guys! I hope your day is full of peace, contentment, and joy.

I have been in Belize for almost 10 weeks now. How full and blessed I feel to be here, to feel settled, to have made strong relationships in Belize, to sense deep connection with loved ones at home. As I learn Kriol from friends and coworkers, one of my favorite phrases yet is “All Ah We Dah Wahn”. It translates to “we are one”, but its meaning is deeper, something more like the Swahili word Ubuntu which means “I am because we are”.  There is something unifying and Eucharistic about it. It rings true for me now.

This JVC experience has already opened up so many complex questions, inviting me to unlearn and relearn many things, launching me into a place of potentially fruitful vulnerability. In all the excitement and confusion, my relationship with God has remained essential yet looks so new here. I see God most clearly in connection with other people, and with creation. If God is Love, then God must be revealed in relationship. That is something I have recognized so clearly here when I laugh with coworkers, when I am invited to a new friend’s home, when someone at Church knows my name, when I sit in silence by the sea.

As I continue my work at SJC High School, many more responsibilities and programs unfold. By this point, weekly retreats have begun. The two largest school Masses of the year have come and gone. Both Peer Ministry and the Breakfast Club started up, giving me more time to be with students which I love.  I’m continuing to learn as I go, which is both exciting and frustrating at times.

I often think back to a moment in PG, when we were visiting a small village in the Toledo District. We set out to have lunch with a Peace Corps friend and her host family. We arrived in the village after a long drive down a bumpy dirt road. The Peace Corps volunteer had texted her host mother with the number of people coming, but there was evidently no service and she didn’t know how many of us to expect. As we stood there in their thatch-rooved kitchen around the wood burning Kamal, young girls producing corn tortillas with amazing speed and grace all around us, the mother said contently, “Well, you can’t know everything”. How true it is. We can’t know everything. At a time in my life when I feel I know very little, it is comforting to think of that woman’s contentment in the unknown. I smile at the wisdom and humility that memory brings.

I’ll leave you with a poem that a dear Jesuit friend shared with me this past week. Be well :)

I exist as I am, that is enough

If no other world be aware of it, I sit content

And if each and all be aware, I sit content.

One world is aware

And by far the largest to me

That is myself.

And whether I come to my own today

Or in ten thousand or ten million years

I can cheerfully take it now

Or with equal cheerfulness

I can wait.

-Walt Whitman

Random things:

• Among other news sources that I've been following, Humans of the Refuge has been a powerful testament to individuals' experiences as they flee violence and war in Syria and Iraq. As the number of refugees grows and economic and political forces come into play, it is important to remember individuals and their stories. 
•  JVC was in the Huffington Post! Check out the video here! 
• Caterpillars are called “hairy worms” here. If you touch them you immediately get a fever.

"Green, Green Rock Road"