Woke up to a lovely good-morning gift from my roommate: a severed chicken head rolled up in a napkin. Surprise!

C

I had so many random funny videos from this little girl that I decided to make a short tribute.

It Begins!

Walked into work this morning and was immediately greeted by a friendly LA guy I kind of recognized from last year: "Hi Sara!"

Sigh.

Indian Movie Marathon

A typical Saturday around our apartment.
Music: Let Me Tell You About My Boat, by Mark Mothersbaugh

Tracy

Poverty Day

Emily giving briefing this week's BUMP team on Poverty Day protocol.

Staff Shots

Courtesy Billy Z

Billy, one of our highschool helpers, has become our unofficial staff photographer the past couple of weeks. Here are a few of his student shots:

Tylor <3 Magglie

Tylor and Maggie are my two high school helpers. They're really cute with the kids and with each other. But today I found this with the scrap paper and thought it was funny, especially the Magglie part.

J Train Express

This kid is absolutely obsessed with public transit. He knows all the local buses and every train in the New York area! He and another little boy in my class play everyday that they're the N and D trains, running "Coco" (a misinterpretation of "local"). One of the teams who came recently had a boy named Adrian, whom they mistakenly called "A-Train." I see some future train drivers and transit engineers in the making!

No fighting

One thing we deal with a lot in this ministry is language barrier. English is never the first language in the households we work with, and it can be difficult interacting with many of the parents, who either don't speak English at all or are less than fluent. More difficult is when the kids don't speak English. Few of our kindergarteners, for example, speak any English at all. We expect that, and try to find teen helpers to translate for us. There are still kids in the older grades, however, who are just learning the language and have trouble adapting. A surprising amount of our older kids fall into this category. Unfortunately, we don't have enough translators to stick in every class; often we resort to finding a fellow student who speaks the same dialect (which can be difficult to match!) to help get the points across.

Here, for instance, a third grader with very little English comprehension got into a fight with a classmate. Emily had to pull another student from class to translate her message.

Mini field trip!

Every Wednesday we go on a little field trip to the park. For the first forty minutes each class works on a sense assignment, the difficulty of which of course depends on their group. My kids generally have to write five sentences about what they sense (for instance, this week was Smell) and then draw corresponding pictures. After that, they have another forty minutes to run around the playground before we pack up and make the mile-long trek to the middle school where we eat lunch every day.

Summer 2006 was one of the most seminal summers I've spent in Brooklyn. I was able work at this church as an intern for an entire month, and drag my little sister along with me. Sara was hooked, of course, and I got my first real idea of what long(er)-term ministry looks like here. The neighborhood that had always been an escape became a home as I adjusted to having an apartment and obligations related to church ministry. Past relationships were strengthened and new ones formed. One of the latter was with a young woman named Tracy who had just come to America for the first time. Although she knew nothing about Christianity, someone recommended the church to her as a safe place to meet Americans and practice her English. We were the same age - 20 - both quiet and tall, and as she spent more time at church we developed a shy friendship that consisted mostly of smiles and shared time. Both of us left Brooklyn by August, she going back to university in China and I to my bookstore job in St Louis. Afterward, she wrote me an email saying she'd forever remember me as her first American friend. As the story always goes, though, we stopped writing once the summer ended.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Tracy sought me out at Sunday school last week! She's come back to America for grad school, and remembered her "happy summer spent at the church." I look completely different - glasses and extremely short hair - yet she recognized me right away. Isn't that bizarre? But it's not, I know, because I serve a God who orchestrates reunions like this, and stranger, all the time. That's a pretty exciting - /terrifying - prospect. Terrifying because I feel like I could mess this up. I'm awkward anyway, but the expectations in this case are even more daunting, and I tend to shrink under pressure. So please pray for me, that I would have the courage to seek God's grand master plan regarding this funny reemergence of forgotten friendship. And pray especially for Tracy, who's starting life in a completely new place. She's not a Christian, but God has drawn her to this church for the second time in as many trips, so I believe he wants her here for a reason!

John 3:16

After school today, four of my first graders were eager to show off the song we learned in VBS this week. They're very silly and very cute!

I have a new, six-year-old bff, thanks to my awesome Pokemon identification skills.

Independence Day

233 years after declaring our independence, America is still not free from racism, sexism, class systems and social hierarchies. Yet our citizens have basic human rights, which are denied - here in America and around the globe - to all those who are suffering in modern-day slavery. As I celebrate my freedom today, I do so knowing that there are people in my very neighborhood who are not free. All around the world, and even in this country, there are millions of people who still aren't free to marry as they'd like, provide for their families, educate themselves, eat. There are millions living under constant fear of violence. Millions miserable, starving, enslaved, beaten, sick, dying. I'm one person; I can't spare millions. But I can do what is available to me, using the freedoms I have been miraculously granted. I can pray, speak, vote, donate, contribute, educate. This is what we were created for and commanded to do: defy the darkness of this world with the gospel message of freedom in Christ.

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?

If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then light will rise in the darkness,
and night will become like noonday."

Isaiah 58