Martha's House

It was just a snag.  It wasn't long before we found a homeless shelter in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. With their beautiful beaches and mansions, Ft. Lauderdale wasn’t exactly Burkina Faso but we were working with a very needy group, the homeless, and it was good enough. My supervisor thought I was great, mostly because I actually really cared about the kids.  I also was a volunteer.  I could have stayed there, but I kept thinking, “this is only the beginning, I have much more important work to do.” My wife and I felt special because we were still saving the world by helping homeless kids get jobs, and it was nice that people were appreciating our extra work. But something was growing inside me, slowly and unconsciously.

It was a small voice that was always there, telling me I was special, that I was different from everyone around me.  Even worse, maybe I wasn't just different, I was better than everybody else.  It's start as confidence, but can quickly turn to hubris.  Once, when I was dropped off at a hospital with one of our homeless kids, we were told it would take a while for our ride to come back and pick us up. So we took the bus. The director was amazed that we had taken the bus and mentioned to me how all the employees couldn’t get over it. I started to think, “I am special, God has something planned for me.”  I should mention here that I was religious in the sense that I believed God had a direct hand in my future, that there was a path laid out before me, and all I had to do was to courageously follow it no matter what. There was path.  But I didn't know I was the one paving it.

Nicaragua

Sand and wealth surrounded me at high school. It wasn't rare to see huge, shiny SUVs parked next to station wagons with surfboard racks in the student parking lot. High school was easy for me— I was a starter on the baseball team, a captain of the swim team, I got slammed most weekends, and I got straight As. Things changed when I went to college.

I went to preppy Southern university, I was one of the drones in khakis and collars who worried I didn't know enough girls to pass through the front doors of the fraternities. By the end of college, I was the one walking barefoot with an unkempt beard and a frisbee in my backpack—how else could I make ultimate practice when it was directly after my anthropology seminar?

I also met the love of life.  She was a dream, and she thought my scraggly facial hair was cute.  We married right after college and went to Nicaragua, joined the Peace Corps. Through the three months of training, most volunteers described us as the perfect volunteers, diligently practicing our Spanish outside of class, taking our projects seriously, and smiling smugly at those who thought the trainings were too tough. We were begging for a tough site.  We wanted to walk miles to a river to get our water. We wanted to live on rice and beans.  We wanted the Peace Corps life you see in the promotional videos.

When we arrived at our assigned site, we found a small town filled with fields of pineapples, internet cafes, and pizza restaurants.  We wondered, maybe it's at night when the drugs, gangs, and prostitutes come out. But all we found were a few teenagers that smoked pot. The neighbors told us those same teenagers also liked to help out the community. They greeted their neighbors from their hangout, and even cut the grass.

We visited our local school and found out it was one of the best schools in Nicaragua, a Blue Ribbon school. They were happy to show off their new computer lab, recently hooked up to the internet.

There was an indigenous reserve up along the mountains beyond the pineapple fields. Neighbors told us the people living in the reserve were alcoholics, and there was no reason for anyone to visit. Unless you were Peace Corps volunteer desperate to do something. We came upon a one room wooden school with children running outside, playing soccer with a plastic bottle, barefoot. If I had taken a photo of it, it would have been on the cover of Peace Corps magazine. They stopped the game and came running to us, curious about white strangers. We told the teacher we were volunteers and asked how we could help. She told us they didn’t have any books for their school. It was perfect.

We had found our spot, the perfect Peace Corps village. Peace Corps had made a mistake, and they would be impressed that we had already found a new, more deserving site. But when we traveled to the capital to tell them the good news, they did not care about the indigenous reserve in the mountains; they told us we had to stay put and find work to do in the award winning school. So we told them if they didn't let us find another site, then we would leave.  They said we had 72 hours to get out.