Is It Worth It?

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The Monday after the earthquake in Chile Felipe, our Chilean student at the EJ Institute for youth ministry, kept falling asleep in class. When we had asked about his family back home he was unemotional and told us that he had spoken briefly with his grandmother and everyone was fine.

During the class break I went up to him as he prepared himself a cup of coffee, “Felipe, are you OK? It seems like you can’t stay awake?”

“I haven’t been able to sleep since the earthquake,” he replied. “I was finally able to talk with my family and now I know they’re fine, but I have a lot of college friends in other cities and I don’t know how they are.”

We know the crushing impotence of living many miles removed from people you love who are suffering. Logically you know that if you were there you couldn’t do anything to change things but it feels so wrong to go on blithely with life when they can’t.

In the following days Felipe was back to sleeping through the night and had more news from Chile. The following week I looked for a space to check in with him.

“When are you going back to Chile?” I asked.

“In December,” Felipe replied. “It takes three days to get to my house by bus and if I were to try to go during the mid-year break I would spend six days traveling for just a few days at home, so I’ll wait until I finish the program.”

Felipe came to us with high expectations. As he said in his application, “When I was a senior in High School I was voted president of the school’s Christian Student Union. As I worked with them I realized how abandoned teenagers are by the church in my area. There is a lot of work with children, adults and even the elderly but there was nothing for teenagers. I want to study at the EJ Institute so I can pay attention to the needs of this generation.

In the face of Felipe’s big vision you can see why I asked the following question a bit fearfully, “Felipe, it’s such a sacrifice for you to be here….is it worth it?”

He broke into a big smile which was echoed in his eyes as he said, “Oh yes.”

Whew :-)

What Made It So Great?

Last night might have been our favorite time so far with the youth leadership institute. What made it great? I think it was the combination of working with enthusiastic, experienced youth leaders plus a subject we're passionate about and seeing them "get" how it has significance and application for their work.

Yay!

Annette leading the Orientation for new apprentices

("apprentice" is the Institute's term for "student")

This is the third quarter of classes, and though the student body
has grown by around 40% each new quarter, there continues
be a great atmosphere of camaraderie and enthusiasm.

Within the last few month we received a significant donation from
someone within Argentina, this was nearly matched by two other
donors in the U.S.. This has allowed us to hire 3 desperately
needed staff and should float us until late this year when
we the institute should be econimically self-sufficient.
Thank you, God!

Here are a few of the old and new apprentices at the Argentina campus
of the "Instituto Especialidades Juveniles". They come from 6 foreign
countries - Argentina, Peru, Spain, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile,
Ecuador - as well as many provinces within Argentina

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Let the Teacher Beware

Over Christmas vacation our brother-in-law Dan introduced me to the book Taking Learning to Task: Creative Strategies for Teaching Adults by Jane Vella. It starts out,

Socrates knew it. Jesus knew it. The Buddha knew it. Every open question asked as the peripatetic crowd in white togas strolled around Athens, every parable put to the crowds at the lakeside…was a learning task. These great teachers set great learning tasks because they knew the power of dialogue.

I was hooked. While Tim and our nephews played for hours outside I took copious notes on Vella.

For years we have seen ourselves as “facilitators” rather than “teachers” or “speakers” and we always try to include a variety of learning styles in our training, but on the first page Vella showed me that what we’ve used have been “teaching tasks” instead of “learning tasks.” As she says, “When I prepared teaching tasks, I was not inviting dialogue. I was structuring my monologue.”

So far I’ve taught four classes at the EJ structured around learning tasks and I’m thrilled by the difference I’ve seen in level of student’s engagement with the material. The following pictures give you an idea of the environment we create.

Now if you are involved in adult education and you’re thinking about getting this book, its only fair to warn you: a learning centered approach is full of challenges. For one thing, it’s difficult and time-consuming to prepare good learning tasks. It also develops people’s capacity to think for themselves. This might not sound like a challenge, however some of our students come from authoritarian environments where personal opinion is not valued. As Vella says,

This learning-centered approach has the delightful quality of uncovering domination and oppressive purposes. A dominating manager quickly discovers that you are the wrong educator to strengthen his control over the workers or staff.

As this third semester of the EJ Institute for youth workers nears the halfway point, many of the problems that plagued us last year are being alleviated by the new staff, but we're constantly reminded that this project requires more wisdom than what we have.

"Summer" "Vacation"

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We’ve been in Argentina long enough to adapt to some of the cultural rhythms, including arriving at the end of the calendar year exhausted. The average porteño (person from Buenos Aires) burns the candle of life at both ends, prioritizing work, study and relationships over sleep. For example, it’s not unusual for students at the EJ Institute to leave their house before 8 A.M., get home after 11 P.M., and then eat dinner. Caffeine and internal drive go a long way to keep them going day after day, but their secret weapon against complete depletion is summer vacation. The city powers down around Christmas and feels almost deserted until March, when kids go back to school.

Come December, we decided to embrace the cultural rhythm by getting out of town too. Even though we were neither in summer, nor really on vacation, we have been recharged by the time spent with family, friends and churches who collaborate with us in the work we do providing resources and training for youth leaders in the Spanish-speaking world.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder... We Hope

Courses, clases, students, professors...

These are the students (all active youth leaders) for just one of twelve courses we've offered so far. Each course lasts ten weeks and requires them to plan and execute a course-related project within their youth ministry context.

Yes, it HAS been WAY too long since we posted something on this blog. Months, and months. The images above give you a clue as to what has kept us occupied - really, really occupied - since August 3rd.

No Crying or Detention

First day of classes at the Youth Specialties Institute (Buenos Aires campus)

We returned home after the first day of classes with no detention, no crying, and I even want to go back again today :-) (If you don't know what I'm talking about read our previous post)

Please, Oh Please, Don't Make Me Cry

When my mom asked me how my first day of elementary school was, I replied:

It was okay but... I don't think I'll go back.

Then there was my first day of junior high school when my mom didn't even have to ask. I returned home crying, drenched and with blue stains on my khakis from where my 3-ring binder had bled onto them in the rain and a detention notice because I missed athletics due to the fact I couldn't open the silly combination lock on my gym locker.

Tomorrow is another first day of classes... the youth ministry institute is finally starting. I sure hope it goes better this time :-)

Thanks to so many of you who have supported us over the last 18 months of preparation. Your prayers, encouragement and financial support have kept us going.

First Journal Entry Upon Arriving Home

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We drove through the empty streets of Buenos Aires under a bright grey sky along street lined with grey-brown tree trunks with grey light coming down through brown leaves onto the pavement. There is a paleness to the city in winter. It's not unpleasant o unattractive, just somehow muted and reminding me of bones (structure without life).

[Note: I think I want more color on our apartment walls]

I was still zoned when we got off the plane. I had my eyes half-closed on the ride from the airport. I walked into the house, crawled under the covers and slept for 5 hours. Now I'm here in the stillness before life gets going again - the place in between the trip and the start of the institutes in 13 days. And life here is good - peaceful knowing that God has been so faithful to Raíces - doing more than we could ask or imagine through it - and confident that the institutes don't depend on us.

Thank you, Father, for all that and please help me live in this knowledge.

How to Invest in Latin America

We just got back from Costa Rica where we spent 9 days helping lead Raíces III training program for Spanish speaking youth leaders. Level one is basic principles for youth work; level two is how to train others in those principles and level three combines a look at "new challenges in youth work" with personalized mentoring for people who have proven faithful with the first two levels.

The invited leaders were from 11 countries and amazed us with the creativity and faithfulness with which they have applied, disseminated and improved on what we taught them.

For example, Raul and his wife Elcy have trained 800+ people in their home country of Colombia. His life is a tremendous return on the investment made by a couple who sponsored him through Compassion International during his childhood.

The event was a rich time for us to re-connect with old friends and make new ones with people who work with youth in the Spanish-speaking world but more importantly it allowed us to give fresh insight and encouragment to help them keep going. One of our friends who grew up in rural Mexico in a house with a dirt floor and a cardboard-roof and is now a professor and administrator at a seminary, a church planter, a youth director in both California and Mexico and a youth ministry trainer, said, “Sometimes I wonder about my call to this work. I ask myself if this is really what I’m supposed to be doing or if I’m just filling a spot someone else should be in, but through [my time here] I see that God has been guiding me to this work my whole life. I think I came to Raíces III so I could see that.”

When life get's tough, that's the kind of clarity that keeps you going and we're grateful to have been able to be a part of that process.

Quick Update on...

(a note from Annette about what's happening work-wise)

Life here is good...the pace keeps picking up as we have 60 days before classes start and the amount of work to do before then is... yikes.

The school finally has an administrative assistant, which helps a TON. We're finishing up the first round of interviews of prospective students and are moving on to meeting with their supervisors, which is a logistical nightmare, because they are all crazy-busy. But we're determined to have them in the loop, so we appreciate your prayers for that step of the process.

I'm in the thick of trying to help the professors produce their course materials which will break out of the talk, talk talk mold. And we're trying to get logistics of project based education hammered out and communicated. But the feedback from prospective students and other leaders we've been able to contact so far has been very encouraging. I think we are all sensing that the institutes are the right thing at the right time.