grace.kindness.peace.disruption.pain.processing.rinse.repeat.have a nice day.

As the days dogs bark seemingly without ceasing in the background, I write about silence. Here I have given up much of my precious silence. My room is not my own. The house is shared by eleven people: eight to one bathroom in the upstairs apartment, three to the bathroom in the downstairs apartment. Loud birds, gas generators, barking dogs, horns, people singing, talking, sweeping … there is always something waiting to steal the still moment I longingly await. The cloud of sound that surrounds everything wears down my nerves. I struggle to find peace – to process all that I see and hear, to remind (and sometimes convince) myself that I am still sane, I am love, I have worth. There are no coffee shops, no empty, quiet houses where I can escape. The color of my skin and the celebrity it provides does not allow me to find the silence that anonymity could provide. The brief moments that do come when the cloud cover breaks briefly or when I lose myself in my thoughts are sweet and cherished. Finding extended moments of escape is one of the challenges of my time here.

Even as I seek moments to be lost in silence that is mine to break, I am thankful for the silence from my routine back in the US – a silence brought about by the absence of the familiar. While I deeply miss friendships and family, the silence afforded me by my forfeiture of my routine allows me to start anew, to see what is really me and shows up here in Sierra Leone, and what is not and is left back in the states. This experience is a filter of sorts, leaving behind the things that are hindrances behind to create a silence to sift out what remains. Sadly, it also catches some things that mean so much, like family & friends.

So here I sit, seeking a literal silence to process the figurative along with all the lessons of the day.

How do I describe Sierra Leone? Sights, sounds, smells, and heat have bombarded me since stepping off the plan almost a week ago. As a sidenote, a weeks seems like an eternity ago. Our team is a good one, a fact that I'll probably repeat many times here and through email over the next several months. Our community is forming well and strong on a good foundation of openness, prayer, vulnerability, and desire to support each other. This community will be an integral part of my time here, providing the much needed support as we laugh, cry, get angry, forgive, and encounter our brokeness.

The WMF team here in Sierra Leone is broken up into three, unequal, yet nonetheless important parts: the girls, the couples, and three guys. The girls (Faye, Cami, and Michelle) live in the Aberdeen house that I mention in the pictures. This is in a small "suburb" (for lack of a better word) of Freetown called Murray Town. WMF rents this house by the year. The last Servant Team of five girls lived there. The couples live in a rented apartment downtown Freetown. The Eichorns & Padgetts live there. The Padgetts will be headed back to the US of A on Monday in search of chocolate and a refridgerator. The remaining three guys (Chia, Micah, and me) live in a house in Murray Town about 3/4 mile away from the Aberdeen house. Two families live in the house, one upstairs and one down. Chia currently lives downstairs and Micah and I upstairs, but we're going to try to get a bunkbed in our room so we'll all live upstairs. We hope to still be able to use the shower and facilities downstairs though.

We walk a lot. I consider this a good thing. The walk from the Aberdeen house to the guy's house is about 20 minutes. We take this route about once or twice a day. To travel into town we take a poda-poda. How do I describe a poda-poda? Hmm …. work with me here. Picture a late 1980′s family vacation in one of those new-fangled Japanese boxy minivan with a catchy name (Nissan Vanette and the like). Yes, oh yes, the fuel efficiency of a Japanese vehicle and the roominess of a van, but without all the hassle of a full-size van. The seats are cushy. You may even have captain's chairs, captain. It seats seven comfortably, including driver and front seat passenger. Ok, now remove the air conditioning, the padding, the carpet, the muffler, the seats, some windows, and make sure that it burns some oil. Now, put in three benches, the front two with a slide-out fourth seat. The back seats four (un)comfortably. The vehicle now seats twelve in the back (three rows of four), plus the driver & shotgun seat that will most likely seat two. The right seat in front bench in the back is reserved for the Apprentice. This is not some cocky twenty something trying to impress Donald Trump's hairpiece. No, this is the teenager that sticks his head out of the window calling out the transport route and who takes passenger fares. Now you have a poda-poda.

Travelling around Freetown is exciting. A large honky/cracker/apoto (white person in Mende) like myself draws quite a lot of attention. People like to stare. I stare back. They'll call out "white boy." We respond back with "black boy." Everyone chuckles. Being a spectacle is a novelty now, but I think it will get old after a while. The anonymity that is fairly abundant in a multi-racial soceity like the U.S. is a luxury that I will miss when my introvert self wants to be alone. But this challenge will make me stronger … or drive me crazy. Ahh, culture.

Things are going well. Relationships are forming in the team and with the Lighthouse kids. We'll go into Kroo Bay tomorrow to do the Good News Club for 200-300 kids. We walked through the Kroo Bay slum yesterday for the first time. It is quite an experience. From above, looking down on the bay you see a chaos of different colored roofs, garbage, dirty water, and pathways for travel fashioned with no planning. Once you dive into the slum you are greeted with a strange sense of orderliness. The shacks become houses with windows and doors. The threshholds are swept and clean. There is still trash and dirty water to remind you that you are in one of the poorest areas of the poorest countries on this planet. There are people in school. A church. Laughing. Cooking. Cleaning. … Life happens. I'm still trying to process what I've seen. It will take much longer than four months.

My team leader informed me that I may have lied to many of you before I came and may have led you to think that things would be a cake walk over here. For that, I am sorry. I promise I intended no harm. I was incorrect in stating that we would get two hours of electricity a day at our house. I've been told that we'll more likely get two hours a week.

This week has been an exception. We've had about seven hours so far, but between the hours of 3-7 a.m. People get up to enjoy it when it turns on. You can hear the BBC blaring from radios all over the neighborhood when we have it. Many of you know that I like news, but no matter how cool a British accent sounds, I still don't want to hear it at 7:30 in the morning while I'm trying to sweat out a few more minutes of sleep!