Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut!

Hello and welcome to my blog! This is the place I hope to chronicle my experience over the next three years in Bolivia, where I’ll be serving with the Franciscan Mission Service (http://www.franciscanmissionservice.org/). The aim is to live a mission of presence and service in solidarity with poor communities overseas, and then come back to the US to continue living out that mission here—good stuff!

I’ve been in Washington, DC for training the past 3 months but am now back home in Fairfax, VA preparing to leave on Tuesday Jan. 5, 2010. What have I been learning? Well, we’ve had generally 2 sessions a day 4 days out of the week on a wide variety of topics and then one day a week we volunteered somewhere in DC (I was at Living Wages of Washington in Anacostia tutoring adults working towards their high school diplomas).

Here is an overview of the topics covered:

• Cross-cultural realities, adaptation, phases of adjustment



• Myers Briggs – I found out I am an ESFJ and that when my organizing-sensing side gets frustrated, I need to remember my values, my heart J (please remind me of this)



• St Francis and St. Clare – called people to an attitude of listening and conversation; not to “do” for people, but to “be with” people; sitting down face-to-face and exchanging the good in each other; encountering the poor is a gift from God, relating to someone not as inferior but as a part of God; live without possessing things (not live without things) in order to more fully enter into an exchange and be able to receive; Compassion—a quivering of the heart in response to another person’s suffering; not trying to solve all problems but to share Love



• Social Analysis and Faith Reflection—reflecting on the way the world is and way God intended the world to be, and then planning Action to make the former into the latter. In talking about systems, we’re actually talking about relationships and relatedness…How do we repair relationships???



• Popular Education-started by Paulo Freire in Brazil; the idea that as an outsider, one can help pose questions that bring about awareness, analysis and learning, in the context that people know their experience better than an outsider and the wisdom is already there.



• Environmental Justice – consequences on people and on the Earth; “ishamer” – Hebrew for “to keep, care for, to protect, to do in such a way that full potential can be revealed”; importance of healing; creation is the agent of conversion—“creation is the window into the divine”



• Non-violence – communication is key ingredient



• International policies and development



• Interreligious dialogue—sharing traditions and seeing similarities and differences, recognizing that many people who’re upset with religion haven’t had an experience of freedom and choice but felt forced in some way



• Catholic Social Teaching (main gist: Life is Awesome! and there is great Dignity in all Life, with Love at the forefront and what brings any action for justice to reach its full potential)
  community – the importance of community and relationships; dealing with conflict



• Scripture and Mission – what is the mission of God and of the church? !LOVE! there’s no denying it



• Lay mission spirituality



• moral responsibility



• Helping – the good side and the shadow side



• Being an Agent of Change – leading from behind; key to power is organized people



• Inculturation—in my own words: how God is present in every single person and in every place and culture. The more official definition: dynamic process in which the Word of God is incarnated in a cultural context, expressed in the lives, symbols, values and meaning of the people of the culture.



• Mission—we’re responsible to share our selves and our resources beyond ourselves; to promote love, peace and justice; to collaborate; mission called the church into being



• Power and Privelge – being aware of the systems in place that favor different groups of people (class, race, gender, religion etc.) and how we’re a part of that



• Trauma and Violence – symptoms, what to do and what not to do, crisis intervention



• Intimacy—willingness to allow myself to be changed/influenced through closeness to someone else; being who you are and allowing the other to be who they are without compromising either



• Health – holistically: emotional, physical, spiritual, mental
  

I’ll end with some key quotes and advice I’ve received over the past 3 months:

It’s in the relationships, not necessarily the doing.
It’s not always what you say but how you live it.
Keep an open mind—to receive richness, and be willing to suspend beliefs a bit.
Discomfort opens us up to conversion.
For at least the first year, keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut!