An Older Generation Perspective

Here are some random themes developing so far from the perspective of one of the older generation Granada team members:

Not Kids vs. Adults: I use “older” instead of “adult” because after spending the first 24 hours traveling together from Dresher to finally getting settled in our new convent “home” in Southern Spain, our team had quickly dissolved the notion of being a group of kids and adult chaperones. Some are older and some are younger but, after crossing the Atlantic together, it became obvious that we were one unified body on a shared mission. This shift was epitomized at our first team devotion time last Thursday when one of the younger team members said, “we really don’t know what to call the adults - Mr. or Mrs. (like we do at church) or by their first name?”. As you can imagine, all the adults voted for some variation of their first name - it is our attempt to cling as long as possible onto that “kid” in each of us that has never really grown up.

Musical Gifts: It’s really great to have so many musical talents on our team. On Friday and Saturday nights we came home and sat around our 3rd floor common room - we had 5 guitars/ukuleles/mandolins going at once and some great lead female vocals from Chrissy Hetrick. The songs range from great worship tunes, back to the Beatles and mixing in some more modern Cold Play songs.

Teaching/Preaching Gifts: John Gullett is my roommate and I think we’ve been a good fit - each of us unpacked our clothes into drawers and closets right away, and had shoes neatly aligned along the side of our bed (no people, this is normal, not anal-retentive :-)). Our neighbors on either side, Stefan & Adam and Jesse and Tommy, are still living out of suitcases 6 days into the trip - John and I are praying every day for our “lost” traveling brethren!.

John has been leading our small group times and has really brought a sense of calm encouragement to our group - he is leading us through a more formal evening prayer time followed by some reading of Ephesians about how the good news of the peace of Christ outweighs any of our anxieties about this trip. John also preached at our church service last night with the language translation help of Kelly, who works with the World Harvest team here. This was a really neat display of God’s gifts being used cross-culturally.

Jesse’s Raw Humor: Jesse Robinson is our official team leader and brings his own giftings and encouragement, especially to the younger gang. He has this raw sense of humor and is not afraid to laugh at himself, nor shy about saying what he thinks. Our end of the dinner table was in tears laughing Sunday night, and I really can’t tell you what was so funny - it’s just refreshing and contagious to hear that Texas laugh!

Mangling the Spanish Language: I have noticed in my business travels that other European countries tend to speak a good amount of English - but it seems to be a rarity here in Spain. Thankfully, there are some good Spanish speakers on our team which has helped us greatly in navigating our way around. Other than the Lovelady’s, Laura Solt, Rachel Niekirk and Chrissy Hetrick though, the rest of us are in deep waters. Anyone from Philly has seen and heard the word, “Yo”, so many times that we immediately think of Rocky Balboa and his guttural calling to get the attention of his wife. In Spanish, “Yo” means “I” and is pronounced, “Joe” - which normally wouldn’t be an issue, but “Yo” was used about 500 times in the worship slides at church last night, and you can maybe see the problem with a group of Rocky Balboa’s trying to sing our typical New Life range of songs!

Hutta-Hutta: The Harvest team leader’s name here in Granada is J.J. Foster. In Spanish, the alphabet letter J is translated as something that sounds (to me anyway) like “Hutta”; and therefore J.J. is referred to by the locals as Hutta-Hutta. For some reason, this has become really funny to Stefan, Adam, Tommy, me and a bunch of others. For those of us that don’t speak Spanish very well, we have been able to plug in Hutta-Hutta in places where you would otherwise say normal pleasantries such as thank you, hello, good bye, etc - or when someone is speaking in Spanish and you just have no idea how to respond, “hutta-hutta” just gets us over the hump. Hutta-Hutta has essentially become our one-word rendition of the entire Spanish language. Our varied pronunciations bring in a range of influences from Japanese accents to Star Wars characters. The big problem here is when J.J. is actually in the room and hears all of us calling his name constantly!

Getting to Know the Girls: Somewhat related to the first point, we have a core group of teen girls on the trip - it’s been really great getting to know these young ladies whom I previously saw more as the kids sitting next to their parents at church. I’ve been on a couple trips now with Julia, and Laurel, Rachel Neikirk and Libby Stark have been in my travel “pod” around town. Anna Lauer and I have often been the final two slow-walking stragglers following the rest of our crew around the city. I have to mention Carly and Emily in particular here - the three of us have ended up being co-teaching leaders of our adolescent camp and so we’ve needed to spend some extra time together preparing lessons. I was going to attempt to make this a humorous recap of all the laughing these two have done together (they are roommates). But, I’ve really seen God’s gifts showing up in these girls. I don’t see myself as particularly gifted at teaching and leading groups, but Carly and Emily just naturally gravitate and connect with these kids in our camp. Our team has been taking extra care of a little blind girl, Rachel, that signed up for the English camp, and Carly and Emily having been basically giving up their lunch hour to sit and help Rachel eat her own lunch and help her get to the bathroom, etc.. It has really been a picture of Jesus in action, and it was an especially emotional goodbye said today when we had to leave the school and you could tell that Rachel would have loved to just stay and play all day.

So, to recap, I really feel like the “kid” in this group - poor Carly was in tears during one of our prep times when I mangled the Spanish word for “counselor”... OK, just tell me what to do here, Carly! If there was any doubt about who is really the adult, I was quickly reminded that I am the one who needs chaperoning: we took a walk on Day 1 into town and Emily casually asks me, “So, are you going to bring back a gift for Mrs. Leahy from our trip?”...Geeez, we haven’t even been in Granada an hour yet... and I get this dagger of guilt plunged into my heart! Emily’s friends then proceeded to fill me on the various levels of sarcasm that she tends to use with friends and strangers alike. Of course, I made a vain attempt to cover up my cluelessness and I won’t share my gift idea here because that would just give it away to Lisa...(eh-hem, no, I’m not just buying time and waiting until the last minute... Meredith, any help here???).

Thanks for praying for us and see you guys soon,

Tom L.