We’re a rag-tag group of people vigilantly pursuing self-sustaining educational & employment opportunities with and for students and their families living in rural communities in developing countries. We believe in asking hard questions like, “What do you need and how can we help?” We believe that communities know their needs better than we do and that it’s our job to listen. We’re big on being kind for the sake of kindness and we believe that even the smallest acts of kindness can make a big difference. We believe in keeping vigil over one another and watching for opportunities to help, no matter how far off the beaten path those opportunities take us. We’re vigilant in our belief that God has given each person unique gifts and that one of the highest forms of worship is using those gifts to serve others. We believe God has a purpose for each life and Vigilante Kindness is our purpose. Join us as we live out wild adventures in service of God and others. Join us in committing acts of Vigilante Kindness.
This week I’m thankful for…
This week I’m thankful for…
The machines are against me.
Not in a Transformers Dark Side of the Moon* sort of against me. There aren’t huge talking robot cars breaking into my house or anything.
It all began when the air conditioner at the school broke. My classroom A/C worked just fine mind you. But when the men in coveralls came to fix the school-wide A/C, mine stopped working. Stopped working as in it was eighty-eight-lord-have-mercy-degress inside my classroom. Dear ones, let me tell you that there isn’t a tougher crowd than 30 five and six-year olds who are too hot to move and/or think. Due to the smoke from the fires blazing around us, we couldn’t even open a door or crack a window. Teaching Sweating profusely for upwards of 10 hours a day and then driving home in a cauldron of smoke made me contemplate 2 things:
Truth be told, it also made me long for my days in Uganda writing with my sons and daughters in their beautiful open air classrooms that don’t need pesky things like air conditioners or for that matter, electricity. It made me long to sit under the trees with them, looking out over the bush while they entranced me with their stories.
Once word got out that one of my machines had gone rogue, the others followed suit. My router went on the fritz, taking my internet access and printer with it. No amount of cajoling could bring the router back to life. Believe me I tried. I tried to fix it with the help of customer service agents from all over the world. I was on the phone with customer service for 5 unholy hours which led to me saying very bad words and entertaining thoughts of taking the business end of a screwdriver to my router, which I may or may not have done while having a full on fit in my garage.
So while I would have loved to write about said ridiculous fit in detail here, the last thing I wanted to do after sweating through my clothes all day was vagabond myself out to free WiFi spots. The only thing I wanted to do was come home and take an icy shower. Trust me, sparing the public of my presence during those days was really an act of community service because let me tell you, the funk rising out of my skin was so strong it sometimes brought tears to my eyes when I happened to catch an errant whiff of myself. There aren’t deodorants strong enough for that people, there just aren’t.
After the A/C, router and printer went on strike, my classroom projector and camera followed suit. I swear it’s because they were melting in the heat. My classroom A/C has now been out for 2 weeks. Luckily for me I have a student teacher who climbs into the spiderwebby A/C closet every day and manually starts the thing up. What better way for him to get a glimpse of the realities of teaching that to do that every morning, right? Unfortunately once it’s on, it will not be stopped, so we’ve moved from the sweltering fires of Mordor to the frozen tundra of Antarctica.
But today, dear ones, is a turning point in The Great Machine Strike. Perhaps they saw the damage I can do with a single screwdriver. Perhaps their little metal innards were scarred by a full-grown woman melting down in all senses of the word. Today two men in coveralls came and banged on things in the A/C closet outside of my classroom so I’m hopeful that tomorrow it will be humming away again. Also a man with a jangling tool belt came and did things to the projector and it’s all bright and happy again. I bought a new router that is speedy and quick and smiles at me with a pretty blue light.
The last hold out is the printer, but I think it knows I mean business because it’s beginning to perk back up and make clicking sounds and flash cheerful blinking lights at me like it wants to be friends again. Just in case it needs a little more convincing, I left the screwdriver out in plain sight.
This week I’m thankful for…
Hello, dear friends. Lord have mercy, it’s been a long time since I’ve been here with you and I’ve missed you. The past few weeks have been filled with funerals, weddings and the beautiful frenzy known as Back to School.
Good, good things are happening and I’m dying to write about them and also to write more about my beloved Ugandan children.
But the thing that’s on my mind tonight as I stand tip-toe on the doorstep of a new school year is how ripe with possibility the new year always feels.
Have you ever eaten a peach straight from the tree? Yes? Then you know the sensation of the flesh bursting with juice as it runs in warm rivulets down your chin, dripping onto your shirt. That’s the kind of ripe I’m talking about, the kind of ripe that only comes after months of effort from the loins of trees, the kind of ripe that gets all over you. The kind of ripe that is blissfully messy.
Year after year I find myself rippling with excitement on the eve of the first day of school. I barely sleep and I’m all a-twitter the morning of the first day. I never know what the first day might hold. I could be peed on. It’s happened before. I could be puked on. Also happened. My shoulder could be damp with tears. It’s happened, courtesy of students and parents. I could also receive drawings and love notes scratched out in blocky phonics. It happens every year. I could get hugged so many times that my arms ache. That happens every year, too. It’s a blissfully messy day.
Tomorrow when my little ones settle on the carpet and look up at me with beaming, hopeful faces, I’ll be thinking of ripe peaches. When I eat a peach, I don’t care about the mess or the stains on my shirt, I only care about the sweetness of the peach. Tomorrow may hold some surprises-the first day always does-but what I know for sure is that the day will be ripe with sweetness.
Vigilante Kindness 