A Lot to Learn

Got to sleep in today since it's Sunday. Normally no work is done on Sundays at the complex, so today will be the last day that I have the privilege of sleeping past 5:30am, which feels like 4:30 New Orleans time.  I woke up a few times, but for the most part my body was a champ and let me enjoy the rest.

After a perfect combination of corn flakes topped off with 4 tiny cups of coffee, I finally settled on what to play for church this morning, with some wonderful insight from Mike to assist my decision:
"Some of those songs have notes that I just can't sing..."

I settled on Paul Baloche's classic, "Open the Eyes of My Heart".  No big deal. Oldie-by-goodie.
After about 45 minutes of worship, they invited us to sing our song.  There were about a dozen of us and we chugged through it in true American fashion, thanks to Chris for holding the microphone by my guitar because it was too heavy for the clip on the stand.  I think we sounded pretty decent over all, but there was simply no comparing our song to what we had just heard from the congregation there.  We heard a variety of some neat locally flavored music, but also a surprising number of classic American pop worship songs, with most of the lyrics in Creole, I think.  Once the band dropped out, though, is when the music really happened.  200 Haitians singing "How Great is Our God" in Creole completely a cappella, and a dozen of us white folk sometimes singing along in English.  It was so incredibly moving, to the point of tears, to see how genuinely these people worshipped.  Many of them didn't have amazing pitch, but
it
didn't
matter.
We have a lot to learn from these people.
It's like Mike put it today, "These kids are playing around in broken luggage for hours, and our kids have every toy under the sun, and they still get bored."

Granted, it's a different world. A different culture.  What I'm suggesting is not that we all learn to live on nothing, although I'm sure there could be some good to come from learning what we really NEED versus what we want, and furthermore to figure out why we want it at all.  What I AM suggesting is that we learn how to be content with what we have, no matter what that is.  We could learn to live on what we DO have, instead of demanding more and more from everyone and everything around us.

On a lighter note, I got to meet a pretty cool cat (the expression for "dude", not the animal) named Clerice.  He's learning how to play guitar and it sounds like later tonight I'll get to show him a few more of my "how to play guitar well enough for non-musicians to think you're good" tricks. (hush up, all you musicians...the muggles don't know you can't play any worship song in the world either in the key of G or E by simply using a capo...let them continue in their bliss.)  Oh yeah, and we had some pretty good soccer exchanges too.  So far I've played soccer every day I have been here, and this makes me very happy.

Going to miss the friendly guys and gals that left today.  Wish we could have had more time to get to work with and know them.  But there's plenty of neat people here still, and still plenty of work to do.