everything but

Saturday, Micheline, her newly returned-to-Haiti-after-5-years-trying-to-find-work husband and their 3 biological and 2 live-in-orphaned children came for lunch.

From before I could say “help me!” in Creole till now, Micheline has been a faithful, gentle, sacrificial friend…teaching me how to cut a papaya, how to make guava juice, how to get that darn coconut open, how to fix banan (plantain), how to do laundry without a dryer, how to buy stuff at the market, helping me with the language, answering a million questions about culture, helping me with my girls and house, making working at the Seminary possible, and generally, being an all around fantastic friend.

Best, Micheline knows Who Jesus Is and gives Him to me all the time. 

For years she has swept around a pile of shoes unparalleled in her own bursting home.  Washed our clothes with a machine unimagined for her own dirty mountain.  Cut open fruit that she rarely touches for her own family, played with Lily with toys never had by her own kiddos.  Mopped our tile then swept her dirt, worn my old clothes when I thought they were completely worn out, dusted our tv without a current of electricity in her own home.

Micheline has never acted like any of that was all that important.  She’s always been crazy with sharing her gratitude over a job with which to support her family while her husband was away, and while dozens of others in her community sit at home, her children have been in school. 

So after all this time, it never occurred to me that when her family came for lunch, her seven year-old son    Wudson was whispering in her ear about the kitchen sink.

Before they left, she quickly bowed into the kitchen holding his hand, and I watched from the family room while she showed him how to turn it on and turn it off.  With sheer delight and completely mesmerized, Wudson watched the stream of water charge out, then stop, charge, then stop again.  Enthralled, he grabbed his little sister's hand and drug her to the sink as well, showing her running water.

He wasn't jealous or irritated or frustrated over the millions of gallons of water he must have pumped and carried home in his life.  Just thrilled.  It had honestly never occurred to me that over five years of rinsing dishes with me, Micheline's children had never even seen running water.  I didn't tell him the water could come out hot, too.

I know this isn't the kind of water that matters.  

But it still broke my heart.