mixed up good

Today proved to be a very interesting cross-cultural day...which is always good for my soul.  Time I get to spend out and about is always a blessing.

My Mondays start with hair braiding, sending the girls off to school, then rushing off to be with these 33 students, my biggest English class ever.  I much prefer the smaller classes where we get to relationship more, but I have still be really enjoying getting to know these new men and women.

When Lily came home from school, she'd had a great day...EXCEPT for one thing.  "Foreigners, foreigners, foreigners!" she sighed dramatically.

"Everywhere I go there are foreigners!  There were even foreigners at school today!"  (A group of Americans are building a cafeteria at her school).

"Well," I said curiously.  "What's wrong with that?"

"All my friends drive me crazy asking me if those people are my dad, uncle, brother, cousin, aunt and mom even though I don't know ANY of them...and then all of the foreigners stare at me, point at me and one guy even took my picture!"

I think Lily genuinely does not recognize that she a foreigner.  She is somewhere in the middle, isn't she.  And I bet those foreigners were not expecting to see a Lily at their building project :)  It does make me wonder if Haitian kiddos complain about the same thing!

Then this afternoon we took Nora to meet Florina, who has been wanting to meet her but is absolutely petrified of Boone.  The girls adore Florina's house, running wild and getting spoiled with hot fried peppers (marinade), sugar cane and water in bags, their favorite thing.

Naomi taught the girls how to make pate from start to finish, rolling the dough out with an old beer bottle and stuffing them with mystery meat and spicy peppers...they had SO much fun, and ate so much that nobody wanted dinner.

...but no one had as much fun as the line of people coming and going from their little shop, all oooooing and ahhhhing over Nora, person after person insisting she was a boy, then asking if they could please have their picture taken with their phones with Nora.    

Foreign babies are very special :)  I laughed to myself, having just read another article about all the ways that short-term teams are doing missions wrong, grabbing people's babies and taking their pictures with them.

When we got home, Matt, Junior and Johny were cutting Matt's hair with a razor blade alligator-clipped  to a plastic comb.

I'm sure there is some word for how cross-culturally mixed up we are.  

But as I watch the girls, I realize that for them, it does't matter what it's called.  It's just life. And they are loved and happy and learning to follow Jesus, learning to share Him.  Learning that how we show each other Jesus matters a lot more than what language we speak, what our houses look like, what we look like.

thankful.