So us being teachers and writers and preachers and whatever we are, exactly, kind of makes sense.
But Lily? Lily does not make sense.
I guess that's what it is to be a missionary kid. You don't just GET watcho mama gave you.
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| Lily's first cow foot |
Yesterday was kill day. Every five or six weeks, we buy a big 'ole cow from some nearby family, and he comes lumbering on the campus and tied to a tree for a few days.
During those days, Lily and Sofie frequently visit him, naming him, feeding him, telling him stories and showing him their stuffed animals.
When it's time (feeding 100 people a day means it's always time soon) Granny sets a kill appointment.
And on that day, Lily wakes up before sunrise. LIKE it's Christmas.
Yesterday morning when it was still dark outside, she shook me awake and said, "CAN I GO NOW!?" and Sofie seconded her "Me, TOO!"
They charge out of the house and run across the wet field, barefoot, finding Granny and "Brownie" and a few young men with machetes, and settle happily into their front row seats.
You will NEVER see Lily so interested.
And neither will Matt or I. Because we are NOT going over there.
At 8 am, I call them in from afar for breakfast, but they are not hungry.
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| a few years ago, with "Star" |
"Granny already brought breakfast! We had fried spaghetti while we watched! And I got to hold the leg!"
YIKES, child. Just the thought of slurping on garlic fried spaghetti watching a butchering makes me glad I DIDN'T have breakfast.
As soon as they finish homeschooling, Lily BEGS her way to the kitchen, where she knows by now they'll be sorting and cutting and chopping. And that is her favorite part.
Kisa-sa YE? Kisa-SA ye? I hear her little voice asking over and over as I head home from the office later, elbows deep in a bloody bucket of meat and organs, picking up one nasty lump after another, begging Granny "What is this? What is this?"
Granny is very happy to have a kitchen protégé, and later Lily enthusiastically tells me all about the kidney and the heart, the brains and the eyes (which bounce, apparently), the tongue and the stomach, where they were, what they do, how they smell (help me) and feel.
I got a C in high school biology because I refused to take the dissection process past "daisy."
I was a vegetarian for years, because I couldn't stand the sight of raw meat, because it kind of looked and smelled like it had been alive once.
Who IS this child? She LOOKS like me, but....
It all reminds me what has always been true...this world is not our home, and Lily's NOT really mine, but His.
She is a farm girl to city parents, and she always has been. I see her running out of school with her friends, eating fried mayonnaise hot dogs and talking a mile a minute, and she's a blonde Haitian girl with an American family. Her experience of life in Haiti is entirely different than anything Matt or I will EVER understand. Because we came to Haiti.
but Lily is being made here.
So interesting to read because it brought back many memories. I felt the same in biology and could not even watch missionary presentations with my eyes open when it involved surgery pictures. Yet when Kate was growing up she was always interested in stuff like that. In high school she went with a class to see an autopsy at OSU and most students left the room when it got to the brain but she stayed and could not wait to tell us all about it (at the dinner table no less). Watching our children as they grow and seeing how God created them is quite interesting.
ReplyDeleteoh my yuck-o. :) I did hold a live chicken this year before watching Anthony chop its head off. I did not partake in the plucking of feathers or anything else, though.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Stacey, I LOVED to help my dad care for and cut up the deer, snapping turtles, squirrel, fish, etc and learn what they had eaten and what the organs and muscles did... My parents have several pictures of me JUST LIKE THAT! I identify with EVERYTHING you just wrote about your girl :) Maybe someday she will be interested in medicine?
ReplyDeleteLove this.
ReplyDeleteWONDERFUL! She's a doctor in the making AND it reminds me so much that God has a unique plan for EACH OF US. If we have a parent who isn't what we would want, we DO NOT have to "follow in those footsteps" forever...Christ died that we might have life ABUNDANTLY and UNIQUELY our own in Him. PRAISE HIM! Isn't He so amazing!? And of course, so is LILY...and SOPHIE...and NORA...who will be running alongside them very, very soon.
ReplyDeleteOh my.... She is one special girl with a strong stomach! But I have to say, I would not be running across the field with her, I would be sitting in the house with Matt and you!
ReplyDelete