School

Amber said she was meant to give her bracelet away to someone, and she saw me walk back into the classroom after I left to use the bathroom and she knew I was the one god intended it for. “Don’t sink, float” the bracelet said. I tried to accept it, like it was a present from her and from above.

She also said she had been possessed by a demon that was making her speak Greek. And that god told her to control the height of the waves in the ocean and that it worked, it really worked.

I wondered if she had ever listened to Greek before or tried to learn it. I didn’t doubt the waves, but I wasn’t big on demonic possession, especially one that just made someone say some spooky accent sounds.

I spent time in the moldy music room making fanfiction of Neopets stories with evil faeries and runaway kids on Lutari Island, and I kept wishing I could learn guitar. I wasn’t ready for the type of school it was. I was in a concrete block with three girls, me the loser of the group slated to be the only person on the top bunk- unanimously. Everyone set up their stuff and made themselves comfortable, but I didn’t know how to do that, and no one had taught me. I spent the school year hiding and avoiding my household, only asking for things when I really needed it like when I was freezing in the fall with no clothes. Danika lent me a hoodie for one week before saying I had to give it back, and I went back to freezing.

I had a bad feeling in my bones and in my stomach. I told my young mentor Rachel, my friend Julia, the trip leader Corrin and her husband Josh, and some other adults in charge of our school, too. Everyone told me I was wrong, that this would be good for me and that I needed to go for god. I would just be disappointing everyone I wrote back to home about my trip. I promised them I would go, and I wouldn’t graduate if I didn’t go.

There was a home mission I asked to do. We were told that night we could do the home mission if we felt led to, but during that night in the tiny worship room I couldn’t feel what to do. I had heard and seen the word Nigeria, though I wasn’t sure what it meant. A girl younger than all of us was crying in the corner. It called my attention louder, and so I went to her and held her in my arms. Everyone else was sprawled out, cross legged on the floor with only christmas lights goldening their faces. By the time I had to give my response, I hadn’t been able to finish my prayers to get an answer. I walked to one side of the room.

I used the same tiny tote bag I had moved to school in for the airport journey. Four shirts, 3 skirts, 2 pants. Toothbrush and toothpaste, a phone charger I couldn’t use because of voltage differences, and a pack of vitamins and a box of protein bars. They fit inside the black canvas neatly. I kept an eye out during our van ride for the satanic shrine in the ocean cliffs, but somehow, I missed it. I could see the three long stone slabs balanced on top of the layers of concrete pillars covered in the goats and buddha-baphomets. Three layers of art jutting into the seaside cliffscape. The image lived in my mind as something strange and beautiful I had never seen before. A human creation silhouetted by ocean waves.

Homophobic. Styrofoam. I remember those two words from my rooftop friend. We’d sit on the kitchen rooftop and look at the ocean. It was the only time I helped break the school rules as he rolled up cigarettes and smoked them. I always wished I could share more closely those moments, but I sat and watched as the softly rolled up nicotine was squeezed between his lips- breathing in and letting go to breathe out.

“It was homophobic bullshit at the party. Hundreds of people and styrofoam plates and plastic forks. They have so much money, but they fill bags and bags with waste and can’t even use real plates and wash them.”

Out in the soccer field the night before our flights, Kristian cried. The married Jonnathan and Julia and I held him, said we were his friends and that he’ll be okay. I wished and wished I was on the home mission. I felt it everywhere that was where I was meant to be, praying for all my classmates every moment and every day.

Chunks of rubber between the plasticky blades of grass of this artificial soccer field, reminding me of other strange things at my school. Bible-guitar teacher back-hand-slaps, a male mentor threatening my roommate he had a crush on, and me being so so cold everyday and everynight with no clothes. It was a month into fall that felt like a year and then someone finally unlocked the door to the donated clothes covered in dried paint for me. Thank god. However, this night we were waiting and waiting for the inevitable that was going to happen when we woke up the next morning- everyone happy besides me and Kristian who were crying and crying in the spotlights of the soccer field. Kristian needed me, but I couldn’t go with him to Mexico, and I needed him, but he couldn’t come with me to Uganda. Hugs and tears and the three of us reassured Kristian, and then the married couple reassured me. Last van ride to go in the morning.

The flight from San Diego to Newark was fine, but our connecting flight was canceled. That night we were trapped on the tarmac for 10 hours next to a doggy bathroom until we were finally able to get through the line. They sent us food vouchers and then taxied us to a hotel they said we could eat at- but the restaurant within the hotel was closed for renovations. The next day at the airport they said the vouchers wouldn’t work because they were for a different airport, so we just waited for our longest flight.

I loved flying from Newark to Brussels. They gave us these funny little European airplane meals in hot cardboard boxes. 16 hours in and for the last meal we got melted brie and cuts of bread loaf which felt homemade to me. My classmates hated the brie, and I loved it, so they gave me five extra wheels of brie to eat. I stuffed each one of them into my face before we got off the plane for our next layover. In the Brussels airport I bought an umbrella to protect me from the rain and sun with the print of the world map on it, and then I bought a book about forgetfulness and separation from loved ones. That book was called Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The first night in Uganda we went through customs and then took a bus to our school in Jinja. In the darkness of the night, I closed my eyes and listened to us bump along paved roads and dirt roads. When we arrived at the school, we started to slight downward on this muddy hill right outside of our boarding houses. I stepped out onto wet mud and followed the street lamp and the little outdoor lamp on the front of the house. I realized as soon as I got there, I didn’t have my umbrella, and I turned around and the bus had already left. I asked if it was possible to call the bus or if I could get it back, and I was told I was making a big deal out of nothing.

We had a kitchen with a static electrocuting outlet that would shock you if you reached your hand out or held a fork. A bathroom with cold water. A triple bunk bed like three caskets stacked on top of one another. I took the bottom bunk and tied up my mosquito net. I tried to knot the holes closed, and when I slept, they would fall open and I would wake up to the buzzing in my ears and bites on my body.

Two weeks into Uganda and I regretted my decision to go. I wished and I wished to go home. My only friend in the group spoke to me the day before the trip, and then stopped because he had other closer friends who he was now spending everyday with.

I remember exploring the first mission location- a YWAM school in Jinja. I remember spying on lizards and spiders in different empty buildings, and strange cocoon tunnels that let long skinny winged bugs crawl between sealed doors in and outside of closed buildings. In Jinja, we had a lot of missionary work in dirty city places. I remember first the disabled children’s home with babies covered in flies all day and night, the orphan center where kids from the street came for tea and bible lessons (and slaps on top of their heads by the pastor). Kids were sick with malaria, and kids told us they wished they were white like us.

Three tiny bird eggs were smashed against the concrete. Hunted by lizards gulping up the nutrients. Abandoning the half-eaten children on the ground for me to find. I used a rock and a stick to pick up the one that had an entire baby bird inside of it intact with no feathers, and I brought it over to somewhere pretty and dug a hole with the rock and stick. After I buried it, I used a rectangular rock to make a grave. When I went to bed that night, I thought about the darkness over the school, the wet mud and dewy leaves, how I lost my umbrella. I slept and when I woke that morning, I went to check the grave. Unearthed I found the baby bird, ants digging it out of the ground. I thought about reburying it, but felt it would be better if I just left.

Everyday, we got a piece of white bread with margarine and sugar for breakfast. The good days were Friday when we got a boiled egg and funky milk tea in the morning, and the extra good days were when we did missions in the city. We got to have rolex for lunch cooked over a fire in the street- eggs fried on chapati with green chillies. It was so good. Our other lunches were posho, (boiled corn meal) rice, brown beans, and meat macheted off with bone shards, fire ash and sand. I brought protein bars and vitamins because I knew I might have a hard time, but I really struggled with the food. The bonfire flavor was in every piece of meat we had and permeated into anything it touched. I thought I would be hungry enough to ignore it, but every time I tasted ashes from the fire or crunched down on a piece of bone I felt like puking and lost my appetite. It was crazy.

We got an opportunity to do prison outreach. They asked us if anyone felt led to go to women’s ministry or men’s ministry that didn’t match their gender, and I knew I did. I raised my hand to go to men’s prison ministry because I felt it inside of me that I wasn’t meant to go to women’s and that I had no place there. I didn’t match women, and I wasn’t going to be helpful or feel okay in that gendered space. I went with the guys up through the mountains to this men’s prison. There were two layers of metal walls that reached high up in the air and guards with machine guns watching the perimeter. We were searched and then let in one at a time inside of the walls. Each of us was given a white plastic lawn chair which we propped against the wall. Then, a man came out and called the prisoners out to the courtyard. They came from three stories of prison cells in files, and they all sat in the grass and dirt and sun with only a sparse tree giving them shade. The young men from my school prayed and gave sermons. I stayed quiet except for on one occasion.

“God, help these men with their struggles, with their responsibilities,” one of our local guides prayed.

“God, I pray these men become strengthened in you,” I think my friend Jackson prayed.

“Give them wisdom, help guide them,” someone else said.

I thought that none of these people have ever been trapped like I have… They don’t understand what these men are going through having to live like this. Years in the same place. Years alone and doing nothing.

Right now, I have to relive the moment and rethink what I thought, to conjure up what I would’ve prayed with what I knew at that time. Whatever had brought them here, they were trapped in a tiny pen with nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to be with. That was what drove me to come to my school in the first place, and I was still experiencing it now.

“God, I pray you help these men through their struggles. Give them comfort, give them peace, help them to connect to one another and find hope for the future. Thank you for your kindness, thank you for them.”

It was something like that, and I felt the air change, I saw these men sit up straight, their stern faces uplifted just a little after I interrupted with my prayer. It felt like I did something that was true to me, that it was right, and that other people recognized it was right.

One day during outreach, we climbed down the hill outside of the school we were staying at through forest and mud paths. We found a small settlement of mud huts at this flat area full of streams. We stopped at each house and with each person to offer them our prayers.

I laid myself down at her feet to pray as hard as I could. I stayed on my knees for twenty minutes, far beyond when my legs went numb, and everything hurt. I knew something wasn’t right with her life, and I wanted to conjure up a happy future. I was in the dark of her hut in the mud, praying with my classmates around us adding their prayers. We hugged her and left the forest huts that were outside of the walled school.

My favorite outreach was going into the marketplace of Jinja and talking to the Muslims there. The chaos and beauty were like static with loud labyrinths of sewing factories and four-story tall open markets full of fruit and meat and secondhand toys. Each of the Muslim store owners there always asked for the same prayer, “please let my business be successful.” My favorite person we spoke to was a man named Adam. We wandered down this brightly lit alleyway full of bars and just a few people. Adam was there and started talking to us. He was an Islamic refugee from the middle east living in Uganda as a drug dealer. He was kind and patient and tried to understand us. My classmates asked him if he should be selling drugs if it is bad for people, but he said that it was just them trying to survive in this place.

At some point Corrin asked me if I was okay. I had been searching for rocks shaped like Africa in the refugee camp of rocks and rocks. I think I said yes, or that it was hard, but I wasn’t sure what to say. She said to let her know if I needed anything.

Our guitarist became sick with malaria after not remembering to take his medicine. We were at a church in the refugee camp, and they had no one to put music on. I felt led, and I felt scared. I went to the front of the church and, with no music, I sang a modified version of “No Matter What” from Steven Universe. The church loved it and said they took a video of me and asked for the lyrics. I panicked and had to tell them it was by someone named Rebecca Sugar. I realized I might’ve gotten them into trouble with copyright infringement and didn’t know how to explain it to them, and then I realized I might’ve gotten myself in trouble for singing a song from a cartoon they might not like.

We went on a sad safari towards the end of the trip. I was sitting alone in the front. I heard this conversation after the morning fog had cleared.

“The lions have been turned homosexual by the white tourists teaching them how to have gay sex,” our guide from the YWAM school told us. “Homosexuality has been made illegal in Uganda so we can execute the gays now.” Our leader Josh tried to argue with him and said that even if being gay is wrong, isn’t it better to let gay people live in peace so they can have a chance to go to heaven one day?

Perhaps it was good he didn’t try to argue about white people teaching the lions gay sex.

The last days in Uganda we went to a tourist destination, but I was sick and stayed alone in the motel.

Covid 19 had started its approach immediately after Uganda. I had one month of volunteering in the kitchen before I flew home to Minnesota. During the flight I was between two missionary women. They gave me chocolate and raspberries, a sign from god I thought since those were the two things I missed the most the last days in Uganda. Then what we spoke hurled me out of the experience.

“I’ve always wondered about speaking in tongues. In my church, if you can’t speak tongues, you’re not a born-again Christian. I know I want to, and I know I’ve gotten close to it, but it’s always been too scary for me. It really scares me,” I told her.

“Speaking in tongues is something you just gotta do, it’s not hard. The bible says to ‘utter a noise.’”

She babbled like a baby, loudly, with everyone around us hearing her making up sounds. After a moment, I said, “Oh, you know I’m actually so tired from my trip, I think I’m just gonna lay my head down on the tray here.”

I was horrified, I was embarrassed, and I was betrayed. All of this time spent doing missionary work and doing what I was supposed to do. Speaking in tongues isn’t supposed to be you pretending to speak like a bumbling baby, it is supposed to be the holy spirit itself possessing you and speaking through you in the language of angels. This was a scam. What was everyone else doing when they spoke in tongues? Were they lying to me?

Baphomet Shrine, Baja Mexico, 2019-2020