Flexibility or {What Mami Lydia Taught Me About Life}

 

It was early afternoon and the sweat rolled down my face as I walked away from the girl’s kitchen and back towards the volunteer house at the top of the hill. The lunch menu had been the same as usual that day; if you can call one giant pot of stew a menu. Tia Angelina would get started soon after we finished cleaning up breakfast. Whole chickens, rice, some chopped vegetables, maybe some canned vegetables if we had them, and water would go into the pot and simmer slowly for hours over the fire. At lunch time, 200+ girls would file past the serving table outside the kitchen, collect a plastic bowl with their serving of whatever came out of the pot that day, and make their way to one of the tables that filled the open-air pavilion. On the good days, a warm, homemade, flour tortilla was laid on top of their bowl. There is pretty much no bowl of gruel that is beyond the redemption a homemade flour tortilla can provide.

After the bowls were empty and the bellies full, I would collect the bowls and spoons and cups with the help of a few other girls and stack them in the kitchen for washing. I’ll never forget the feeling of helplessness those first few weeks in the kitchen. I grew up washing dishes for a large family, I knew how to work through a pile of dishes. But Marmey taught me the vital ingredients for clean dishes were hot water and a detergent that cuts grease. Here at Emmanuel, I had lukewarm or cold water. There was no Palmolive or Dawn, but an unrecognizable chunk of bar soap that I didn’t know how to use, and who’s effectiveness was severely diminished by the cold water. And I wasn’t facing a nine-children-family pile of dishes, I was looking at a 200+ children pile of dishes. The smoke from the dissipating cooking fire would burn my eyes and I’d struggle to catch the few words of Spanish I knew from the chattering girls who were helping me. If comfort zones were sweaters, this would have been one itchy, prickly, sweater.

It didn’t take me long to take to that sweater, and fall in love with the smoke and the Spanish and the simple meals and the dust and sweat. I can’t say I ever enjoyed washing greasy dishes in cold water, but the relationships I made around that sink, the way I learned to join those chattering girls in laughing at my Spanish, are memories that I will treasure always. But this post is not about memories or sweaters or learning new languages. This post is about flexibility, or the ability to adapt.

Orphanage Emmanuel was started by David and Lydia Martinez, and while there was plenty about the organization that pained me, I will always credit Mami Lydia with this lesson. She would preach it to us volunteer girls over and over. “You need to be flexible. You must learn to adapt, to let go of whatever you thought was going to happen, and accept what is.” It was 2003-2004. We had no cell phones to call and cry to our families. No texting our friends to complain about how horrible our day had been. Approximately once a week it would be my turn to walk in to town to use the internet café, and to this day, the sound of dial up internet makes my heart leap. During my time in Honduras that sound meant I was a few minutes away from an email from a family member, a friend, or my very long distance boyfriend.

But there were no guarantees. Maybe it was my day to walk to Guaimaca, but I’d be called to help with a certain project and I couldn’t go. Maybe they’d decide it wasn’t safe to go that day. Or maybe I’d get all the way in there, hear that sweet dialup sound, and then the power would go out minutes before I set my eyes on news from home. One day I was handed a baby who was a few months old and told he was my responsibility. After a few weeks of getting attached, I handed him back to his mother who decided she could care for him after all. I was moved from this duty to that duty. I taught a class at school until the needs in the clinic outweighed the need for the class, then I was a “nurse.” I learned to do sutures by practicing on a diaper. I rode in the back of an ambulance with no medical personnel, just myself, a girl from the orphanage who’d torn the top of her finger off, and a woman in labor who lay on a stretcher crying and pleading and clutching my leg for over and hour, “Ay Dios mio…..AYUDAME!”  (Oh my God, HELP ME!)

But the point is not to tell stories about things I had to do. The point is the lesson that it taught me. With Mami Lydia’s “Be FLEXIBLE,” ringing in my ears, I had to learn to just go with it. How could I serve the child in front of me in the moment if I was still hung up on the fact that my plans for a Google chat with my boyfriend didn’t come to fruition? How could I focus to do a proper suture if I was still mad that my plan for a school newspaper had to be dropped because there was no time for it? Flexibility required a switch in perspective. The spotlight had go off of me, and onto whatever the person in front of me needed. Did I really want to put my wants, wishes, or even needs,  ahead of the needs of the orphanage?

Crisis situations may call for a greater measure of flexibility, but I believe it’s a vital ingredient for getting through all of life. It has great importance in marriage, or any relationship. Everything is just not always going to turn out the way I envisioned, or wanted it to, or was even promised it would.

My husband is traveling for work this week and I traveled with him this time,  because I wanted to be close by as he works through a massive project. Tonight is my last night here and when our plans changed from a nice dinner out, to him working late and me doing laundry in a less than stellar laundromat, I had to swallow my disappointment, and adapt to what simply was.  Flexibility is sending me to bed tonight with no dinner, but with a full heart because of the long conversation we had at the end of the day. A conversation we would never have had if I had insisted on going out. He would have been so tired, I would have been cranky because he wasn’t looking rapturously into my eyes, and our last evening together before five days of separation, would been soured with my selfishness.

Be flexible today, and you just may be surprised with what you get, when you let go of what you thought you want.