My alarm clock buzzed at 6am, and my eyes shot open. I was staring at a chipped cement ceiling, and my pajama shirt clung to my skin like plastic wrap, soaked with humidity and sweat. My mind was wracked with confusion: Where was I? Who's house was this? And how did I get here? I froze as I heard someone rustle on the bunk bed below me, and then clarity came as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes: I was a missionary. I was in Argentina.
An involuntary groan escaped my lips as I sat up, literally peeling my body off the mattress. It had been one day. One day since I stepped of the plane from the comfort of the Missionary Training Center in America and stepped foot into that dusty hot jungle of foreign words and faces. My mind was exhausted from trying to make sense of the sounds and commotion of life around me, and every inch of my body ached from hours of proselyting and running from stray dogs in the street. My companion climbed out of bed and knelt on the cement floor to say her morning prayers, and as I maneuvered off the top bunk to do the same, I winced as my blistered feet made contact with the floor. I breathed in deeply, re-steadied myself and knelt beside my companion with my head bowed in prayer, wondering how I could possibly do this, every day, for the next 16 months. "Padre," I prayed, "Te necesito..."
I pulled myself off my knees and headed for the dresser, hobbling on the sides of my feet so I wouldn't pop my blisters. I opened the top drawer and stifled a scream: there, racing across my clean white underwear, was an enormous, dirty brown cockroach. He froze when the light hit him and stood there atop my silky slip, his antennas twitching and feeling, seeming to lick the air around him. I stood staring at the little beast as he stared at me, trying to decide what to do: I wanted to throw something at him, really hard; I wanted to crawl back in bed and pull the sheet over my head; I wanted to scream for my companion, who was in the shower; and mostly, I wanted to cry.
Then, of all the random things that could flash through my mind in that instant, came a story I had read years earlier, about a husband and wife who had returned late from a trip, and too tired to unpack had gone to bed, leaving several of their personal items in their car parked in the driveway. The next morning they discovered the car had been stolen. As they stood in their now-empty driveway with the wife in tears, the husband suddenly started to chuckle. The wife stared at him in unbelief, and the husband said something along these lines: "We can have a stolen car and cry about it, or we can have a stolen car and laugh about it. Either way, we have a stolen car."
I stood there in the 100 degree heat in that cement apartment in Argentina, nursing my blisters and staring at Mr. Cockroach, when it dawned at me: I could have a cockroach in my underwear drawer and cry about it, or I could have a cockroach in my underwear drawer and laugh about it. Either way, there was a cockroach in my underwear drawer. The corners of my mouth twitched a little, and in that moment I made a pivotal decision: I would laugh.
Now, that didn't change everything. I still had a cockroach in my underwear drawer, and, both literally and figuratively speaking, he would most likely be there every single one of the 455 days that lay ahead of me. It would take six more weeks before I learned to look into the faces of the Argentine people instead of down at the dusty road ahead of me as I walked. Three more months before my blisters popped and became callouses. And nine more months before I learned to roll my "R"s and actually carry on a fluent conversation. But what that experience taught me was optimism. I chose to find humor when my apartment flooded each time it rained, and when my shoes wore so thin I had to stuff the lining with cotton balls and duct tape them together. I chuckled when the Bishop's wife chased a chicken out of her house with a broom, and even attempted to smile when she served me morsilla and mondongo for dinner. (Translation: blood sausage and rubbery cow stomach).
Heavenly Father did answer my prayer that morning some five years ago, when I pleaded to him on my knees in my broken Spanish. He helped me turn my outlook from simply enduring 16 months in a foreign land, to working and serving and learning to love a people and culture and country so incredibly much. Cockroaches and all...*
*well, almost. I still want to throw up, or throw something really hard every time I see a cockroach here in Texas :)
3 weeks ago