Back in October, Dave and I made a run out to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, to take winter clothes and stuff to the villages of Wanblee and Potato Creek. We put the word out that we were doing it, and started taking donations. Almost immediately, worry set in. Would we have enough stuff donated to make it worth the fuel we’d burn to get out there? Would we even get enough to fill the trailer? It’s always a worry when we make one of these runs. It’s the whole thing of trying to be good stewards. We don’t have a lot of money, and so we try to handle it very carefully, trying to get the most bang for God’s buck, as it were (because that’s how we see it).
Then, there are the personal (selfish?) considerations; wear and tear on the truck and trailer, wear and tear on Dave and I. Dave had to miss work, and I had to miss class. Plus, there’s that whole long drive, and believe me, it’s a loooooong drive. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t mind doing it, and we have a good time, jamming to tunes, talking, and arguing all the way there and back, but it’s still a loooooooooong drive.
So there we were, in October, sweating it and really kind of dreading yet another trip. Donations started coming in. People who had never heard of us before heard about it and donated stuff. We got the trailer about half filled, and I took it down to Dave’s, where he managed to finish filling it up with donations. Meanwhile, back home, people kept bringing stuff to my house. I ended up with my full-size truck bed completely full, the trailer completely full, and the back seat of my truck completely full, and a room at my house pretty much completely full of stuff that just wouldn’t fit. Amazing.
So now we’re coming up on Christmas, and I had a bunch of winter clothes in my basement, doing nobody any good. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough to completely fill up the truck, so I was back at the “should I stay or should I go” phase. Dave and I talked and decided to see if we could at least get a truck load. I built sideboards for the truck, and we started taking donations again. Again, I was worried that we wouldn’t have enough to make it worth the trip. The ladies aid at my church got stuck in and finished filling up the truck. Once again, we came dangerously close to having more than we could fit, even with 30″ sideboards on the truck. Again, the back seat was completely full, so full that I wasn’t completely sure there’d be room for Dave’s and my stuff.
Every time we go to make a trip out there, whether it’s just taking clothes and food like this time, or going out for the week-long mission trip, I’m never sure right up until we leave, whether we’ll have enough stuff, or enough people to do the work we’re trying to do. And yet, every time, we do, thank God. And the credit really does belong to God, because Dave and I are the worst at asking for help, or recruiting people.
Signs and Portents
Anyway, you know how people are always looking for “signs” that they’re supposed to be doing what they’re doing. So Thursday, I hop in the truck, it’s a frosty 30-35 degrees, we’re driving to South Dakota, and the heater blower won’t work. I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, that’s not a good sign.” Still, guys like Dave and I are far too intrepid to be deterred by the idea of hypothermia, so I pressed on. After about 30 miles, I was noticing that it was really kind of freaking cold in the truck. I stopped at a truck stop and picked up a plug-in heater. I figured that would be enough to keep the chill off.
It probably would have been, had it not fried the electrical system (or at least the part of it that runs the outlets). Again, not a particularly good sign. Still, I pushed on through to Nashville (Indiana) to pick up Dave. After we got his donations squeezed in, we started in checking fuses. They were all fine, at least as far as we could tell. Dave knew of a garage nearby, so we drove there and the guy came out and took a look. It turned out that the blower motor is going bad, but if we give it a good thump, it’ll start up again, for a while at least. He said that eventually, it would just stop completely, but there was no way to tell when. Needless to say, neither Dave nor I were filled with confidence.
Fortunately, neither of us puts much stock in signs and portents, so we went ahead on.
Success!
Surprisingly enough, the drive turned out to be pretty uneventful. The weather was good, if cold, the ride was comfortable, as long as we remembered to give the blower a kick every once in a while. Neither of us was too crippled up by having to have the seats scooted way forward of where they normally sit (we had to scoot them up to get everything into the back seat). Diesel prices were low, and we made good time. The roads were clear until we were almost to Potato Creek, but the nearer we got, the worse they got. As we came around a curve and down a long grade, we saw a van in the ditch, down about a 4 or 5 foot embankment, and a truck on the road trying to pull it out. We turned around to see if we could help. With us pushing, and the guy in the truck burning his tires off, we got it out. I, of course, ended up face-down in a snowdrift. Really no surprise there.
We got to Potato Creek and unloaded about half of the clothes, along with a grocery bag filled with canned ham and chicken, beans, macaroni, canned fruit and vegetables, and rice, along with a 10-pound bag of potatoes for each house. We then stopped in Wanblee to unload everything else. Everyone we saw was very grateful. We met some other folks out there who are doing pretty much the same thing as we are, and seem to have their act much more together. They’ve actually managed to purchase land in Wanblee, and have broken ground to build a bunkhouse to sleep 40 people! We’re hoping that we can work together with them, maybe pool resources, help them with construction, etc. It was really encouraging to us to see that.
Disappointment and Guilt
Sadly, Eleanor wasn’t home, so we didn’t get to see her. We hit the road to come home, and came across two girls in the middle of nowhere, stuck on the side of the road with a dead battery. We got their car started, and went on our way. As always, at this point, we were exhausted, glad to have accomplished what we set out to do, but disheartened by the amount of need out there. We hadn’t even gotten back to the highway when we got a call telling us that the son of one of our good friends out there had just been found dead in Interior. Once again, we had been asked to help with the house of some elderly folks whose roof is about to cave in on them. The man is currently in the hospital, and his wife has lost her legs, is on oxygen, and sitting in a house surrounded by buckets to catch water from all the leaks in the roof, and we know that this is no isolated incident. All across the reservation, people are forced to live in homes that are so dilapidated that farmers around here wouldn’t keep their cattle in. Sadly, a task like that is just beyond our scope.
It really puts things into perspective. There’s absolutely no danger of getting a big head about what we’re able to do to help when you see the catastrophic needs that exist. Against all that, a truckload of clothes now and then, an occasional bag of groceries, and a week or two of VBS once a year is about the equivalent of bailing out the Titanic with a teacup. I don’t say this to belittle what we try to do, or to diminish the significance of the donations and support from everybody. That is not my intention at all. But the value of those donations and efforts lies mostly in the spiritual realm, not the physical.
If we are able to do any good at all, it is in the fact that we keep trying, and do what we can with our limited resources and means, and that the folks out there see it. They see that they are not completely alone, not entirely isolated. I really believe that that means more to them than anything else.
Blessings and Faith
I have been abundantly blessed. Blessed so much that I couldn’t help feeling kind of guilty as Jess and I went through our stuff, looking for clothes to send. We had an entire closet that we had pretty much completely forgotten about, filled with sweaters, blankets, and coats, that we didn’t even realize we had. Stuff that hadn’t been used in years. And there are folks out there who don’t have one coat, people trying to heat their house with hot plates because they don’t have money for propane, and hoping they get some before their electricity gets turned off. It’s heartbreaking to even think about.
I know that a lot of you are like me, worrying about bills, living paycheck to paycheck, thinking we’re broke because we may have to cancel the satellite TV. A trip to the Rez really puts that into perspective. It’s so easy to forget how much we’ve been blessed with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning you, me, or us, for having stuff, even more stuff than we need. I’ll admit it; I like stuff. I like my comfortable home. I like being able to turn the furnace up when it’s cold, or the A/C down when it’s hot. But I also think that it’s dangerous to get too comfortable with our stuff. It’s good to be reminded of how much I’ve been blessed with. It keeps me grateful. It also spurs me to help others when I can, whether it’s taking stuff to S. Dakota, giving a stranger gas money, or dropping a buck in the Salvation Army bucket at Walmart, as I walk out with my cart full of more stuff.
I don’t know why some of us have been blessed more than others (and I’m talking about needs here; food, clothing, shelter, etc.), but I think that some of it has to be so that those of us who have been blessed can be a blessing to others, and that by sharing the physical blessings that we have in abundance, we can be blessed spiritually, both by God, and by those we share with. I know that I always feel like I’ve been blessed more than I’ve given, every time I go out there.
The bible says something about if we had faith the size of a mustard seed, then we could command mountains to move. Obviously, I’m nowhere near that class, nor apparently, is anyone else I know, but maybe it works collectively, as well. Maybe if I take my teeny-tiny molecule of faith, and combine it with Dave’s molecule of faith, and with the faith molecules of hundreds, or even thousands, or even (optimistically) millions, we can come up with a collective mustard seed of faith necessary to move the mountain of hopelessness and despair that sits squarely on top of so many people in our society. That would really be something, huh?
Maybe that’s what it’s all about.