“He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth.”
Psa 135:7
As the morning crept in I watched the changing panorama before me. The blanket of clouds moved into every draw and crevice of this high mountain farming valley. It gave me the feeling that I was in an airplane looking down on the clouds. Occasionally, the tip of a Dominican pine tree appeared eerily as if it were floating on a cloudy sea. It seemed that every few minutes another facet of beauty was revealed.
During the last part of my Spanish class a couple of weeks ago two colorful song birds perched on the window bars of the computer room that we meet in, and gave us a song that rivaled a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Each day a bird balances himself somewhere outside my room at school and treats me and my students to the most beautiful song I think I’ve ever heard in nature. The students don’t seem to notice. It is simply part of the many extraneous random sounds of a tropical climate to them, but for some reason I’ve been noticing it lately and have felt grateful to have such beauty around me.
Unless I get carried away with too much romanticism I need to remind myself that I have this opportunity to write during a school day because the teachers were asked to stay home because of the “Huelga.” Because of the corruption and lack of accountability in government services the people of this country have developed the somewhat pragmatic method of correcting problems by organizing national strikes. They burn tires on public roads and throw rocks at cars. It is a planned day of demonstrations across this small island that can become quite dangerous. Of course, politicians don’t want this kind of unrest during their term (especially during this election year) so the hope is that they will either pay off the organizers of the Huelga or give them what they want.
Because we don’t know the language, and communication and organization isn’t exactly this country’s strong suit anyway, we are not sure what is going on. We think it has something to do with poor electrical service and the threat to raise fuel rates nearly 20%. But whatever happened in the last couple of the days the Huelga was held today and we teachers were told to “stay home and hunker down.”
This is simply the ongoing contrast that any person can find regardless where he chooses to live. It is a fact of life in a broken world. It’s just that, more recently, I’ve been seeing more of a balance in this part of the world where I’ve temporarily chosen to live.
So now when I put my sheathed knife weapon in my pocket when I go for a walk for fear of the very real possibility of being robbed, I remember the thunderstorm that made me tremble because of its intensity and power and the double rainbow afterwards over my campus later that took my breath away.
When I want to complain that it took two months to get our living room wicker furniture refurbished because of miscommunication and mistakes and lack of transportation, I want to recall the large and plentiful bunches of brilliantly colored bouquets of fresh cut flowers that can be purchased on the street any time of the year for just a few dollars.
And the next time a student asks a question about how to change degrees into radians only 10 seconds after I’ve spent 15 minutes giving examples on the board, and want answers without understanding the concept or learning how to think, and I begin questioning what in the world I am doing trying to teach in another country when I am Medicare age ......,
I need to remember … the fingers of fog.
Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help,
whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is:
which keepeth truth for ever:
Psa 146: 5, 6
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