A pocketful of patience

Clouds stuffed the blue sky up like the puffy substance you find in medicine pill bottles when you open them for the first time. Underneath these clouds was a basketball court, and upon the court my students were partaking their recess in whatever shape or fashion suited their fancy: some running up and down the court, others giving each other piggy-back rides, and still others sitting on two old tires that function as the base for the volleyball net poles. I'm the only adult supervising, my eyes bouncing back and forth in a thousand different directions as I try to tie one kid's shoe and pacify the tears of another who was hit by someone, all while attempting to chastise the one who is to blame.

Everything here happens in rapid succession, my moments pass before me like a movie director anxious to pull one slide out as soon as the other is in. The audience can't focus, there's so much to take in. There's one shot of me holding Ybelina, her round, Haitian face all bubbles and always slightly smeared with the stuffy nose she's had. She wraps her arms around my neck and leans on my shoulder, I think about the brothers and sisters she has in Haiti still...I wonder what they're doing.

But there's no time to think because the next slide is put in place and now she's down on the court and scrambling with a flurry of other girls in white polo-shirts and navy blue skirts who are picking tiny white flowers off the chain fence. They run back and forth from the fence to me, placing in my hand a quickly growing bouquet of these minuscule morning-glory-like blossoms. Each one is a sweet gift, I try to capture it all but even now in retrospect I only see my hand holding these cream colored flowers, little hands and smiley faces coming into frame, and a clamor of excited Spanish words with those clouds up above.

Yet just as my heart was filling up with the love I felt from these tiny humans, they went and tested it by overt disobedience. The game of back and forth from the fence turned into "let's climb the fence". I pulled one off, laughing, giggling, she thinks it's all fun and games yet I'm giving her a stern look and telling her not to, telling her it's dangerous.

It's too late, the fad has caught on.

Now they're all climbing the fence, even sweet Ybelina, and they laugh. They laugh as I peel one starfish off the fence simply to see four more attach themselves. Words are of no use, and I quickly learn that pulling them off won't work either. I grabbed one, a particularly sweet girl, and held her face, staring hard into her eyes and trying to explain why she should not do it. Yet she's laughing, and she's laughing so hard it almost made me laugh. But I can't. I can't because these kids are out of hand, so I stand there.

I stand there and I see another scene, but this one is from the day before. It's of Pastor Tanis, shelling beans on his patio with another man. He's telling me how it's about learning patience, patience with students who haven't been taught the fundamentals that U.S. kids are instilled with from day 1 of sterile hospital delivery.

"I went there [a school in the States] and I saw flowers! And I was so amazed, because here are these flowers and the kids were not destroying them, because it was natural for them not too. But here, they don't even give a thought to the environment, they don't do things that are good for the earth or for them, because it's natural for them not too. The training and education is so vastly different, it's so different. You come from a very educated country. The kids are going to really test your patience."

I stand there. Patience being tested.

My handful of flowers had been knocked to the ground. Ybelina bends down and quickly sweeps them up into my shirt pocket, cream-colored petals now sullied by dirt and dust.

Sometimes, this is what my patience feels like. It feels like a beautiful bouquet in my hand, filled with love, joy, and an abundance of good welfare for all mankind and dogs too. Then something actually happens that tests my patience: loved ones disobey, loved ones mock, my own inadequacy in the language mocks me, and my patience is knocked to the ground, the scattered petals get crushed by the feet that keep climbing up the fence.

I look down at these crumbled flowers in my pocket, these shambles of joy and grace that had just been showered upon me. One of the students grabs another professor and she helps me gather in the kids. Patience is funny in that, by being created, it often has to be stretched, it has to knocked down and dirtied, even tucked back away in your pocket for later review, because it's through this that you learn about what the bean-shelling man spoke of. It's through this that I learn to be patient, to not give up, but also not be too expectant of perfection. Instead, I look at those flowers and dirt, and I see the sweet face that swept them up for me. I see an attempt at restitution, a redemption of some sort, and I sigh.

Grabbing up a runaway student in my arms, I carry him into the classroom and see Pastor Tanis walking past. I think about those beans, the quick, skillful way he shelled them into the bowl.

Patience. 

It may take time, but I'll take those flowers in my pocket and little by little, with God's grace, I will see these children change.