Ruth

Since my last blog post, my week has consisted of a youth retreat (for a detailed account read meredithinperu.blogspot.com), a delightfully church-filled Sunday, a week of preparing for and teaching two different classes, and my attempt at fighting off this cold/cough that is attacking a good percentage of Huancayans because of the sudden drop in temperatures. But amidst all of the things I have been doing, I feel anything but overwhelmed. I feel peace.

As I prepare to leave today for another retreat with a different group of high schoolers, I am thinking about my favorite part of last weekend's retreat. It was not the hilarious crisis of painting our group "banderola"/flag, nor was it the fact that one of the students swiped the key to the main door of the girls casa, nor was it the endless screeching of the girls who would not go to sleep, nor the sad truth that we did not have running water the next morning, nor that we began our devotional at 7:30 am (try herding 24 cranky chicas to a time of prayer at that hour). No, my favorite time of the retreat came in an unexpected package.

My group had been semi-participatory throughout the retreat, but were a bit reluctant to talk about the theme of the weekend: La Amistad de Jesús/The Friendship of Jesus. Saturday morning we discussed different things that build walls between ourselves and others; And in the afternoon we were to discuss family relationships. The morning went relatively well and the kids seemed to enjoy their time together, despite the fact that they were tired and un-bathed. Yet, when it came time for our afternoon session, every attempt at a conversation-starting question that I asked was responded to with dead silence, the occasional yawn, and sometimes a cricket chirp. I recalled that in one of the facilitator planning meetings we discussed the art of story telling, and how powerful it could be. I began to tell one of my favorite stories of the Bible, the story of Ruth. I framed it in a contemporary setting, Ruth being from Lima, Naomi and family from Huancayo, etc. I told the story quietly, and the kids were leaning in, trying to hear. They actually wanted to hear the story. After I finished telling the story, we talked a little bit about the family of Ruth and Naomi, and discussed what that teaches us. It was beautiful. But this was not even the best part.

My group of 10 fifteen year olds decided that for their presentation to the entire group of fifty-something people, they would re-enact the story of Ruth as though it happened today. The kids were so creative and fearless in their practicing of the drama. Two girls sat with Bible in hand and recounted each detail of the first chapter, which was proving to be the toughest to coordinate, as you have the deaths of Elimelech, Mahlon and Chilion. After a series of interesting twists to the story, the kids finally perfected their drama.
During the presentation, which was about 15 minutes too long, the kids had the full attention of their peers, full of applause and yelling. What was so special about this scene was not the goofiness of Mahlon and Chilion who had an entire drawn out section of courting Ruth and Orpah (a detail left out by the story’s original redactors), nor the words “where you go, I will go” from Ruth to Naomi, and not even the way that Mahlon learned one line of the Wedding March that he played over and over again throughout the entire wedding scene of Ruth and Boaz (another detail omitted by its authors).

I could not wipe the grin off of my face during the entire dramatic presentation because I realized this: They got it. They spent the last hour of our group time picking phrase by phrase through the tiny book of Ruth so that they could tell the story of a different type of family who loved each other dearly. Yes, they got it. And because they got it, so did I.