July 27, 2010
Visitors in the D.R.
Posted by Tim
We just returned from spending 7 days in Barahona, Dominican Republic with a team of 15 students and leaders. We spent the majority of our time in Pueblo Nuevo, which is one of the five communities that COTN, our partner mission organization, has an established presence. We spent some time walking through the village, meeting some of the local families, and chatting with them through our translators. Although most of the families in Pueblo Nuevo live in extremely impoverished conditions, they were so gracious and genuinely grateful for our presence there that they offered up some of what little food or drink they had as a token of their appreciation. Not to mention they welcomed us in, even though we showed up unannounced. I don’t know why this is so shocking to me other than the fact that this is, generally speaking, not the way that we greet strangers at our door in America. As I consider my drop-in visitor etiquette, I realize that if I’m not hiding and turning out the lights to avoid them, I’m not overly friendly in how I greet them. And I certainly don’t offer them anything to eat or drink. Granted, most of these individuals are selling something and are super annoying with their pitch about selling enough magazines to win a week’s vacation in Las Vegas, but non-the-less, I wonder if we shouldn’t take a page from our friends in the D.R. Their hospitality made us feel welcome, like we weren’t interrupting something so important that they couldn’t take ten minutes to chat with us. We felt valued and that made a huge impact on us. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to go and spend time with the people of Pueblo Nuevo. I know that we were on mission to help be conduits of God’s grace and love, but as we left, I couldn’t help but feeling that they had given us so much more than we could’ve imagined.
