We love working with students. There’s something so special about the liminal space of studying abroad: a voluntary displacement for the sake of formation. Students choose disorientation. They choose to leave the US and ask big questions about God and the world as they spend a semester looking through eyes and living through the experience of another place, people, and culture. And of course they get to travel to some pretty amazing places as well.
This semester was special for a number of reasons. We were finally able to do a full semester of HULA for the first time in three years! We’re so thankful that it all went smoothly. It marked the first time that someone from our supporting churches has come to spend a semester with us, in this case Tessa Spears who grew up at Central. It was extra special for me in that I’m in the process of finishing up a Doctorate of Ministry and my dissertation project is thinking about Christian study abroad as a spiritual discipline. The research and writing gave me an extra level of depth and intentionality as I thought about guiding the group through questioning and growth. I hope to share with you some of that writing, including my Theology of Travel, over the coming months :)
We do our best to invite HULA into our lives and mission while they are here. HULA pretty much takes up all of the time we have for three months, but we love connecting them to Arequipa, our church, the neighborhood, and our friends. In that sense I hold up my uncle Robbie (director of HUF) as a model. For so many years he’s invited HUF students into his and Mona’s Florence life, church, and community. They do that beautifully and Katie and I aspire to do the same.
This year there were two events in particular that epitomized this overlap between HULA and our Arequipa life. We invited the HULA group to be a part of our neighborhood’s anniversary celebration. I made the most of the situation, offering to host a sort of ecumenical prayer service for the neighborhood in which the group was the choir. They sang in English and in Spanish as part of our worship service, and I had the opportunity to speak a word of faith and purpose to those present and to those who were listening from their windows. I can talk pretty loud in Spanish 😉. The group spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon playing volleyball in the street, entertaining kids on the big bounce house, and practicing Spanish while connecting with my neighbors.
Fast-forward to the end of the semester, and we had a special, epic, goodbye event. The students had been preparing a couple of traditional dances (not unlike what I’ve done as part of Adileen’s school celebrations over the last few years) which they were to perform for all of the people they’d connected with throughout the semester. There were neighbors, friends from the church, friends from our soccer group, the owner and workers at El Castillo (the hotel that is HULA’s campus for the semester), and of course, a few curious passersby a bit surprised that a group of US Americans would be performing Peruvian dances. Dances in Peru are containers of story, culture, and memory of place and people. Over the last several decades they’ve grown to be a significant part of what it means to be Peruvian. The heart with which the HULA students performed was a testimony to how much they had learned to appreciate what it means to be human through the eyes of a Peruvian. It was a massive “thank you” to all of those who had given their time and energy to connect.
And it was massive success. We had about 80 people there and they were all deeply impressed by the group. You can see the dances here and here.
We live in a world full of beautiful and complex diversity, divinely orchestrated by a God who delights in that diversity. What we do with that diversity, how we learn to celebrate and learn from one another’s differences, will speak volumes about what we believe the point of all of this is. We’re moving toward a future where every nation, culture, family, and language is worshiping in the presence of God (Revelation 7:9-10). What we do now is a foretaste of that future. We start to live it now as we learn from the person who is different than us. As we prioritize the experience of our neighbor who speaks a different language. As we suspend judgment for the sake of understanding another point of view. May we delight in diversity in God’s world.
It’s more beautiful that way.
