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Photo Copyright World Vision. Photo by Matthew Paul Turner

The earth in Sri Lanka is dry this August, drier than any August most of the people can remember. The flat land, harvested in the last four to six weeks, is either a tan stubble or scorched black from fires that cleared new fields for the next planting.

On Monday morning, World Vision staff drove us along the edges of these fields. We entered a community where they have been working for fifteen years. The vehicles bounced up and down on bumpy, paved roads. Off in the distance I saw a huge crowd gathered – they were waiting for us.

The bus pulled over, and we walked up the shoulder towards eight girls in white ceremonial dress. They stood completely still, arms out in front of them. Then, when the drums began, they danced, erupting in an explosion of movement and the sound of small ringing bells that were attached to their clothing. Every so often their dance moved them back up the road, and we followed them – ours was a bigger group now, made up of not only our ten but additional World Vision staff and community leaders.

Then the dancers stopped, scattering. In front of us two lines of people, each perhaps a hundred yards long. Some of those in line were small children waving balloons. Others were adults smiling and bowing their heads as we passed. They gave us gifts as we walked between them. Children ran up bearing flat green leaves, pushing them towards us, then bending down and touching our feet, awaiting a blessing.

We waved, unsure as to what we had done to deserve such a welcome.

And so the day continued, from place to place, and everywhere we went people welcomed us with gifts and blessings and thankful tears. At one stop, two old women danced in yellow dresses, their ancient feet stirring up dust, their voices chanting. When they stopped, one of the women couldn’t keep from crying – she kept covering her toothless mouth with one hand and wiping her eyes with a threadbare handkerchief clutched in the other.

They welcomed us, and they gave us gifts, and they cried with joy at our arrival. But it wasn’t because of anything that we had done – it was because of this man, my new hero.

He is the ADP Director for World Vision in Sri Lanka, and everywhere we went, he was the guest of honor. You see, for 15 years World Vision has been helping this part of the country: organizing schools and medical care, building sustainable solutions to address the shortage of fresh water, providing counseling to help families manage their finances and prevent abuse, teaching families how to grow gardens and profitable crops, and many, many other things. For the last 15 years, World Vision has been transforming this community.

And today, the day of celebrations and gifts and tears, marks the day that World Vision leaves.

But they do not leave the people empty-handed – they leave them prepared for a sustainable future. For the last three to five years, World Vision has gradually handed over the responsibilities to the community, so that by the time this day rolled around, World Vision had zero full time volunteers at work in this area. The people there have assumed all responsibility for the management of their community. The World Vision staff has moved on to another community, one we will visit on Tuesday.

And it is a beautiful thing to see: people who have been given hope and dignity. People who now have a future.

Please consider sponsoring a child through World Vision. Your donation of around $35 per month helps children and their families, transforming the communities in which they live. Click HERE to find out more.

Here, where all is sand or gray coconut bark or the tan husks of braided palm fronds, there is no point in painting something beige. So the boats are neon blue and the chairs are turquoise and the buses a patchwork of primary color. Things which in the US, have been taught to blend in? Here they have a voice.

“I am Sri Lanka!” they shout. “I am alive!”

Listening to the voices of Sri Lanka, I recline in a chair on coarse sand. Wind tears at the red flag on the beach, warns of a retreating tide and rough seas eager to devour this Pennsylvania boy. I stare beyond the foaming anger of persistent waves and marvel that somewhere out there is the southern tip of India. Floating west, and missing that, I would linger along the constellation of the Maldives. Still further, the east coast of Africa: Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

* * * * *

Earlier, a man stood on a tightrope at the top of a coconut tree, thirty feet up. He hacked at a branch with a curved knife, drew it back, wrestled with the branch, then cut again. He fastened a pot to the sweetly severed stump, his feet gripping the rope like extra hands.

Those same ropes connect most of the palms on this beach, high wires this man walks from tree to tree, gathering what they have given up. He is a spider, the ropes his web. Some of the pots have been lowered to the ground, filled with a foamy liquid: the sap of the coconut tree.

It is a normal life so unlike my own.

It is quiet here. Even the road is rarely used. Occasionally a scooter or an old van will rumble past, loaded down with people, and I wonder where they are going or how they spend their days or if they like their life here. I’m eager to talk to people. I’m greedy for their stories.

No matter. Life here moves at a pace that cannot be forced. The wind through the palms is the raspy voice of an old man, and it mingles with the salty smell of the ocean, the laughter of Sinhalese children, the gritty feel of invisible sand.

9000 miles away the Amish farmers harvest corn and tobacco from the fields around my parents’ house. The grass there is soft and green. Autumn is not far off – already the mornings have cooled. But here the workers water thick-bladed grass and the hotel manager walks through the heat in a stiff collar and a crisp tie and I can’t imagine that summer will ever end.

I wonder if they can comprehend how far away I live from here, because I can’t.

I sit in a very white bed in a high-ceilinged room and peek through the narrow gap in the gold-colored curtains to the courtyard outside my door. A group of Sri Lankan people are having wedding pictures taken. Their voices fall silent during each picture, then rise muffled and loud, speaking a beautiful language I do not know.

A man in a black suit leans in towards a woman in a striking red outfit, her face made up in purples and blues and the whitest of smiles. His skin is the almost-gray of a weathered palm tree. They must think my room is vacant because they laugh and look nervous and linger on my small, covered porch. Are they the parents of the bride? Are these other people their friends, smoothing their clothes, moving a stray hair, watching with quiet smiles?

Then, when I’m no longer paying attention, they vanish. My ceiling fan spins, a propeller. The courtyard is wide, the sky a golden haze. The slanted shadows of short palm trees linger where moments before the wedding party posed.

* * * * *

Forty or so hours ago I sat in a barely vacant spot along the wall in the international terminal at JFK Airport. It was loud and bustling and very much New York. Two large police officers inspected an unattended camera bag left on a counter, berated the janitor for originally sending them to the wrong aisle, then stared suspiciously at the small bag while asking people to step back. The janitor chattered on in a foreign language while sneaking peeks at the package, clearly interested in collecting its contents if it showed an unwillingness to blow up.

It was with typical New York cynicism that even the people in the next line over refused to move – they didn’t want to lose their space in line over what was obviously just a stray camera bag. Eventually a third officer arrived with a dog that stood on its hind legs and sniffed the package. Nothing to see here. The police men gently picked up the bag and left, the janitor trailing behind.

* * * * *

Fifteen hours ago? Twenty hours ago? (I’m not sure about time anymore – it seems unreliable at best, deliberately deceptive at worst.) The ten of us roamed downtown Dubai, then ate pizza outdoors. The heavy heat was like a crying child on a middle-of-the-night flight: completely unignorable.

We caught our third airplane of the trip at around 2:30am Dubai time and landed in Colombo, Sri Lanka in the morning, a good thirty hours after I had left Philadelphia. Men stood at attention throughout the airport, armed with small sub-machine guns. We navigated through a gauntlet of taxi drivers to where two World Vision buses waited.

The drivers loaded our luggage then weaved along the paved road. Everyone seemed quite happy to pass even with oncoming traffic, beeping their horns persistently. Bikes and mopeds mixed with motorcycles and three-wheeled taxicabs. Cows loitered in the dirt alleyways. Dogs jogged lightly along the road and under the eaves of colorful houses, stopping in the shadows of corrugated steel buildings.

90 minutes later we turned left on to a small, bumpy side street. Soon the Indian Ocean rolled to our left while small houses lay scattered through the trees to our right, their cement block walls covered with roofs made of tightly woven palm fronds. We passed a spot by the sea where fifty small rowboats gathered in a large group on the sand, some with outboard motors, others with oars that had their own stories.

Then we arrived, and we were here. We fought off sleep with showers and lunch.

The ceiling fan hums overhead. Outside, another girl in a red dress with golden accessories smiles in the gathering shadows of what is either an early sunset or the hint of an afternoon thunderstorm on the way.

I can’t believe I am here.

For the next week I have the privilege of blogging in Sri Lanka for World Vision. Would you consider sponsoring a child? Find out more about the awesome things that child sponsorship can accomplish HERE, and help me spread the word this week by sharing my posts (as well as those written by my fellow Sri Lanka bloggers).

Today is the day I leave. The day I begin a three-day trek from Lancaster to Philadelphia to New York City to Dubai to Colombo, Sri Lanka. The day I say goodbye to Mai and the kids. The day I say hello to a new group of blogger friends and a whirling mass of traveling strangers and a country full of people who will undoubtedly change my life.

Today.

But I can’t stop thinking about this summer and what a difficult journey it has been. We arrived home from our four-month road trip and in many ways it felt like the bottom had fallen out of my life. I had no new writing projects lined up (ie no income). We were back in my parents’ basement, trying to figure out where we would live. One of my children struggled with anxiety and I found myself frustrated and short-tempered with his questioning, his doubt, his uncertainty – yet I found myself asking the same questions.

Hello, God? Remember me? I’m the one with a wife and four children? The one you sort of convinced to go on this crazy, once-in-a-life trip? The one you brought safely home? Yeah, I’m home now, and I don’t have any money and work seems to have dried up. Does this situation ring any bells with you?

And the summer passed. Slowly. June turned into July turned into August. I turned down a job at some point in there, but as the summer passed it seemed like one of the most ridiculous decisions I’d ever made.

Wait, the voice kept saying. Wait.

So I waited. Impatient some of the time. Angry most of the time. Hope got mixed up with despair, like the beginnings and endings of summer when you can’t always tell it from spring or fall. Was I coming or going? Intensifying or fading? Planting or harvesting?

Then three days before leaving for Sri Lanka, I got an email from a potential client.

“Good news on this cloudy Monday – the project has been approved!”

Thank you.

* * * * *

Sometimes life feels like a handful of dice thrown into the air, its outcome determined by the random result of their configuration. But very occasionally I recognize a more deliberate hand at work – like going on a four-month road trip and attending a conference held by a friend I met after my business went under and at that conference meeting another friend named Matthew who a few months later asks me to go on a trip I wouldn’t have been able to go on if I would have said yes to that job I never would have needed now that this project has come through.

“But dad, what if you aren’t here when I wake up in morning,” my child asks me, eyes tearing up, hands holding tightly to a blanket pulled up to cover his mouth. “What if you don’t come to pick me up after church? What if you and mom forget about me?”

And it’s strange that it took me so long to recognize myself in that line of questions.

God, what if you aren’t here for me? What if you forget me? What if you leave me?

* * * * *

I’ve always know the phrase that God “will never leave you nor forsake you.” What I often forget is the context of that wisdom in Hebrews:

Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

So we say with confidence,“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.What can mere mortals do to me?”

So I set out for Sri Lanka, some questions answered, others lingering. I still don’t know as much as I’d like to know. I still clutch at promises the way a child clings to a blanket.

Today I leave for Sri Lanka, and I’ll blog about the trip for World Vision as I witness for myself the way that child sponsorship changes lives. I’d love for you to join me – all you have to do is show up here from August 25th through August 30th.

In the mean time, please consider sponsoring a child through World Vision. For around $30 a month you can change the life of a child and their family. Find out more about child sponsorship (and check out my cool landing page) HERE.

It is the 71^st morning in my parents’ basement with my wife and four children. 71 days since we returned from four months on the road in a big blue bus. I wake up early and creep from the dark bedroom, trying not to wake Maile or our two youngest children asleep in the small bedroom with us. The door creaks behind me.

I sit at the small table in the main area of the basement without turning on the light and open up my laptop. It is the moon, and I make a list of the things I need to take on my upcoming trip to Sri Lanka.

You can find the rest of today’s post over at my friend Michelle DeRusha’s blog. While you’re there, look around – she’s a fabulous, inspiring person.

* * * * *

If this is your first time at my blog, welcome! Some of my more popular recent posts have been:

What God Asked Me After I Listed All the Things that Suck About My Life
Why Being Terribly Afraid is Perhaps the Best Reason for Going
What We Did to the Unwelcome Guest at Our Wedding

Tomorrow I leave for Sri Lanka! Join me on the trip right here at the blog.

In two days I’ll be hitting the friendly skies for a three-day journey to Sri Lanka. I’m excited, nervous, apprehensive…you name it. So today in the comments I’d like your answers to any of these questions:

1 – What’s the best trip you ever went on?

2 – What’s the biggest mistake you ever made regarding travel or vacation?

OR

3 – If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Bon voyage!