Welcome! This is the personal blog for the team that makes up the non-profit organization, Love for the Sake of Love. Here, we'll update you on the work we're doing, what is going on with each of us personally, and some of our random thoughts on life. We hope that this blog will give you some insight on each of us and the things we're doing at Love for the Sake of Love. Please choose a category below to get started.


Thursday, June 7, 2012

Listen...


             We talked to Sarah the other day and her next task for us was to “listen”. It’s usually hard for me to listen because my attention span isn’t exactly very long unless it’s something very interesting. So I thought about it… When you listen it’s not necessarily always listening to people. Some of the best messages are from listening to people, don’t get me wrong. But I tried JUST listening to the sounds of Ocean View without looking at it. I asked myself “Does it sound like it looks? Does it sound happy? What do I hear here that I wouldn’t back home?”

Well, trying to listen at Sarah’s house didn’t work because there are some people from Alaska building a wall right in front of her house, so there was too much ruckus to find what I was looking for. Yohan is a guy who works with All Nations and he’s connected us with a house of some of his team in Ocean View. A girl named Anita lives here. She’s going back to the states for two weeks so Yohan asked if we could hang out at the house to talk to anybody that might come up. We went yesterday just to check it out and we ended up taking over the reins within minutes. It was just us four girls hanging out outside by the gate. It was much easier to listen to Ocean View at this moment because there were flats (usually one-room apartments) directly across the street from us. Just listening to a regular two o’clock day was actually quite delightful. It was a nice, sunny afternoon so everyone was outside socializing. You could hear the kids playing, dogs barking, and cars passing by. If I didn’t know it, I’d think I was in a normal American community.

When you eliminate the judgment of something visually it makes you analyze things a lot differently. Yeah, Ocean View literally sounds like a nice place, at night it is quite different. I’ve only listened from a distance so far, but from what I’ve gathered it’s a lot different at night. You usually hear music playing loudly with some yelling here and there, not always. You hear cars booming with bass as they pass by or stop at the corner. People still walk around but they’re pretty quiet and shady.

 It’s pretty well known that most crimes happen during the night. Wednesday when Amanda and I went to a prayer meeting with Yohan he made us more aware of the number of abuse and rapes that happen around Ocean View. We were told of a particular girl who couldn’t even speak because of what she’s gone through. This girl has an older sister that has been so abused and neglected that she is now having black outs and seizures. People have been doing too much looking and not enough listening. You can’t look at someone and tell if they have seizures and black outs on a regular basis. It was because someone took the time out to listen that she is now in the process of being helped.

Solely looking at something and making a judgment on it doesn’t nearly capture the severity of a situation. As fast paced as us Americans are, we need to learn to slow down and not only look, but listen. It might take you back to something familiar or it could turn someone’s world upside down.
                                                                                           -Katie

No comments:

Post a Comment