Bigger connections

A year and a month or two and what seems like forever ago, our family arrived hot and slightly bedraggled to the Philadelphia airport. We had just finished a long hike and reunion in a remote corner of New Mexico, and were on our way to a tiny town called Akron to begin a couple of weeks of training with MCC, our sponsoring organization.

After we connected with our ride and were on our way, we started making small talk with Marvin, our volunteer driver, who turned out to be very friendly and interesting. One of the first things that we found out was that his son was in Afghanistan. Immediately, I assumed that he meant the Army, but then realized after a second or two that we were talking to a Mennonite here. Since a central tenet of the Mennonite faith is a strong belief in nonviolence, of course his son wasn't in the Army - he was in Afghanistan as the MCC's only service worker there. Marvin then started to tell us a few stories about his son's experiences, and we started to imagine what the challenges and joys of living in Afghanistan as a peacemaker must be like.

Now comes word that Marvin's son, Glen Lapp, was among those killed in last week's ambush of medical workers in the Northeast of the country. Our first response is of course of sadness - for Marvin and his family, for Glen and the people that he was working with in Afghanistan, for those close to the other aid workers that were killed in the attack. I'm also sad that Afghanistan, for a number of reasons, continues to be a place where people suffer from the results of years of violence.

Another reaction I have is one of guilt. While I've been blithely chatting away about our family's (incredibly privileged) trip to the Expo, another MCC worker lost his life while doing what he believed in. It's the age-old question: what is our response to suffering in this world?

Many of you know that, when we originally signed up for MCC, we had wanted to go somewhere in Central or South America. Our Spanish was good enough that we felt we could get up to conversational speed in a month or three, and more importantly, we wanted to make a difference in the world. We pictured ourselves in a remote village, maybe... helping with a sustainable agriculture project? Starting a microloan program for local craftspeople?

Instead, one thing led to another, and now we're in China. Teaching English, the language of industry and commerce world-wide. When we look at some of our co-worker's blogs, (especially the blogs that aren't updated as often because their authors are, in fact, Busy Doing Things) it's very easy to feel trivial and irrelevant.

This is the point where I suppose I should be summing things up with a conclusion of some sort, except I can't come up with one that doesn't feel trite or self justifying to me. Maybe the only thing I can say is that if I hadn't signed up with MCC, an ambush of aid workers in Northeastern Afghanistan would have barely registered as another blip in the headlines to me.

Now, I realize that one thing I can do is to pass on what I know about Glen to the rest of the people I know, and tell you that yes, we are all connected in some way. And yes, we need to know more about what connects us to the rest of the world. Maybe that's one reason I keep cranking out little bitty blog posts about a small corner of the world that I don't quite understand yet...

More information about Glen, from MCC, here. More about the Mennonites, and their tradition of service here.