March 9

Another normal week here at SVIS, which is anything but normal. The girl I mentioned last week seems to be doing fine. She apparently is in a much better mood when she is here at school where her life isn’t so crummy (parents with other people and no real home to go to and many frustrations that build up inside.)  Of course, we are still praying for her to trust Jesus with her problems so she can find inward peace.

This week’s other story was written by another of my girls. It seems she was so distraught over the passing of a family member that she began cutting herself. When the dorm parents asked, then demanded, that she stop, out of her mouth came some very bad language. I wasn’t there, but it seems almost demonic to me. She later tried to run away from the campus. Of course the authorities and the mom had been called, and she was taken to a hospital. I don’t know any more than that. This was a major blow to my class, of course. They came to school the next day in opposite states of mind – some very subdued and others upset and unable to keep their own emotions in check. Pray for R* and the other girls in the dorm.

Tonto Basin

Friday our basketball team was scheduled to play in a tournament in Tonto Basin. To my Iowa friends, that’s like a Cedar Rapids trip – all done in one day. As a surprise, the administration decided at the last minute to take the whole school down to support the team. You can imagine what we teachers thought of that! Riding in the bus for 6 hours with our students…supervising them at a game they didn’t want to watch… and missing a day of academics that we had already planned! Aargh!

Well, praise the Lord, it did not go as badly as any of us had anticipated. The children were pretty much under control (because most of the teachers had them doing schoolwork on the bus on the way down). They only got wired after the dinner stop at McDonalds. And I didn’t get the expected headache I usually endure on long bus rides.

The Grandma was wearing this traditional dress.

But, that is not the best of it. A family drove from White River to see their boy play basketball. (That’s a long drive in itself.) One of my boys is the cousin of the ball player, so they share a grandmother. He saw his grandmother in the parking lot, and ran to talk to her through the car window while the other family members went into the gym. I could not leave him there unsupervised, so I stayed out in the parking lot out of ear-shot. After 20 minutes of being baked, I finally asked if I could sit in the car. It didn’t matter since they were speaking to each other in Apache. (He is one of the few Apache we have here.) But the thing that really got to me was the love that was flowing back and forth. They were touching each other and crying. He would die if he thought anyone in the class knew because he is one of my most difficult students, but what I saw was a little homesick child who loves his grandma very, very much. They almost had me crying too. And now I know better how to reach this child (who, by the way, is failing academically). He, though he would outwardly deny it, needs a home, a safe haven where he is loved unconditionally.

Thank you for praying

Flag Ceremony- A Tradition on Going Home Weekends