Day 14: June 14, 2009

Day 14: June 14, 2009

It was around 2pm on Friday, June 12th, Lindsay and I had just taken our Global Challenge group, a group of awesome middle schoolers from Lexington, Kentucky, down to the challenge course to do the High Challenge when the clouds began to swarm the skies.

The High Challenge includes several ‘elements’ including a twenty-five foot climbing wall, tight-rope challenges and a zip-cord. The High Challenge and Low Challenge (a lower-to-the-ground group of elements that are done on the morning before the kids spend a night in the Global Village), are team and trust building exercises that get the participants thinking and working together.

The kids had just put on their harnesses and Ken Herren, the Education Coordinator on the Ranch, and the Challenge course volunteers were moving into their positions; Alicia manning the dismount of the zip-line and Stephen at the top of the wall to help the climbers transition from the wall to the zip-line. Ken had just gotten three participants to form a belay team (the belay team’s job is to keep tension off the rope so that the climber doesn’t plunge to their doom), and the first climber was about to approach the wall when a lightning bolt struck the horizon, ending the High Challenge before it even began.

We took the participants inside to play some team building games (mostly games to keep them busy and preoccupied from the disappointment of not being able to do the High Challenge). The story progressively got worse. After a couple hours of games, we arranged to have them picked up and met them back at the Heifer Hilton for their final debriefing before they left.

Lindsay Kuehn told them a story that Ken gave her that would make them think about the direct and indirect effect we all have on world hunger and poverty. The story came from an old eastern philosophy about heaven and hell:

Picture a table with mounds of delicious food. Sitting around the table are starving people, skinny, famished. They are suffering, holding three foot long chopsticks, trying desperately to feed themselves, but every time they pick up a piece of food they are unable to bring it to their mouths because of how long the chopsticks are.

Picture that same table, but instead of starving people, there are happy healthy people sitting around the table talking and laughing. Instead of trying to feed themselves, they used their long chopsticks to feed the person across from them.

The point of the two visualizations is that heaven and hell is what we make it. We hold the power to bring happiness and fulfillment to the world and it lies in our compassion and our willingness to help each other because we are all brothers and sisters of this global community. There is a thin line between heaven and hell and the solution is simple if we would all come together.

After I went home to Valley View, I soon found out that our power was out because lightning had stuck a power pole by the Global Village Barn. For the next two days, our food would slowly grow warmer as we rushed to eat and store what we could in coolers.

By the end of the second day, we were told that we could put our food in the fridge in the house down by the entrance to the Ranch, the Gate House. You see, the power had been reconnected to most of the Ranch, but a couple building and all of the volunteer housing was still without power; us lowly volunteers did not seem to be a big priority to the power company. I was beginning to think this was all a farce and we were being tested in some sort of Heifer Volunteer disaster drill.

So, along with the food, most (if not all) of the volunteers had temporarily moved into the Gate House, like refugees, (or in domestic terms), or IDP (Internally Displaced Persons). Saturday night thirty of us all crammed into the tiny living room, eating what we cooked together or separately and watched Robin Hood: Men in Tights. It was good times and awesome to see so many people crammed into one area for something other that alcohol and drunken banter (even if if was to share the comfort of air conditioning and electricity.)

Apparently the storm had caused a Tornado in the next town, Conway, and the residuals had left us powerless on most of the Ranch. The incident did not faze us much except for some spoiled food. Besides the whole experience did nothing more than bring us all together and prove just how close-knit of a community we really are.

By late Sunday afternoon, we were told that we could move back into our houses because the power was back on, but we hung around another hour or four, watching movies, cleaning and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company just for a little while longer.