A Day in the Life of a Sacred Road Intern at Warm Springs

Swing your legs over the side of your cot sometime before 6:00 in the morning. Pull on some clothes in the quiet semi-darkness and slip out the door so team members can keep sleeping; cross through the cool morning air to the kitchen's back door. Splash some water on your face in the bathroom, put up your hair and slather on a bit of sunscreen. Fill a coffee percolator and plug it in. Take a seat in the dining room with Bible and journal for the vanishing solitary moments of the day. Team members drift in, waiting for the coffee's "serve" light to blink on, sitting quietly at other tables with Bibles open before them.

It's 7:00, time to head into the kitchen. Lauren joins you, and maybe a team member appears in the doorway volunteering to help, so you pull out your list and parcel out jobs: wash lettuce for supper, bake a dessert, fill the roaster with chili or spaghetti sauce or meat and beans for taco salad, hard boil eggs for breakfast. Another team member has signed up to set out breakfast, so you direct him to the cereal, yogurt, eggs, fruit, and toast and he readies the buffet table. At 8 Scott prays for the group, 33 people from churches in Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi; they eat, and you hurry through the line after them and get back into the kitchen to supervise breakfast dishes and setting out lunch supplies, which are also team-manned chores. Lauren loads up her bins of kids club supplies and then helps with whatever is left in the kitchen. It's past the scheduled departure time of 8:50, so you fill up your water bottle, make sure your work pant pockets are loaded with cell phone and chapstick, and circle up in the parking lot.

Scott prays for the group and they load into their 5 vans; the 3 interns climb into the '89 15 passenger Ford van and lead the way to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, about a 20 minute drive from the First Baptist Church in Madras where you're staying. First stop: Public Utilities building where Scott finds your contact man (a Warm Springs Indian who also happens to be the assistant pastor at the First Baptist Church) and gets the marching orders for the day. You meet the teams just down the hill at the park and Scott parcels out the jobs. You follow along, finding a place to work for the day.

Maybe it's picking up trash along the side of the road as passersby honk and wave and call out, "Thank you!" By the end of the week some have stopped and asked for prayer; others have thrust a stack of smoked salmon fillets through the open window as you drove the trailer through the Rez to pick up the bags of trash. Hatchery employees slung a bag of fresh salmon from the back of their pick-up truck into your van, filling your cooler to overflowing.

Another day you paint at the Boys and Girls' Club, doing a little painting and a lot of supervising, trying to help 19 team members keep busy. You pour paint refills, wrap brushes and rollers that have been left unattended, move tarps and ladders, point out areas that still need paint.

 Fellow intern Lauren

You keep working for another couple of hours after a sack lunch break, then head down the road to the community center to clean up a little before kids' club.

The vans caravan to the Boys and Girls' Club at 3:30; you pull up and the kids come running. You man the craft table, or wander with your camera taking pictures for the end-of-the-week slide show, or help Lauren organize kids for the skit, or play tag with Andrew. "Everything is base!" he says, running from tree to fence to post to bush. Then he grabs a branch off the bush and invents portable base. It's a rigged game, but Andrew's smile makes it worthwhile.

Craft table

 

 Playing catch

Foursquare

 

Kickball

Fellow intern Scott

Story time

Andrew waits for his turn to come on stage

 

Tag with Andrew

One afternoon you have to call off a boy who liked to jump rope but kept jumping in out of turn and annoying the other kids who were jumping. Before you leave you learn that his name is Terrence and make a point of saying goodbye to him, hoping to have a better interaction to end the day on. "You're going?" he asks. "Who do you have to see now?" You tell him you're going back to the church where you are staying to eat dinner and spend the night. He doesn't want you to leave.

Face painting

Turning the jump rope

Terrence jumping

At 5:30 you pile into the vans and drive back to Madras. You arrive around 6:00 and hurry to unlock the kitchen door. You check the roaster, hoping dinner was cooking all day while you were gone. Scott and Lauren come in to help set drinks on the tables and get the buffet ready. You find serving spoons, cut the dessert, finish chopping things for the salad. Team members file in after cleaning up a bit, and you pray and they flood the buffet table, eagerly emptying bowls to fill their plates. You eat a quick dinner and supervise kitchen clean-up, go over your kitchen plan for the next day, chat with Scott and Lauren, or join the casual worship and sharing gathering. If you have time and are feeling brave and dirty, you head out to the shower trailer. There are no showers in the church, and the solution is a four shower head trailer with insufficient partitions and (supposedly) solar-heated drums. You wear a bathing suit and hold your breath as the cold water hits you; it's actually refreshing and feels especially clean to shower out under the open sky.

Checking out the shower trailer before we pulled out in Wapato

Then you brush your teeth and head to the girl's quarters. It's maybe 10:30, and some are in bed but there's still plenty of energy. Around 11:00 (if you haven't fallen asleep in the midst of the noise by then) you remind them that it's lights' out, and fall asleep.