Open Hearts and (Briefly) Closed Mouths

A few minutes ago, I said “it’s eerie how quiet you are.” That broke the spell, the silence that had overcome the entire party for the last three hours. Three hours!! I thought maybe they’d finally run out of things to say, but that is not the case. They are off and running again.

One thing that has really impressed me today is the open nature of the people we’ve encountered. First thing this morning, the Zuni school custodian, Sam, noticed us sitting down to breakfast in the gathering space, so he took his cup of coffee and sat with us. Sam has worked for the school for around 45 years, and he was also a student at the school when he was young, so he is as familiar with it as anyone. The building we are in is only three years old, and it doubles as the church worship space (in fact, my air mattress is in the sanctuary). They are in the process of adding on a gym, playground, and a chapel, which explains the loud sounds of concrete work first thing in the morning!

Sam told me about his work, about his family, and answered lots of my questions. He clarified for me that the Zuni Pueblo and the village are one and the same. The old pueblo buildings have all been modernized over the years. He also told me that he finally committed his life to Christ about ten years ago. It was a nice way to start off the day.

Today’s agenda was a little uncertain, because, thanks to a quirk in my email, I had no idea if Rehoboth Christian School was expecting us for a tour. I had sent a message earlier in the week to reconfirm our visit, and I never got a response. So we went anyway, hoping it would work out.

Rehoboth Christian School started as a part of a campus that was the headquarters for the CRC mission to the Navajo people. The Navajo were not a centralized community, and in the Gallup area it was possible to purchase land, so the mission established a church, a school, a hospital and administrative offices to support the work of missionaries who worked at mission stations with different Navajo groups. Now there are many Navajo congregations in our denomination that are self-sustaining, and the hospital is no longer necessary, so only the church and the school remain. [Disclaimer: this is all based on memory of conversations with others, so if you want to go around quoting facts you should really research more thoroughly than my silly travel journal!]

We went inside the K-8 school building and found a nice, modern school that was larger than we expected. Rehoboth continues to operate as an academically excellent school with a push to remain majority Native American—their website says they are around 70% Native American. The campus itself is pretty modern.

After looking around, we drove into Gallup, via the historic Route 66, and checked out the El Rancho Hotel. The lobby is fun—think old-fashioned western—and the walls of the second-floor ring around the lobby are covered with autographed photos of the movie stars of yesterday who stayed there: John Wayne, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Errol Flynn, and many more. The hotel is a great throwback to the Route 66 heyday.

Then we set off to find a friend of one of our passengers. She’d been on a service trip last year to the Pinedale Reservation, working on projects for the church there with Pastor Nathan. I thought the church was right outside Gallup, which is sort of accurate. It was actually about 15 miles outside, through some incredible rock formations and mesas that we neglected to photograph, but the directions got rather New-Mexico-ish. Go 8 miles on this highway, turn right, go 4 miles, look for houses on the right, turn in and go to the end of the road. Around mile 4 we saw a road to houses, and a sign that said Pinedale, so we turned in. And we went on our way to the end of the road. But it never seemed to end. Eventually the road started to narrow, and there were no more signs of life, and we started to think we might never emerge from the wilderness. We turned around.

A couple of tries later, we finally got cell coverage again and got hold of Pastor Nathan. His street was the one just BEFORE the one we started at. We went to the house, greeted him, his wife, his friend, and his grandson. After a few minutes, his wife asked if we had eaten lunch yet (all our wrong turns got us there right about 12:30). I was embarrassed that we seemed to be dropping in for lunch, and she started to offer to make us food. Then Pastor Nathan suggested that we should go for Navajo tacos at Earl’s Restaurant. All four of them hopped in their car, and we followed them back to Gallup. We were definitely in the minority at the restaurant, and we found out we liked Earl’s Navajo taco. It consists of frybread instead of a tortilla, covered in a meat and bean combo that was a bit like chili, with cheese and red and green chili sauce. Excellent! Thankfully he’d suggested we split them between 2 people. I think one might have fed 3 or 4.

Pastor Nathan spent most of lunch either giving us suggestions for an outing tomorrow or answering my numerous questions about his work and the area. He’s been working with his community for 15 years, and he is well-accepted by them, in part because his wife is Navajo. They call him in-law, recognizing that by marrying her he has become part of the Navajo family. For the second or third time this trip, we’ve heard someone say their life journey included at least one moment of “are you sure God? Well, okay.”

We parted ways after lunch. The drive home was very exciting because we saw a llama. I don’t know if that excites you in the same way, but we even stopped to take its picture. It looked straight at us. I did not take a picture myself, so I’m not able to share it with you—you’ll just have to imagine it.

The ride home included much hearty singing; on this trip I’ve been treated to heartfelt renditions of VeggieTales songs, Rick Astley (complete with deep-voiced Rick Astley impression), Imagine Dragons, and a song from The Lorax movie, to name a few. We also stopped, shockingly enough, to do a little shopping from some of the vendors in Zuni.

When we got back to the school, principal Kathy Bosscher gave me some more history lessons about the area and the mission, again sitting down to answer all my questions. One would think, given the wealth of informers available at my church, that I would have had a little more knowledge in advance! Zuni and Rehoboth are the result of two men who were sent to check out the area for missions more than 100 years ago. As I mentioned earlier, Rehoboth was a center for the Navajo mission. The Zuni people, on the other hand, lived together in the pueblo and were very centralized. And so a mission was established in the pueblo, and eventually the school provided an education option to a people who had very limited educational opportunities. Kathy went to Rehoboth school as a child herself, and she has been involved in education in this area of New Mexico in many different roles. She's been at Zuni for the last 20 years.

Kathy also showed me where to go to see the ceremonial dancers tonight. A portion of our group walked over to see the dancers. We went to a nearby plaza, a small space ringed by buildings, and we climbed the steps to the roof to join all the other onlookers. We were the only obvious anglos in attendance.

The dancers were wearing incredibly intricate costumes, dressed as different animals. An older man next to Taya told her that this was the acting out of their creation story. Antelope, rams, birds and some other unidentified fur-draped creatures danced in the square. Men who had painted their bodies with the red dirt and wore matching terracotta masks were the comic relief, sort of the clowns of the dance. We didn’t stay a long time, but it was fascinating to watch the community coming together for this. As I understand it, the dancers are meant to forget themselves and become the spirit of the creature they are costumed as. But with the goofiness mixed in with the drama of the ceremony, it’s hard to imagine they are able to forget themselves. We only stayed for the first portion, so perhaps things get more intense as the evening goes on. I'd include pictures here, but they are strictly prohibited.

Back at the school, it seemed as if we’d come to the end of our collective rope, and we fell into the silence I mentioned earlier. That is not all bad. After a day of having others so generously give of their time and words, we need some downtime to process and shut down for a while. And very possibly you do too!