The First Ten Days: Article 3

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On Wednesday, August 1, 2012, I met a family that I would soon fall in love with. The Siech family is the wondrous combination of Jarek- the hardworking and fun-loving father, Monika- the ever-loving and persevering mother, Kaja- the kind and responsible elder daughter, Kinga- the initially shy, but soon after crazy fun younger daughter, and Radak- the sweet and silly adopted son. Everyone in the family participates in Dar, the evangelistic theatre group that Jarek and Monika started. Their mission and life’s desire is to serve the Kingdom of God by telling of God’s good news to everyone in Poland… and then the world. During my time in Poland, my job was to help them in this mission.

Our first ten days together were dedicated to preparing for the ministry tour that was spread throughout the following eighteen days.

Every morning, we (the Siech family, Carmen- an American young man who also joined in the ministry, and I) would meet in the Siech’s modest apartment for breakfast. Every morning I would hear Radak say, “Hallo B! Hallo!” Every morning I would hear the common greeting “dzien dobry,” from the tired voices of others in the room. Every morning I would help set the breakfast table, and every morning there would be delicious bread, sliced cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, butter, yogurt, different spreads, and a slender hotdog-like meat. Every morning we would hold hands as we prayed over the meal. Every morning we would clean everything up and then go to a large room, in the same building we stayed in, to practice our dramas or fix/prepare props.
The first couple days were filled with stretching and learning the basics of miming. I never realized how hard miming actually was before these practices. My thighs were sore for days. But after a couple days I could walk, go down stairs, and overall act like a mime; I also learned the basics of blowing fire and stilt walking (though I never did the fire and wasn't comfortable enough to be on the stilts for the ministry time). It was also during the first couple days that I learned that it was actually possible to communicate with only a handful of words.

By Saturday we began to learn “Sen Lalkarza,” or “The Toymakers Dream.” This is a pantomime based on a book of the same title. It tells the story of a Toymaker who receives a Bible as a gift one night, and as he reads it he falls asleep. Once asleep his marionette dolls come to life. One of the more curious dolls finds the toymaker’s plans which details where the dolls will be sent once ready. They all will be sent to different homes. This distresses the dolls, and Mardusa, the evil prince, seizes the opportunity to convince the others to run away from the toymaker. They run away to a beautiful island and at first all seems well, but soon Mardusa forces the others to build a wall that will keep the toymaker from finding them. Much abuse happens to these dolls at the hand of the evil prince. Before the wall could be finished, the toymaker, who had awakened to find that his dolls had run away, turned himself into a doll and stepped onto the island. He finds one of the dolls and explains his plan of sending the dolls to houses of children to bring joy. The doll, realizing their mistake of running away, asks the toymaker to help them escape from Mardusa, but while all this is happening the wall gets finished and they are unable to leave. They devise another plan to escape, but Mardusa discovers their plans and sentences one of the dolls to death by cannon. The toymaker stops him and says he will take the place of the doll, but only if he could stand in front of the wall. Mardusa excited to kill the toymaker agrees. Though the cannon kills the toymaker it also destroys the wall and all the other dolls are able to escape from Mardusa. At this point the toymaker actually awakens realizing he has been dreaming. He looks at the Bible laying next to him recognizing the similarity of sacrifice that Christ gave in order to save man, and the toymaker chooses to follow Christ.

I played one of the marionettes named Tam-Tam, a loyal, but naïve doll, and spent a lot of time practicing moving like a doll. I also spent a lot of time creating and repairing different props for all the dramas and skits we did. There was a lot of work to be done these first ten days and every evening, after dinner and cleanup, everyone was pretty much exhausted. We painted, glued, molded Styrofoam, practiced, stretched, cooked, cleaned, spray-painted, brainstormed, prayed, mended costumes, created costumes and did it all again and again.

Because of everything, it was hard to find time to do the things I personally needed or wanted to do. I didn’t do as many updates as I wanted to and barely wrote in my journal. It took ten days before I was able to squeeze in time to take care of laundry. That was a slightly stressful situation since by day eleven I had to pack for traveling and it took a little over a day to dry all the clothes since there are pretty much no dryers in Poland. It was also difficult, at times, to get myself to wake-up in order to have my devotional time, but the importance of spending time with God became ever increasingly evident. The more there is to be done, the more God is needed.

Those first ten days were very full and sometimes overwhelming, but I can easily say that they were worth it. I was able to learn so much. Not only were they days of preparation for ministry, they were, as I learned later on, days filled with ministry, but I’ll talk about that later.