Let's paint!

So this week I painted a “mural” on four walls at the blind school. That’s right, I painted. If you know me well at all, you know that I am not all that entirely gifted with artistic abilities. Like, I have hardly any…especially when it comes to painting. So why did I?? Let me explain….

Last week Mel and I stopped by the blind school to meet the couple that runs it and let them know that we would love to volunteer there some time if there is ever anything that they need help with. The couple is super sweet. His name is Samuel and I have no idea what hers is( after about 5 times I quit asking), but everyone just calls her Madame. They’re probably in their early 60’s or so.
The school is only about a 5-7 min walk from our house. The kids live there year round, except for a couple of six week breaks. Samuel told us that they have about 90 kids that attend school there. The majority of them are either blind or have extremely poor eyesight, although there are also about 15 or 20 very poor, sighted kids that come from nearby villages. They attend school there, but do not actually live at the school. The blind school is k-12th grade, and the “sighted school” goes up to 8th. When we talked to Samuel and Madame they said that they could use some help getting everything ready for the kids to come back since they were on summer break at the time. Madame (that really is what people call her…it bugs me I don’t know her name though) brought is into the boys dorm and asked if we would be interested in painting “some pictures” on one of the walls of the main room to brighten things up for them. (I found that a little bit amusing since they are blind and all.) We said sure and that we would be back that next Wednesday to paint.
Well, Wednesday rolled around and we were all sick, so we told her we would be there Thursday instead. On Thursday Mel still wasn’t feeling very good and so in the end I just went by myself.

When she had first asked us to paint I had made it very clear that painting isn’t exactly my forte, and Mel said it wasn’t what she was super good at either, but Madame assured us that she didn’t care at all what it looked like, she just wanted to make it fun for the kids. In her words “you can just do stick figures of children for all I care and that will be great. It’s ok if you are not very good.” Plus, Mel and I knew that we would be doing it together and so that would make it a little bit easier….we felt sure we could put our heads together and come up with something that would hopefully turn out pretty good.

Ok well, like I said, Mel wasn’t feeling good. And so I ended up going by myself. NOT exactly what I had in mind :) As I was leaving the house I had a couple moments of “what in the world am I doing?? I can’t paint!” and “maybe I should just lie and tell the lady that I’m still not feeling well either” and “I cannot believe I am doing this” BUT I kept walking and found some condolence in the fact that she had said that she would be happy with stick figures….surely I could at least do better then THAT. Plus, we had a long conversation about it and I felt certain that God was surely going to help me out and let it turn out….just this once.

When I got there she informed me that rather then ONE wall (like she told us) she wanted FOUR walls done. Oh great. She handed me a piece of chalk to sketch things out, showed me the collection of completely crummy paint (like seriously it was probably 10 years old…)told me to get started, and stepped back to watch and be amazed. Right.
I just kind of stood there staring at the wall with the piece of chalk in my hand, not knowing what in the world to do. I had drawn out some ideas on a piece of paper before I left and shown them to her when I got there, and she had been happy with it. It was a decent drawing…I was actually pretty proud of myself. I learned very quickly though, that drawing the same thing on the wall 15 times bigger is a completely different deal altogether. In my opinion anyways. Long story short, the first thing I drew with the chalk looked nothing like my cute little picture. After that, I just stood there staring at the wall for a while trying to figure out how I was going to make this work. Apparently I stood there too long because she took the chalk and told me to follow her somewhere. She took me upstairs to some of the classrooms that her daughter had painted when she came to visit so that I could “get some ideas.” She said that the paintings were very simple and cute and maybe I would become inspired.
We walked into the classroom and I knew right away I was in trouble. It was kind of funny because nothing looked like it went together…everything was pretty random, BUT it was painted really well. It was not simple. It looked hard and I was freaking out on the inside. To Madame I just smiled and said it was very nice, and her daughter had done a great job. On the inside I was having quite the conversation with Jesus. I was very quickly asking Him why in the world He was having me do this, and asking Him to please somehow give me some talent and ability for the day.

Well, in the end He didn’t give me amazing artistic abilities, but He sure gave me a good dose of humility. It was definitely a couple afternoons of feeling pretty helpless and vulnerable, but at the same time thankful that God was reminding me that it's not always such a bad thing. Sometimes situations that put you in that position can be a very good and growing thing. And when you allow yourself to be put in that situation I think it says a lot to the person that you are serving. It put me in a place of complete humility and vulnerability, simply doing what I know God had for me to do for those afternoons, despite how I felt about it. In the end it all turned out ok, and I think it was a good experience and reminder to me that as Americans, we don’t necessarily have “the answer” to everything. Or have the “right way” or “the best way”. In this particular situation I knew that from the very beginning - and was not expecting to - but sometimes when we come into situations of serving, especially in another country we come into things automatically assuming we know best and we can do things better, and we bring all our “stuff” (meaning ideas, teachings, ways of thinking) with us. The truth is a lot of times we cannot actually be of much help until we put ourselves in the position of learning, and make ourselves vulnerable with the people that we want to love and get to know. We have to have humility.

In the end, Madame was a pretty picky boss to be honest. And at times it seemed silly to me to do things the way that she told me to do them. In my opinion it would have made a lot more sense to do things the way that I knew how to do it. But I tried to have a very humble spirit and I just did things the way that she wanted me to. It was a good reminder to me that even though it didn’t really make sense to me at times, it didn’t hurt anything to do things her way; and it was respectful to her and it helped our relationship grow. Sometimes you have to just do things for the sake of the relationship. Honestly a lot of the little things that we worry about don’t matter in the grand scheme of things anyway. It’s about the relationship and it’s about being culturally sensitive. It’s about being a servant.

While I was painting there were a couple of little boys that sat with me the whole time. They were 11 and 12 and they were so sweet! Neither of them were completely blind, but they certainly couldn’t see very well. They would sit with their faces RIGHT next to the wall, and over and over again tell me “that is very nice Didi,(which means older sister in Hindi) Very, very nice.” It was so cute. Clearly they couldn’t see very well :) I think that was Jesus’ sweet reminder to me though, that it was all going to be ok, and even if I’m not the best painter in the world, that’s not really completely what those two days were all about anyway.

Here are some pics of the finished walls :)


In my opinion this doesn't exactly look much like a boy's dorm. Oh well. She kept asking me to paint more butterflies, so we painted more butterflies. I'd say there are now plenty of butterflies, how bout you?

Not extremely creative, but hey it works.
The green trees on either side of the door are Madame's handiwork.

This was not my idea, just for the record :) She told me what to paint and I just painted it. I found this smiley thing rather funny.

Another complete wall. The huge sunflower was originally a sun that I painted...she didn't like it and told me to turn it into a sunflower instead. So here's the giant sunflower...painted just for you Madame.

This little guy was my favorite.


Kind of a sad excuse for wall murals, but in the end I guess they don't look TOO bad. I know you all probably want to hire me now....too bad I'm in India.