#3 Bathing in Concrete

The day after our 16-hour trek, day 5, I taught in the morning on “washing” in preparation for the “dunking” of 20 people. Then we headed downhill to a small river to accomplish the task at hand. Easy enough, right? Well, not on this trip. After walking 45 minutes downhill with the sound of the river growing louder and louder, I was dismayed at the sight of our selected body of water. The water was gray from all the rock and sediment that had been washed down from the mountains. To make matters worse, it was really fast moving, and the terrain was very dangerous. In our company we had a range of ages from 1½ years old all the way up to a few ladies in their 70s. So we headed upstream to find a smaller creek that was supposed to be cleaner and fed into the grey river. It was cleaner, for about 3 minutes before it began to rain. Not just a sprinkle, but an all out torrential downpour. So our clean river was now muddy brown, and the little pool we had selected was quickly filling with gravel and mud.

The main river on the other hand had turned to the consistency of concrete. The force of the concrete was so strong that it was throwing boulders the size of T.V.s down the river. I had taught just two hours before about the symbolic death to self, but this river would make the symbolism very real. So now our company of 40 or so people began walking downstream to yet another creek. 45 slow-moving, treacherous minutes later, we reached a crystal clear creek and found a place to build a small damn. All in all the day turned out to be a wonderful celebration of new life. Now we just had to make the hour walk back up the hill on very sore legs!