13. At Least There Weren't Any Freedom Fries

'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat.
What dogs are these! Where is the rascal cook?
——The Taming of the Shrew, IV.i

You might expect, dear reader, that following our unsuccessful practice on Friday, the foremost thing on Q.'s mind would be carving out some more time on Saturday for Loudmouth to get its act together.

Alas, 'twas not to be. We certainly expressed the desire to practice, but Q. had more important things for us to do.

I, for one, was to accompany E. to the Internet café near Omonoia Square, where I'd gone with Q. on Thursday night. And as with Q. and the Thursday trip, this was the first and last time I went anywhere alone with E. in Athens. She had urgent business at the café: she was to check e-mail for some information about buying a light system to use at some of our concerts, print out said information, and return to the church. Other band members would await the information and then go make the transaction.

Naturally, Sarah, who has a master's degree in theatre and knows a thing or two about lighting, offered her assistance, and spent the morning waiting for our return. But then Q. rebuffed her — actual professional knowledge about lights apparently being irrelevant. Instead he told her to help the Youth in Action kids, who were hand-painting several large banners to decorate the stage for our outreach concerts.

I don't mean to suggest that lighting and banners are unimportant. Continentals had them too — I was on the banner crew — but they were never allowed to trump our rehearsal time. Sarah's original intention had been to spend the day sightseeing, but she stuck around only to help with the lighting transaction — which didn't even happen that day, apparently because E. and I didn't get back from the Internet café in time. So her morning was wasted and she was miffed. When she resisted the idea of painting banners (because the kids already had this task well in hand), Q. told her to babysit Holly's son, Logan.

I hadn't realized that my mission with E. was time-sensitive. It certainly hadn't seemed time-sensitive:

• There were other, albeit inferior, Internet cafés closer to the church — but it had to be that café, which was a considerable hike.
• There was no chance of having the information e-mailed as a text message to Q.'s cell phone, or of E. calling him from Omonoia Square with the information. Why? Because Q. hadn't brought a cell phone to Greece, nor rented one after he got there. More later about that. This wasn't the last headache caused by his refusal to make himself accessible via phone.

The trip did have one positive result — it gave me an excuse to steal a map of Athens Q. had left lying around the courtyard. Between that map and my Athens tourist guide, I finally oriented myself. I wanted to be able to find my way around independently and not have to rely on Q. to take me places.

We managed to squeeze in an hour or two of rehearsal in the courtyard between lunch and the evening's big event, planned by Q. as a bonding experience between the various teams I've mentioned. That big event? A bonfire with hot dogs and S'mores.

Yes, you read that right.

Athens in the summer is hot. I was there for a week before I ever saw a cloud. The last thing anybody wanted was a bonfire, but Q. and Ken built one anyway — right on the concrete in the church courtyard, where it left a huge black scar. During our gathering, no one wanted to sit near the bonfire, because we were already warm enough. We had no wire hangers, sticks, or other apparatus for roasting hot dogs on the bonfire (and the church, you'll recall, had no kitchen), so Pandora boiled the dogs on a stove somewhere blocks away. Then she and Ben Paris lugged them back in a pot.

If you ever have to plan an event designed to bring people from various cultures together for a common purpose, here's a bit of advice: Don't serve hot dogs and S'mores. They're just so ... American. You might recall that "hegemony" was one of the buzzwords of international politics in 2004. Many people from other countries, not entirely without cause, ascribed to the United States the sinister motive of trying to increase its political and cultural influence in the world by any and all means, including the Iraq invasion. Well, I'm here to tell you that American cultural hegemony doesn't always stem from sinister motives. Sometimes it's just ignorance. A Yank may simply fail to consider self-evident truths, such as this one: Most Europeans will find hot dogs disgusting. Especially if they're French kids raised on croissants and paté.

Another problem with serving American food: We weren't in America. Pandora had tried to explain to Q. that hot dogs would be not only inappropriate but hard to locate. He insisted on them anyway. I'm not sure where she finally found hot dogs, but they weren't very good ones, even as hot dogs go. As for the S'mores, two of the essential elements — graham crackers and plain marshmallows — were unavailable in Greece. The substitutes were "digestive biscuit" — a large, round, bland, cardboard-textured cookie you can get all over Europe — and some dodgy-looking marshmallow-like confections filled with strawberry jam, which wouldn't stand up to roasting.

But the chocolate was pretty good.

Since at least the 1980s, and perhaps earlier, most evangelical missionary training has included some discussion of "contextualization." The idea is to learn to separate the content of the message (the Gospel) from its context — the trappings and expectations of Western culture — in the belief that it's necessary and desirable to disseminate the former with minimal interference from the latter. Only then is it possible to contextualize the Gospel for the culture you're working in, rather than the one you came from. Missionaries who are concerned about contextualization might observe local customs regarding dress, diet, and domicile rather than clinging to or exporting Western ways. (I know a lot of people think religion is just another of those Western ways — but if I agreed with that, I would've stayed home.) Consider, if you will, the opening scenes of The African Queen, where Katharine Hepburn and Robert Morley portray missionaries trying to get native Africans to sing Western hymns accompanied by a harmonium. Contextualization might have helped them.

If contextualization meant anything to Q., he might have chosen a cuisine that would put Americans, Russians, Germans, and French on equal footing. Naturally it couldn't be cuisine from any of our native countries. It would have to be some kind of food that was both readily available and equally unfamiliar to all of us, such as ... hm ... let me think ... uh ... wait, don't tell me ...

Oh, I know! How about Greek food?

Our band sang some more worship songs, and the kids did some of their choreography numbers for us — taking extra care not to singe themselves in the bonfire. Having alienated the European kids with the hot dogs, Q. tried to win them back with an encouraging speech — only to prove that his cultural unawareness didn't stop with food. Helene, the French King's Kids leader/translator, had a heck of a time making sense of his slang-laden ramblings. At least once that night, I had to translate what he said into standard English before she could render it in French.

Around midnight, after the fire was extinguished and the King's Kids had left, the guys started shooting some more hoops, so I joined in. In a spectacularly bad midcourt shot, I heaved a basketball completely over the cinder-block wall into some inaccessible corner of the compound. We never did recover it. Then Q., who was playing barefoot, ripped a pretty good hole in his toe by scraping it against the same wall. That's when we learned that none of our four leaders — Q., E., Ken, or Barbie — had thought to bring any medical or first-aid supplies. With as many people as we had, walking everywhere and staying in such modest accommodations, small injuries were almost inevitable — but the only one of us who had realized it was Sarah, who got the medical kit from her suitcase and patched up Q.'s toe.

Having been warned by Q. that tomorrow would be a busy day, we sought an earlier bedtime. Sarah and I were at this juncture sleeping separately, she with the girls and I with the guys. Private rooms were hard to come by in Athens Christian Center.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Q. claimed that his friends from Youth with a Mission told him every YWAM mission trip involved at least one fist fight between participants — so naturally he, Q., anticipated conflict within our group and would not be surprised if a fist fight broke out. A couple of observations:

1. Sarah spent three months on the mission field in Papua New Guinea and another year in France. I spent three months with Continentals and have flown all over the United States playing with another CCM band. Total fist fights witnessed or participated in: 0. We have mutual friends who've spent plenty of time with YWAM groups. They've never mentioned any fist fights.
2. If Q. expected a fist fight, it's even more unfathomable that he didn't bring a first aid kit.
   
3. At times Q. behaved as though he were trying to make his prediction come true. More later about that.