Bind Us Together

Over January, I took a course called "Development Ethics in Jamaica." For two weeks, our class worked with local volunteers and workmen on expanding a basic school in the rural village of Bamboo, Jamaica.

On our final day at the Ebenezer Basic School in Bamboo, Jamaica, our work team arrived to find that the children and their teachers had waited for us to start their morning devotions in the adjoining church. The children sang—90 three, four, and five year-olds in school uniforms—and we sang back.


Later, after lunch, the school and the church threw a farewell ceremony for us. Near the end, Mrs. Carol White, the principal teacher at the school, called us up to the front of the church to present each of us with a small gift. Lined up on both sides of her were Mrs. White’s fellow teachers and the two churchwomen who had taken care of us for two weeks, Mrs. Williams and Auntie Lena. Each woman leaned over the communion railing to hug me, and the others in our team, tightly in turn.

Tourists do not get tearful hugs.


We circled up to sing spirituals. Mrs. Williams held my left hand and Auntie Lena gripped my right. We swung our hands up into the air each time we sang, “Bind us together, Lord. Bind us together, Lord, with bonds that cannot be broken.”

Tourists are not bound together with the people of the place they came to see.