The Bandana

The Bandana

by Judson Park

Our work in the Donauhof is fun most of the time, but it can also be stressful. A few months ago, we had to prepare the building for a pop-up restaurant that would be spending seven weeks using the ballroom as a dining hall. This meant the basement had to be clean in order for the air to meet a certain standard of cleanliness (the air filters were down there). Keep in mind that this is an old building. I would guess the basement hadn’t been cleaned or dusted in well over half a decade, so an ungodly amount of dust had piled up over the years—and we had to clean it.

The team cleaning the basement consisted of myself, my project:vienna coworkers, and about six men from the Farsi-speaking congregation. In total, I would say we spent about six hours all together down in the basement breathing in air thick with dust. Sweeping and moving things around only made it worse. It was only after we’d been cleaning for a good while that someone came up with the idea to wet the floor, so the dust wouldn’t fly up into the air.

Sadly, we didn’t have any professional breathing masks to help us deal with the polluted air, so most of us had to use bandanas or our shirts to cover our mouths. I myself pulled my shirt up over my nose and mouth to try to stop at least some of the dust.

A good friend of mine (I’ll call him Stephan, which is not his real name, to protect his identity) who is a refugee from Afghanistan, was part of the team cleaning the basement. Stephan is one of the happiest people I know. He’s short man who is always smiling and saying in a deep, announcer voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, listen to me!” because that’s pretty much most of the English he knows.

During the process of cleaning, I had to take a step back and catch my breath because it was getting a little difficult to breathe. I stepped out of the room where the dust was thickest and brought down my shirt. When I re-entered the room, Stephan came up to me and offered me a bandana to cover my face more easily. He offered me the bandana he had been wearing.

Judson Park and his Vienna coworkers clean the dusty basement of the Donahouf.

I didn’t realize until about a week later what I had experienced. A man who has not had the easiest life met the need of a boy who, throughout his life, hadn’t experienced anywhere near the amount of hardship as a refugee from Afghanistan. In that moment it didn’t matter who we were. It didn’t matter what we had been through in life. The only thing that mattered was what was needed at that moment. He gave me his own bandana, because he saw that I needed it. How beautiful is that?

This is, in my opinion, what project:Gemeinde is all about. It doesn’t matter who you are, what your story is, or what you’ve done. If you have a need, they do everything in their power to meet it. The people in this community have such a pure love for others that repeatedly takes my breath away.

I truly believe this is how the spirit works. It constantly gives us new perspectives on what the love of God looks like. It works in a congregation of many different nations, loving each other because they recognize they don’t belong to this world. They refuse to hold people to their past and accept them (believers or not) as children of God, and they love them accordingly.

Judson Park is currently serving as a Venturer in Vienna, Austria.