Guatemala 2016
In a remote village, our group provided life bags to the community and played with the children there.
If you asked one of the eleven students who went to Guatemala over March Break what they did, what they saw, or what they learned, you may have been given the unsatisfying answer: “Lots of stuff.” It’s not really our frustration at the thousands of people who have asked, nor is it our desire to get the obligatory conversation over with, but it’s the truth--we did, saw, and learned lots of stuff. So much, actually, that it’s hard to fit into one sentence, one conversation, or one article. But I am here to try to give all of you curious friends and teachers a satisfying answer to what the Guatemala trip was all about.
Imagine living in a country without a stable government, a safe place to live, or parents who are able to provide for you. Being a child, you have your whole life ahead of you, but seemingly little hope for a good one. You leave your home with your five or six siblings and enter an orphanage. But this orphanage is hardly the Oliver Twist kind; it is a school, a workshop, a chapel, a library, a soccer field, a garden. It is a home to over 300 of nuestros pequeños hermanos - our little brothers and sisters - and it will give you an education, three meals a day, and the opportunity to learn trades, go to university, and get a respectable job. Any child in such a magical place, who would otherwise likely be lacking these opportunities, would consider themselves among the fortunate ones.
At the beginning of March, NPH Orphanage opened its doors to eleven more kids and three teachers, who spent a week giving all they could to the children and finding that it was the children who gave them so much more than they ever could have asked for.
It seemed like the whole country opened its arms and welcomed us with joy, despite the fact that we were strangers with a different skin colour and an extremely limited knowledge of Spanish. The orphanage became our casa, and each morning we rose with the roosters to get to work sorting beans, chopping vegetables, sanding wooden crosses and painting lockers, with a view of erupting volcanoes and the hot sun on our backs.
Between work we would take every opportunity to play a game of soccer with the boys or have a broken conversation about Korean soap operas with the girls. We easily forgot that the children, who were now our good friends, were indeed orphans. You really couldn’t tell by their beaming faces, their energetic personalities, and their abundant thankfulness for our tiny efforts. We gave with all our hearts, and everything that we did, we did for them.
We spent one morning packing bags of food and supplies to distribute to 122 families of a small, impoverished village, and spent the afternoon playing with the children of the town. After giving them countless piggyback rides (and maybe teaching them how to dab), we struggled to say goodbye and left the children with our sunglasses and baseball caps, feeling as if we had done something so insignificant but being treated as if we had just given them the world.
“It’s one thing to read about or look at posts of poor children or poverty in other countries, and a completely other thing to live it,” one of the students reflects, overwhelmed by the joy and laughter of those who seem to have so little and have gone through so much. “These children have so much hope and love, it’s just one of those things you cannot really describe.” This is true; words, neither English nor Spanish, could describe the totality of the trip. The students received 100 times more than what they gave in time and effort, and broke down the walls of our sheltered families by reaching out to hundreds more children, now our very own brothers and sisters.
Outside NPH Orphanage, where we spent most of our trip.
Photo credit: Sophia Kopyna