I love What I do

I know that I love what I do here but today I had an especially grateful moment. Walking home from our first meeting of ‘Domingos Divertidos’ (Fun Sundays) hand in hand with a little six year old boy named Noe, I looked around me and everything just felt right. In front of me, Tyler walked on the dusty road holding hands with Marvin and beside me, Noe and Cristian talked about how they were going to ask their Papi to make sure they were always free and ready for Sundays. And ahead, the sun was beginning to set and the clouds perfectly floated above Talanga. A perfect feeling of contentness and blessing.

Today was the culmination of over a month and half of planning for the start of our program Domingos Divertidos. When we first arrived, I wrote a blog about visitors—and I said that my favorite visitors were the afternoon visitors, our little visitors. These visitors were just a handful of the street kids that live in Talanga. They would come to our house run wild with Oso, our dog, and play ball. Like hurricanes, they whipped through our house touching and asking for everything. They were wild, chaotic, and completely in their own world.

Well, fast forward to four months later, in November, Tyler and I started planning a program for these children that have so little in their lives. Most of them don’t go to school and many spend most of their time on the streets running around bare foot. They either don’t live with their parents or their parents are busy working and so leave them with nothing to do all day. With these children in mind, we set forth to plan a program that would meet once a week to teach in an interactive and fun manner. This group would be something special—just for them—and in each meeting, we would give them a snack or some incentive to come back. Through the month of November and December and early January, we met with Prof. Daniel to write a mission, vision, goals statement, a list of goals, find a location and write a curriculum for six months.

A week before our first meeting was planned, Tyler and I went out on a search to find these kids. Tuesday morning, we found one and were later visited four or five times by different combinations of the kids we had met earlier in the year. As we explained the idea to them, they were excited but didn’t know what day it was and so had no idea how many days there were until Sunday. And so here we encountered our first problem. This is when we made the rule only one visit a day. Wednesday morning we were awoken at the crack of dawn by another visit and then we made the rule that they are only allowed to visit to switch books in the afternoon. As the days passed by, we encountered quite a few visits and we also had some combination of these mischievous ones climb our wall when we were not there to play with Oso and leave our front gate wide open. When Sunday came around, we weren’t sure if any of them would realize that it was the day for Domingos Divertidos or if they would come to our house.

And so Sunday came and at 1:30 exactly, we had three knocks on our door and the grinning faces of three of our little friends. Edwin, one of the boys, told me yesterday that he was going to change his clothes and wear shoes especially for our program. And he wasn’t the only one. Marvin and Cristian both came over cleaned and with shoes. Marvin was even wearing part of his school uniform. They went to search for Noe, Marvin and Cristian’s little brother, and then returned to the house. Because of the heat, they all decided to wash their faces with buckets of water from our pilla and were thus fresh faced and sparkling clean for our walk to the library where the program would start. As we walked, Edwin took my hand and then Noe the other. Then Marvin held Tyler’s hand and Cristian took Edwin’s hand and told Noe to hold Tyler’s so that we would be like a chain. And so there we walked all six of us hand in hand to the library.

When we arrived, our plan was to have them write their names on the board so that we could write the right spelling on their name tags. I called Cristian, the oldest, to the board to write his name and the others followed up in suit. I asked Cristian to write his name and he started and then Noe asked me what letter his name started with. It soon became clear that none of them knew how to spell their names. Cristian is 11, Edwin is 10, Marvin is 7 and Noe is 6. They do not know how to spell their names. After a quick lesson on how to spell their names, we moved on to rules and they helped us write some rules. With that done, we made name tags and they couldn’t have been more excited about markers and paper. After completing those, we watched a movie, ate a snack, prayed, and then played with stickers. A short game of soccer followed.

And then we headed home. After three hours of meeting, our first meeting was over and these wild crazy hurricanes that had swept through our house in the first months we were here had now become these relatively calm friends with whom we had shared laughter and watched a movie. There are moments from my time with them that just jump to mind and make me so grateful for what I’m doing. Noe, the youngest, was enthralled in the movie. We watched The Tigger Movie—and his eyes rarely left the screen and chuckles of laughter erupted from him every once in a while. And when we told them that Tyler and I like thank yous and pleases, the next four or five sentences from each of their mouths was covered in thank yous and pleases.

I don’t feel like anything I’ve written does justice to the feeling of contentness and joy that I received from today. Simply to have the respect and calmness of these four boys to listen, to help each other out, and to laugh and learn with us is incredible. Yes, they are mischievous and naughty and wild, but the little pieces of paper that we gave them to tell them about Domingos Divertidos came back to us today a little dirty but tightly folded and safely held in their pockets. One of the reasons why we created this program was to give these kids something of their own, something special that shared with them the love that they deserve in their lives—and today I felt like, maybe, in a small way I had achieved that.

I love what I do.