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"...laughing every step of the way..."
My trip to El Salvador is the kind of thing I had wanted to do for so long. I really had no idea just how much these ten days would mean to me. Words cannot describe what I experienced, but I will try to reflect on just how wonderful the people of El Salvador are.
Our last five days were spent teaching English in a little village called Las Delicias, situated in the closest thing to a jungle I’ve ever seen. My first impression was the poverty, unlike anything I had ever seen before. People walk on dirt roads; their school consists of one room and eight desks for 37 children. Some of the children walk five miles to school. Their houses are no bigger than my kitchen, and they bathe in buckets.
In the afternoons, we would take the children to the “soccer field.” This was when we bonded. Getting to the field entailed going on tiny trails through the jungle to emerge onto a wide open field surrounded by mountains --and lots of cows who tended to sit right in the middle of our games. Everyday when we went on our adventure, I would have three or four children on each of my arms, and two or three more wrapped around my waist. We would run all the way to the field like that, laughing every step of the way. When we got there, the older kids would play soccer and I would play a separate game with the younger ones.
It was during these playtimes that I realized that these children don’t have much, but they don’t need much. They are happy with what they have each other. They don’t want any more than that, and I just found that amazing. It occurred to me that these children are instinctively wiser than we Americans who tend to strive for what is bigger and better! The children I met in El Salvador seem not to care about things, but about people, even people like me, who had known them for such a short time. I was in awe of their simple lives, yet their extravagant love. As I wrote in my journal one night, they might not have very nice houses, but their village is a good image for the word “home.”
The opportunity to share in the lives of these children was such a blessing. I fell in love with them and, in my broken Spanish, I promised to return. Everyone should have such an experience. Spend one week in El Salvador, and you will surely come home richer than you were before.
Colgan Learning
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