Reflection

Even if, like me, your Spanish has not advanced far beyond “Buenos dias,” when a young child runs at you with arms upraised, it is pretty obvious what you are supposed to do. So I picked up, spun around, chased, and played with kids until I was exhausted. Playing with the children of the Working Boy’s Center was a microcosm of my entire trip to Ecuador. It was tiring and sometimes a bit frustrating, but ultimately it was fun and deeply rewarding. Much of the trip focused on learning: learning about the Center, learning about the people, learning about the country. All this learning necessitated traveling all over the city and the surrounding area, frequently on crowded public buses. I found that sitting on the rocking buses, wedged tightly next to several other people in the hot air, was just as exhausting as any of the actual labor we did. Yet the our guides from the center rode these buses for up to four hours a day just to get to and from their homes.
We saw poverty while in Ecuador: people living in cramped houses, children gleaning scraps of meat off of chicken bones that I would have considered already picked clean, kids wearing shoes held together by tape. Seeing this, I naturally wanted to do something to help. Yet our main task in Ecuador was to see rather than to do. So while we spent a couple days painting and building, we spent far more time seeing the operations of the center, meeting Ecuadoreans, and experiencing all aspects of the country. It was difficult at times to tour cathedrals and take day trips to go zip-lining while I knew how desperate the situation was for so many people just a short bus ride away. But all our people watching, tourist tripping, and bus riding was absolutely necessary. It is fairly easy for me as a young man to share sweat with the people of Ecuador. Doing so might assuage my immediate pangs of guilt and my labor might even be useful to the people I pity. However, the people at the Center, in showing us all of Ecuador, both the brilliant and the dirty, were trying to get me to take the next step and share my heart with those I was visiting. They were trying to show me the path from hating poverty to loving the poor. What was built in my heart in one week was so much larger than anything I could have built in Ecuador in a year. I feel new meaning in the term “cura personalis.” Helping others is less a single-minded march to achieve milestones than it is opening up my arms and letting them fill with flying children.

-Sam Kernan