When I got off the plane, I remember waiting for my luggage staring
out the airport window. There were so many people laying on the
side of the street begging, and my heart literally broke. I had seen
homeless people before, when I would go into the city, but never to
the extent of these people; some of them weren’t even wearing
clothes. The sight of those people was what I was facing the entire
ride to the shelter we were staying at for the week; we would drive
past and they would all back away, as if in shock of the sight of a car.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility that I could’ve been born
into that kind of life, and everything would have been so different.
The majority of the days we went to a series of different
orphanages and just did simple things like play with the children, and
help fix up their playgrounds and living spaces. That was a really
good experience, as I got to get insight into how orphanages worked;
I had never actually been inside one before. I got to interact with the
kids who don’t ever get to be interacted with, clean up the rooms that
were never clean in the first place, and fix up the playground that
wasn’t ever able to be played on because it wasn’t built properly.
The last day of the trip, I remember waking up at five in the
morning, being scared out of my mind; we were going to the Rio 3,
the place everyone had been talking about the entire week. The
teachers would always say right from day one that it was the most
emotional day, and that not everyone was able to stay the whole day
because it was just that overwhelming; but I made an agreement with
myself to stay the whole day and work my hardest, no matter how hard it was,
because those people deserve help.
When I got off the bus, my mind shifted a bit; I wasn’t sure I could
even spend half the day here. I looked around, and immediately started to cry;
there were hundreds shacks built out of sticks and mud, hundreds of parents
bathing their kids in the river that looked so dirty, and there was an infinite
amount of rubbish covering the ground. I tried not to cry, because the
teachers were telling us on the ride that it offends the people who live there,
but the tears just kept falling.
The tears eventually turned from tears of sadness to tears of joy as
the day went on. We got to set up a shop where donated clothes and other
items were sold, cook lunch for everyone, and put on a puppet show for the
little kids.
I’ll never forget the impact my mission trip had on not only the
Monterrey community, but also myself.
Lauren Jankowski
Pg 9