A Lovely Mission Trip

The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote in high school about what it means to be an American. I promise it has to do with what I'm blogging about :)

My granddad does missionary work in Haiti and other countries. I have been reared on my granddad’s stories of his experiences in these places. However, there is one story I have heard a million times over, and it has impacted my life tremendously. When my granddad was in Haiti many years ago, a young Haitian mother came and introduced my granddad to her child. He was a young boy, very thin and sickly, as many of the children are in Haiti. The boy stayed by my granddad all day while he did his work. At the end of the day, the boy’s mother did not come back for him.  When my granddad took the boy back to his home, his mother begged my granddad to take her son home with him, to America. She knew if her son continued living under the conditions of poverty in Haiti, he was likely to contract a disease, such as AIDS or malaria. He was likely to become malnourished or hurt in the violence that goes on daily in his hometown of Port-au-Prince. She knew he might not get a proper education or have opportunities like he would in America. Stories like these, told to me by my granddad, make me realize I am so blessed to live in a country like America.

Before I get very far, let me say that I have not been to Haiti. My grandfather has been doing mission work there since before I was born and he will not let me go with him because of how dangerous it is. He doesn't go with a huge group or anything like that, He goes on his own or with one other person and roughs it for a week or two. He is so intense... and I will go with him someday. :)

What I do want to say is that I have my own experience on the mission field. One of the greatest experiences of my life thus far has to be the mission trip that I, along with about 20 other young people from two churches, took in the summer of 2008.

We went to San Pedro, Coahuila, Mexico to work for a week with the Stephen and Marcela Tolman. I'm afraid I could never have enough words to describe this experience and how it impacted my life. Until that time I had viewed the "poor" parts of the world as an outsider looking in. I listened to the stories of missionaries at conferences and I watched when the commercials came on t.v. asking people to support a child. I was reared on the stories my grandfather had shared with me of his trips to Port-au-prince, but I knew nothing of what it meant to actually immerse myself into another culture and to live as they do. Also, I come from a huge farming area where Mexicans, or Hispanics in general, are viewed as... not good. I have never ever been prejudiced, but I am definitely a product of the place where I was raised. So the trip opened my eyes to the culture of the Mexican people and I came back with a whole new outlook on the life of the Mexican people and a new heart for Missions.

Crossing the border

Children playing the streets of Cardboard Land