For the majority of our time here in Padre las Casas we have been teaching & feeding the kids in the Compassion International program. Compassion is supported by American families/individuals and children are “adopted” through their donations. This assures them a school program, clothes and one meal a day. It’s a fantastic program and it’s so obvious how greatly it affects the lives of these children – so to all of those who sponsor a child I’d like to personally say thank you.
When we get out of school each day around 5pm, we head to the park with our laptops/phones because that’s the only place where there is even the slightest chance of getting wifi and also because there is a gazebo there under the palm trees that gives us some relief from the heat.
There are children from all around the area who know our schedule and meet us at the park each day. They are perfectly content to sit with us quietly and watch us blog (as long as we look up every few minutes to give them a smile).
These kids are a little different from the ones I teach every day at Compassion. They are beautiful. They are happy. They are poor.
Under this gazebo is where I first met Javier.
Javier is ten years old. He doesn’t attend school but instead spends his days selling empanadas on the street.
It’s easy to overlook his need because of the amazing, contagious, life giving smile that seems to never leave his face.
And for the first days we were here, that’s exactly what I did. We played together, explored the streets of Padre las Casas and attempted to get to know each other via broken Spanglish. But today God opened my eyes to what I had been so blind to this week.
Today was the team’s “day off”, so when we finally decided to head out of the apartment around 2pm, we found sweet Javier asleep on our doorstep. He was up in a flash with his easy smile, ready to walk us to the park. It was from that moment on that it was as if God was hitting me over the head with a sledge hammer to open my eyes to what I hadn’t been seeing.
Javier had on the same clothes that he had on yesterday..and the day before. His shoes are so worn through and tattered that you can see his toes peeking out of the top.
I began to see the way he looked longingly at the food and even the water that we passed as we walked the streets. I walked to Javier’s home for the first time, which consists of random boards nailed together with old clothes stuffed into the cracks.
My emotions began to build inside to the point that I felt like I may explode. As we walked home at the end of the day I knew it wouldn’t take much to send me over the edge into weeping openly in the street, so when I passed a bunch of kids using an extension chord from the dumpster to play jump rope, it was all I could handle.
The moment we got inside..let’s just say I finally let it out.
“Eat your dinner, there are starving children in the world!” and sad commercials with sappy music have become punch lines to bad jokes in the States – but being here and looking into the beautiful faces that need so much will change your perspective in an instant.
I know that I’m going to see more devastating need this year than that of the Dominican Republic, and I’m already asking God to give me the strength to handle the injustice with grace and maturity. But today, I caught a glimpse of the heartbreak that God feels when He sees a hungry child, and it will stay with me forever.
