“We are going to the billiards’ room,” Ezo, the counselor of my group, says with a thick Albanian accent. Two children excitedly grab each of my hands, chattering away in Albanian and dramatically waving their free hands all around. As the door swings open and we enter inside, I look around. The game room is a stifling hot concrete room that has flies swarming around, buzzing in your ear, and landing all over your body. The two tiny billiards table have felt that is completely torn up and the pool balls are so faded that they all look like cue balls with the exception of freshly written Sharpie numbers. All but one of the table tennis paddles are falling apart, and the only ping pong ball is actually a cracked wiffle ball. There are foosball tables, but some of the players don’t move and one row will pull out of the side of the table.
But the decrepit state of the room is overshadowed by the love and life overflowing from it.
Children’s laughter reverberates off the concrete wall and fills every corner of the room. You see children congratulating those who win and offering their friends a chance to play. It goes unnoticed by the children how run down the game room is. To them, this is an amazing opportunity to play games they usually have no access to.
Light Force Ministries runs this camp in Albania to give children from extremely poor families the opportunity to attend summer camp for free. But despite coming from large families with very little income, these children do not have a poverty mentality.
Happiness isn’t about how many items you have. It’s about the thanks you give for the things you have. Accumulating stuff isn’t the same as accumulating joy. In fact, the pattern tends to be that the more things you do accumulate, the more your focus switches from happiness to materialism.
On the first day of camp, I was shadowing a group. The camp wasn’t expecting us to be there for snack time, so they did not have enough for the Racers to eat too. The group of children, who I had just started getting to know an hour earlier, each gave me a piece of their chocolate croissant, leaving me with about four croissant’s worth of food. If these children were in poverty mentality, they would have not been so willing to share. Even if they weren’t actually hungry, they would save the croissant for later, always fearing they would not have enough.
The children, who have far less than any people I have ever met, don’t rely on what they have because they know love and friendship are more important. During arts and crafts, the children where drawing a person and listing the qualities they wanted to see in the person. Rissa, a beautiful Albanian girl, wrote on her paper that she wanted the woman to have a smile because, “A smile is one of the only ways you can show love to everybody that doesn’t cost anything to give.”
I encourage you to examine your own life and see in which areas you are constantly worried that you will not have enough. Is it money? Love and relationships? Or even time? Once you find this, remind yourself that everything is in God’s hands. He will always provide exactly what you need. Taking heart in this knowledge frees you to cast your worries upon the Lord and focus on the wealth He’s put in your life.
