Spending time with the children of our ministry days brings joy to my heart. Seeing their hurt brings sadness to my heart.
There have been some days that we have had to walk down the street to the park, because the school gates were locked. The first day we were at the park I noticed that there was lots of broken glass in the grass and playing area of the playground. Many of our children go bare foot. Seeing them run around without shoes makes my heart jump in pain every time at the thought of them getting hurt on a broken piece of glass or a sharp piece of plastic.
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Keshia hold glass she found on the ground in only one area
To the children it’s a normal thing to see broken glass and trash everywhere they walk. To tell you the truth, seeing trash in the streets, the parks, and all over the place has been normal scenery for me the past six months I have been on the race.
Last week a little girl named Naomi sliced her little four year old heel right open on a piece of broken glass. As she was crying in pain Lauren E. (on Kaitlyn’s team) took care of it for her. After Naomi got fixed up she was just like new and the episode of her foot was out of her mind so she could go back to playing. It made me realize that this happens a lot to them as they play. I started to walk around and look at the ground. As I did so, to my amazement, I couldn’t believe how much broken glass was around the playground. Glass was put there probably by teenagers or young adults who thought they were cool to smash bottles on the ground, (I was young once and would think this was a cool thing to do, not realizing who would get hurt from it).
Realizing we had to do something about this problem before more children would get hurt, we decided on January 3, 2012 at the end of our day with the kids we would put aside time to go to the park and pick up the trash and broken glass. We made it into a competition for the children and split them up into three different groups. We told them the team that got the most trash/glass or the most weight would get a silly band bracelet. Anytime you offer a prize at the end of anything, it makes any kid want to help.
Only 2 of the five bags of trash and glass. The bag on the right is filled with glass.
At the end we had gotten so much broken glass and trash. A white trash bag alone was filled with glass, a black trash bag filled with computer parts, plastic of all shapes and sizes, and other items that had just been discarded on the playground. Even though there was still glass on the ground there was not nearly as much as there was. To get all of the glass that was in the ground would take hours to pick through, and we just didn’t have the time or the bags to get all of it. Yet we got a pretty hefty amount out.
Happy with the amount they got
I was taking a picture of the whole group at the end of the day. A child screamed out in pain. He had cut his foot on a tiny piece of glass, and was screaming in pain. We fixed him up, and he went back to playing. Yet it still bothered me that he still got hurt even with all we had picked up. Then I thought and looked at the all the bags we collected with trash and glass.
The grew that helped make the park a little safer
We can’t always be with them to protect them from harm, but we made their favorite place to play a little safer to play and to be kids.
