Trip sheds new light on Black Friday
On Black Friday, my wife and I and 18 Waynesburg University students were a few thousand miles from home, spending our last day of our week-long service trip to Patzun, Guatemala.
We were putting on a carnival for the 80-some children who live at the Nutritional Center and Home for Children, which is run by Franciscan nuns and supported by St. Ann’s Parish of Waynesburg, among other churches.
At the carnival, we had face painting and games, most of which, like the bean bag toss or egg races, would let the winner take a small toy or trinket from the collection we brought from the States. Since the children live in cramped conditions (about 12 bunk beds per room) and don’t have many possessions (basically a few clothes and a toy or two), any chance to get a new toy was a big, big deal.
But there was one line that was longer than any other during our carnival — and it wasn’t to try to win toys or lollipops. Rather, the thing that most excited the children of the Patzun Center was the fishing game in which they could win a new pair of socks.
Socks.
They wanted the socks.
Imagine yourself at age two or six or nine. Imagine lining up for the chance to win socks over candy or toys.
Imagine, if you were one of those 18 college students, to watch on Black Friday — on the most ridiculously commercialized day of the year in America — children do just that.
It was a tangible and poignant reminder that the way we live here — even in a far from luxurious place like Southwestern Pennsylvania — is not the way much of the world lives. It was a reminder that there was much to be thankful for — including the simple fact that we won the genetic lottery to just be born in a country with such enormous wealth and opportunity.
The service trip — which saw these college students give up their Thanksgiving with family and their only break of the semester — involved doing manual labor that the nuns could not in order to improve the center and spending quality time with the children who live and go to school there because their families are so poor they can’t afford to feed them.
The purpose of the trip, arguably, is to help improve the lives of these wonderful and precious children and help the nuns who have dedicated everything to caring for them. But each year I’ve gone (this was my third trip to the center and my wife’s ninth), what is amazing is just how much of an impact these children have on the college students.
These are children living in conditions that many of the Waynesburg students have never seen — kids without the most basic need of parental love and the warmth of a hug when they skin their knees or get sick. Yet these children are happier and more content with a fresh pair of socks and the chance to be held by a complete stranger from America than any kid in their condition has the right to be.
And, let me be clear, these kids have it bad.
Little Allison, 6, told my wife and me, in an absolutely matter-of-fact manner, how her father went out one night to the store and got shot. She told us this the same way she would’ve told us it had rained yesterday.
While we were horrified for her, the sad reality is that the fact that she now lived at the center and not with her mother because her mother could only afford to care for her two younger sisters was just not that out of the ordinary for the kids of the center.
And that’s what is so tragic: things we would consider unthinkable for children here are the norm there. Though the stories and circumstances are different, the common thread is that each of the kids lives without families. They will grow up — they have grown up — with no one to hug them when they’re hurt or comfort them when they’re sad. There’s no one for them to run to and say, “Watch this! Watch this!” Many are not technically orphans (many will return to their families when they’re old enough to work and earn their own way), but for all intents and purposes they are growing up orphans. The six nuns and handful of workers at the center do their best, but you can’t give every child the love and attention they need when there are about 10 kids for every adult.
So, for one short week, the 20 of us from los Estados Unidos did everything we could to give each and every kid some attention and some love while we were there.
But the funny thing is, based on the tears that were pouring down the faces of the Waynesburg students as we said our final goodbyes on Saturday morning, those kids did more for us than I imagine we did for them.
If you’d like to know more about the Nutritional Center in Patzun, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.