I really do love missionary work. I find it inspiring, incredible, and meaningful. They have been times of my life where the experience is just glued to your memory for years, even decades, to come. I took my first trip to Guatemala just a couple years ago, and it's shaped so much of my love for helping others, for service, and for really just believing in the human ability to make a positive, lasting difference in the world. We were a team of just about 14 or 15 people but we divided ourselves up, where one group stayed by the schools and did lessons for the children, and my group went to do labor work to assist a Guatemalan pastor named Jose, who wanted to build a church in that area. When we arrived, he was working on the first floor, with a certain doorway leading to a room he needed to be emptied. When we entered in, the entire room was filled with dirt. The whole ground of the room just gradually inclined up the walls, and Jose needed it to be ground level.
All we had was basically 4 shovels, 2 hoes, 2 wheelbarrows, and 7 guys to work on it including the pastor and our mission leader. But despite the work that needed to be done, we still leveled the entire ground in just two days, and made concrete atop the the ceiling that we lowered using this pulley-system. The sun heated our backs up like heating up a stove, but we got done what we needed to, leveling out the leftover dirt. We completed what we had to cause we had a thoughtful, dedicated, faithful, and overall committed team to get it done, and we could see Pastor Jose's face light up when he saw how quickly we finished up the job. It's the reactions like those that really demonstrate the strength in numbers and having a team that's determined to take action.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from that trip, for me, was about midway through the week we spent there, our team rode in vans, as we usually did, across these long dirt roads that bypassed the hills of Guatemala with an increasing number of fields and farmland. You could tell since the people, cows, pigs, dogs, and all other sorts of animals just walked across the roads freely as they chose to, and hardly anything to behold. The area had been mostly empty land and people in tattered clothing. There was hardly much technology or advances that often are expressed greatly in Japan, Germany, and the United States included.
Our driver was Jodi, one of the missionaries we stayed with when we were there for the week, and she told stories about Guatemalan life as she drove, giving us more insight on what their lives were really like. Us, being young outsiders exposed to social media and the explosion of technology that has taken over the century, don't know much about having to work laboriously everyday sometimes without even knowing what your daily pay could be. It was a lifestyle we never really got a chance to comprehend and put ourselves in their shoes.
She was very upfront; describing it as a way of culture for Guatemalans to love their work and truly appreciate every little thing, a quality often overlooked in nations that are already developed with advanced technology. They were always willing to lend a hand to their neighbors and help people when needed, even lending a hand to our team despite us being outsiders who came them specifically to help them. They welcome us and showed us love, cause that's just who they were fundamentally and culturally, which opened my eyes a lot. I found it to be really telling about their culture, and I really do think Jodi couldn't have described it better.
But moreover than just her description of the culture, she also told us something that really resonated with me ever since I heard it. She told us that 4/5s of the world lived the way these Guatemalans lived, as she pointed over to the impoverished, empty lands that passed us by from the window view. It doesn't take a mathematician to figure out that what she told us meant only 1/5 of the world lived the way the U.S. lived, with technology and advancement that improved the quality of life on all fronts. It opened my eyes so much, and the statistic she said spoke out to me over anything else as I was face-to-face with a newer, different kind of culture before my very eyes. I've shared this with friends, people online, and even in front of large crowds before, and it opened their eyes as much as it did mine.
I wasn't faced with poverty every day, but those missionaries were and so the struggle could be made so much more significant and imperative for there that the message of service toward those in needs just had to resonate with our young team of hopefully future missionaries with men and women of service. Seeing poverty like that for myself and understanding, now after what Jodi told us, that most of the world lived like that made me realized the world really isn't rich. Citizens across the world are impoverished, and the wealth of the world is condensed only to the minority, to the developed countries of the world. I was vaguely aware of any of this growing up, but hearing of this only gave me a greater sense of empathy, and my entire trip to Guatemala really brought out the true purpose of serving.
Service isn't blindly giving to others.
Service isn't just doing good acts just to tell people about it later.
Service isn't just random kindness.
Service is selflessly humbling yourself to understand the difficulties and battles of someone else facing them, and resolving to help them through it. Mission trips are true eye-openers that leave sentiments etched into your heart for years to come that now I truly understand, from my first trip to Guatemala especially.
