Quote:
Originally Posted by futurekaur  Beautiful CarolineJi;
that is beautiful seva. Taking youth with you is double wonderful seva. |
The funny thing is that I always receive so much more than I give. The first time I went to Haiti I had so many ideas about all the wonderful things I was going to do for people etc... you know, visions of Mother Theresa and all that.
I was supposed to be there for two months -- LOL -- I didn't set foot on American soil for a couple of years. I went to visit an orphanage for kids with disabilities, one of the babies needed a diaper change and the next thing I knew my return ticket had expired. I lived there with a little cot in the corner of that orphanage for two years and I learned so much from those kids.. I can never explain it. They taught me Creole, they taught me Afro-Caribbean dance, they taught me the drum rythms to the hymns and most of all, they taught me about service. After a while I realized that they were doing me much more of a service than I ever could do for them.
In that orphanage, we didn't have "employees" to help take care of the kids. There were 24 of them and 12 had severe to profound disabilities. The director of the orphanage was almost never there because of the demands of constantly trying to get enough food, medicine and supplies to take care of everybody. The rest was up to me and the kids. So everybody just helped each other. The kids that could walk pushed the kids who couldn't, the kids who couldn't walk but could feed themselves fed the kids who couldn't feed themselves, the kids that were strong and able bodied mopped the floors and washed dishes and bathed the kids that were smaller or disabled. One of the kids who was older and stronger had a seizure disorder but he got up every morning before daylight and went to the nursery where the kids with the worst disabilities slept. There were around 12 to 13 of them most of the time. He would warm water up on the fire and start changing nasty diapers. He cleaned up all those kids and nasty stinking diapers and bathed them all and put clean clothes on them and would take them all out to the sun room one by one. He sang the whole time. He sang while he was mopping, while he was working and washing. He didn't even know who his parents were because he was abandoned at such a young age. He was the happiest person I've ever known.
There was also a young man who had autism... pretty severe. He was non-verbal and had a lot of behavioral issues. Once when I was really down and depressed he was sort of hovering over me and pacing around me, then he grabbed my hand and started dragging me up to the top of the orphanage. This place was in the mountains of Haiti (Haiti is very mountainous and beautiful). He dragged me over to the edge of the roof and stopped there for a minute. He looked out across the beautiful horizon and slowly reached his hand out towards the horizon and made a slow, graceful sweep with open palm as though he were displaying the scene to me. Then he just sighed and dropped my hand and walked away.
God will come to you in the most unexpected ways sometimes. And I think its very much like that -- when you think you are doing something for him that's when he makes you understand that really it is the other way around. Those kids made me realize that when you serve others you really are serving God and in the long run you end up getting more than you give.
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