Participants Blog

Grateful to Have Witnessed It

With a little bit over one week to go on my three month stint I´ve a lot to think about. Working day in and day out with the kids has taught me more about myself then I ever thought I would learn here. It is a constant struggle, but a happy struggle.

The kids and my work and my family here give me wake up call after wake up call. This past Thursday I was asked by FUNARTE to go to managua and work with the down and out at two different mercados (markets) giving art classes to the kids. We left at 5am in the morning and i did not see my bed that evening until 10pm. What a long day. But the theme of the day was ¨Derecho,¨ meaning human rights, what is necessary to make you happy. As you can imagine the answers we received were not iPods or Abercombie and Fitch. They were instead family above all, bicycles to take younger siblings to school and get back home with (most of the kids live hours and hours away,) food, jobs for money, playing football etc. It is a really wonderful thing to witness, these kids who are absolutely filthy dirty but still smiling and bursting with desire to learn.

I guess if you are feeling hopeless, lonely or sorry for yourself in this moment you can just imagine what I am talking about. A tiny cramped class room full of lice ridden children of all description dressed in rags and eager to laugh smile and hold your hand. It is certainly something to get me up and ready to face another day each morning, even when my body is giving me every signal not to (Including something I have recently discovered I received from the kids—head lice! oh yay me! Thousands of eggs and head lice for Siobhan that Marissa had to sift through and pick out for hours on end this morning, oh joy! What a friendship) This email is just my recent realizations, its not to make you feel belittled in any way as I have also discovered that no matter where you are in the world or of what class you belong to, it is inevitable to suffer. This goes without saying. But it is these kids, these tired little bodies that suffer so much but still are able to always muster up a smile and a brave face. They get up and beat the odds every day to inspire everyone else to get up one more time too. Its one of the worlds many miracles I think, and I am so grateful to have witnessed it.

-Siobhan Sweeny, Nicaragua