Jamaica, mon

Jamaica [ A country In need ]

Kissing

Jamaica [ A country In need ]

Kissing

Jamaica is an island south of Florida, and Cuba, just outside of the Gulf of Mexico. In the lowlands of the island it can be 90 degrees (F) with 90% humidity. But up in the mountains on the same day it can be 70 degrees and breezy. Jamaica's topography is similar to a large crater, where the center is flat in comparison to the large mountains and rolling hills on the perimeter. Almost every available inch of Jamaica is covered in the greenest plants and the densest foliage. It is an unstoppable force of the island and something I have never experienced before. The island is full of such beauty.

The Beauty

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The Poverty

On the flip side Jamaica is one of the poorest countries in the world. It also maintains the highest murder rate per capita on earth.

It is a country ravished yearly by hurricanes and floods of rain. Almost daily the sky opens for hours and dumps water onto the lands drenching anything not tightly sealed. Which is nearly impossible to avoid when your house is made out of sticks and sheet metal. Adding salt to the wound, the country also has a rampant AID's, HIV, and STD epidemic thats leaves hundreds of children orphaned per year and has created an unstable social structure for the country.

The Flight, Expectations, and Background

Earlier this year a group of eleven from my fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, decided to volunteer a week of our time in a 3rd World country through a service trip. For many of us this was our first time overseas and/or our first service trip.

The flight over was quick, but filled with air turbulence and a little bit

&

of superstition for crossing over the Bermuda Triangle. For only being five hours off the coast of America, and never seeing a 3rd world country before, I had no idea what expect. Looking back I'm glad I did not because the noticeable contrast between countries was immense and it set the tone for the rest of the trip.

Samuel

Kissing

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Our Goal For this service trip we had three things that we were going to do. The first, and most important in my eyes, was volunteering our afternoons at St. Bosco's orphanage. It is an orphanage for boys from the ages of 6-18, and every afternoon we would go there and talk to them about going to school, staying in school, and working hard so that one day they can get good jobs and be able to have a healthy family. We also played games with them and they destroyed us in soccer. The

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Izanna Fletcher

second thing that we did on the trip was every morning we went to a second orphanage and repainted an entire dormitory that was in desperate need of retouching. We also took it upon ourselves to clear the dorm of dozens of hornets nests. I'd be lying if I said we all came away unscathed. The final thing we did was we spent our last day at a retirement home talking with them and trying to make them happy since we were told they never get visitors.

Samuel

Kissing

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Here

at the orphanage the game of marbles

is almost as big of a sport as soccer.

The

boys would play for hours battling to see

box drawn in the dirt.

They

the most marbles from their opponents.

things that teenagers in

took the game very seriously. If you were the game and lose all of your marbles.

Marbles

was the first thing that

Fletcher

taught me, but very quickly he taught me much more than just games.

He

showed me

amazing lesson that I learned from was his ability to forgive others for their faults. An example of this is when he told me that at one point he had won over 800 marbles from the other hundred boys at the orphanage, an amazing feat, but they were stolen by another boy. Without even thinking about it I expected Fletcher to start complaining about it and telling me how upset he was, which is understandable because they have so little to call their own. Their marbles are everything to them, but without skipping a beat he told me he did not care that his marbles were stolen because in his

didn't need fancy

phones or all the relatively insignificant

They

Another Fletcher

fun with just little balls of glass and a

who could win the most games and collect

caught cheating you would be kicked out of

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that they could be happy and have hours of

America

need to

be "happy", and sadly it was something that

I

had not seen in a long time. It made me

remember the times when

I

was much younger

and would spend hours in my imagination.

Now

everything happens so fast, and is less magical.

Samuel

Kissing

heart he knew that he was better than the other boys and that they needed to steal to have as many marbles as he did. The part that amazed me was that he is also only 11 years old! The comparison that I drew was like a teenager having their phone stolen from them that they had worked for months in order to save up for, and then saying "It's OK, I know that I am better off than the thief because I could afford it, and they obviously could not, so I forgive him." It blew me away to see that. I had never witnessed that before. It's the sort of thing you only hear about.

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It

seems that at every turn Fletcher managed to surprise me. He spoke two languages fluently, English and his native language Patois, a mix of English, French, And Western African influences. He was also only in the first grade, but could write cursive perfectly and was quite adapt at math. He was so good in fact in his school studies and ability to speak English that I was told he would take time out his day to teach his fellow students how to do the things that he was so good at. Just another thing I never expected a first grader to do. When he asked for a piece of paper to draw on, again I did not expect much, but at this point I probably should have learned to expect to be

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surprised by him. He drew the picture above from memory in less than ten minutes, and no outside help whatsoever. He told me he had never seen fruit grouped like this, but enjoyed how it looked.

The reason that I find all of this so special is that if Fletcher had been given similar opportunities like I have been given through life, like a family, a safe place to live, and a great education, I know that he could have accomplished incredible things.

He had a special spark that I had never seen before. Now that's not to say that he won't still accomplish great things but that it will just be exponentially more difficult for him to do so than myself.

My Take Away Samuel

Kissing

08

This service trip to Jamaica has been a life changing event for me. I learned many things from the children that we helped at the orphanages, but the most important, for myself, is that you don’t need money or fancy things to be happy. These children who lived in wood shacks were by far some of the happiest children I have ever met, and they had nothing but their friends and a pair of clothes to their name. Surrounded by a country with the highest murder rate per capita they still made the best of their situation, and I think that is something everyone could take note of and learn from. I definitely did.

Even though they are happy and doing the best they can with what they have, it doesn’t mean that they are OK, and they don’t need our help. Far from it actually. It goes back to Fletcher and how talented he is, but at the same time he could be so much more talented if he had a supportive family and good schools. If he wasn’t forced to go to work at the age off 11 to afford clothes he could focus on just being a kid and going to school.

This is where our service trip comes in though. We were told by our service leader multiple times, through the nuns who work at the orphanage, that just us being there for a week changes these kids lives. I wasn’t sure if I believed that in the beginning, but by the end of the week there was no doubt in my mind that we had done something to help these kids.

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I was able to convince Fletcher that going to school and staying in school was extremely important. I told him that when it was all said and done you want to be able to look back on your life and be able to say that you have not a single regret. He replied that he wanted to get out of Jamaica, and I asked how he planned on doing that and he immediately said “by working hard and staying in school”. It made me proud and happy to hear that.

For anyone who has thought about doing a service trip and is on the edge about it, I have only done one so far but I am already looking forward to the next time I get the opportunity to do one. It was expensive, but it was worth every dollar, and I would highly recommend it. I also understand the feeling that there are so many people in need around the world that it feels like you won’t be helping enough people to make the trip worth your time and money. That is logical thinking and it is true, there are too many people in need around the world and most won’t ever get help. It is an unfortunate truth, but on the flip side if we had not gone on our service trip at all then the 20 children’s lives that we touched would have gone untouched, and maybe Fletcher would never have found the confidence or courage to stay in school against all odds and succeed and finally achieve his dream of leaving Jamaica. Who knows what would have happened, but looking back on that week I know that I did the right thing and I don’t have a single regret.

Samuel

Kissing

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