At the beginning of this trip i set out the goal to develop the following: gratitude for the experience, humility, and understanding of Bocas del Torro and the people that live here.
Gratitude has come to me the most naturally. I am grateful for this experience, for being able to see such a beautiful part of this world and travel so freely. Grateful for the children here for showing me kindness despite my inability to even pronounce their names. Grateful to these communities for allowing me to visit and learn from them. And grateful for all of the things I tend to take for granted like travel, education, and mini-split air conditioning units.
My second goal to develop humility was impossible not to succeed in after watching a child scale a tree and grab 5 apples and then discovering I was unable to even get up to the first branch of the tree(I also learned I am entirely unable to pronounce the word tree in Spanish.) Coming into this trip I expected this goal to be the hardest for me as I planned to come in as a helper to the community. It turned out I had a lot more to learn than I did to teach. While I taught kids how to read in English and pronounce the colors of the rainbow, they showed me how to climb up tree trunks and collect apples from the trees. I may have taught them how to make rainbow loom bracelets but they showed me how to get back up after falling extremely hard into mud and how to treat strangers with kindness and love.
My final goal was understanding. I have realized since setting this that this was not a reasonable goal to set for myself. I have learned a lot about Bocas Del Torro- its islands, its people, its culture – but I could never truly understand the lives of the people here. As a tourist I can learn and admire the places I see but cannot assume that I understand the them. I could never understand the struggle of growing up in a community without social services, nor the challenge of fighting for an education, nor the beauty of growing up in an incredible tropical island.
I am extremely grateful for this trip, humbled by the people I met, and happy to have learned so much in my time here.
