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Moment of Happiness

Author


John K.

17th of July, 2016

Category


Nicaragua '16

Well, this is it. We’ve departed with the kids. There are no more work days. And we leave Ometepe for good within the next 12 hours. For our departure, we had heard about an “inauguration” being held in our honor for our contributions to the community. I had figured it was simply a few “thank you for your work here” type sentences then they would send us off. But to my surprise, they had quite an elaborate set up. A DJ was playing what I assumed was popular Nicaraguan jams over five waist high speakers. The children performed numerous dances for us and their parents. We even had to perform a last minute dance which none of us were prepared for but it ended up being very fun. In the middle of the inauguration, I took myself out of the dancing, singing, and playing and scanned the crowd. I had realized that this was a true moment of happiness for me. I can only recollect very few moments of these in my lifetime, but this was definitely one of them. The group was smiling and clapping to the beat of the music, the kids were enjoying every second they had with us, and the parents were thankful of what we had done in their community in such a short period of time. Once we had departed from that and into the eating area, we all knew our time with the kids was ending. Some members in the group broke to tears, but I was all smiles. Instead of mourning over the fact that we will very likely never see these kids again, I celebrated the time I had already spent with them. In my mind there was no reason to be in tears. We did what we had set out for. We impacted the community and made significant progress on the new classroom. One of my fears walking into the trip was that we wouldn’t be able to finish the classroom. Of course we didn’t finish building an entire classroom in two weeks, but to see how our progress had impacted the community in such a way had turned my fear into an all time high.

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