In the afternoon of our third day in Guatemala, we went on an outing, that I was the most taken back by this whole trip.
We pulled up in our luxury school bus in front of a public school, in a neighborhood a lot worse than the one we are staying in. One the dirt road we ambled single file. As our counselors explained what we had brought to share with the school with the money we had raised, I was the first to notice kids lined up on the balcony above. My fellow classmates and I stuck out in this atmosphere like a sore thumb, and I can’t imagine how alien we looked in fancy Nikes, fully accessorized with hats, sunglasses, water bottles etc. to these kids. As they came down we where each assigned to a few children. What took me the most by surprise is that when we where asked to escort the children to the school yard, people took their hands, or put an arm around them. Hand in hand with our assigned kids, my classmates have never surprised me more. For the rest of the afternoon we played games and ran around like we where born there and had lived there for our whole lives and never known anything else.
Only a few of the children had celebrated their birthdays, so with the money we raised we brought two piñatas, two cakes and drinks. In the end none of us wanted to say goodbye. We were late getting back to our host families.
