This morning I took my first chicken bus ride with Melissa and Ryan. We headed out pretty early for Chimaltenango to help with a wheelchair distribution Dick Rutgers was heading up there. This ride was pretty uneventful, though it was interesting to discover just how many people you can fit into a standard size school bus seat! Some of the curves were a little concerning, but thankfully, we were not sitting right in the front of the bus, where they probably would have been hair-raising.
(Click on any picture to enlarge)
As it turned out, there were many people to help with the chairs, but Melissa’s language skills were put to good use interpreting for Dick. Ryan was a great sport, hanging around, taking pictures and helping out wherever he could. I got to wander around, taking pictures and talking with the mothers who had brought their children in for chairs. This ended up being a small distribution, since one of the towns scheduled to come was prevented from doing so by a land slide.
It seems that in every distribution there is one person who stands out in my memory. Today it was a therapist I met who needed a walker for one of her patients
(the lady in white above). The guys had to do some significant adapting to find one the correct size, so I had a bit of time to visit with her. This lady had brought a number of children from Jalapa, where Bethel had had a distribution about a week earlier. They had not had correct chairs to fit these special children, so were asked to come to Chimaltenango for this distribution. This dedicated woman left her home at 3:30 am to get to Jalapa to pick up her patients and bring them all the way to Chimal. When I thanked her for making this sacrifice for the children, she basically responded, "They need this. What else could I do." I don't know if this woman is a believer, but her attitude was a good reminder to me of the privilege of serving the "least of these."
After a quick lunch we headed to the orphanage, only to find that all the kids would be in bed until 3 pm. We did visit some of them in their beds, and then went and visited Christina in the older girls area. By three, there once again were many volunteers and much commotion in the children’s area. Melissa did get to hold Arianna, Ryan pushed Carlitos around in his chair, and I held Gloria. I know that the kids get a lot of attention when there are many volunteers, but I can’t help but feel badly that even here, some kids are just not “popular” with volunteers. They are often overlooked, and left to sit in their chairs alone. They are the kids who are less attractive, slower to respond, more withdrawn. Part of my heart is always drawn to these who go unnoticed, for I believe they are in need of the attention the most. Many think that the brighter, more outgoing kids benefit more from attention and activities. I think that they just respond more quickly, more easily. But over and over, I see responses slowly emerge from kids who I originally thought could have cared less if I paid attention to them more. When these kids finally smile, it reduces me to tears.
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