Emma Grindle 1
Mr. Murillo
English 095
20 March 2013
An experience I will never forget I had only been to Mexico a few times in my life, and had never seen it in any aspect other than vacation. Little did I know that the most rewarding experience I would have would be serving in an orphanage in another country I knew so little about. Being adopted I was able to connect with children in the orphanage. The feeling of helping and working with children helped inspire me to work with children as a career, and made me happy. Seeing so much poverty, extreme need for medicine, and need for health education made me want to become a nurse and serve in Mexico. My parents both died from a car accident shortly after my ninth birthday. My older sister, twin sister and I were taken in by another family of our church. The loss of my parents was heart breaking and left my sisters and I to grow up in what I call survival mode. We each had our little quirks that would pull us out of survival mode, and into the world of being a kid; mine was reading. My parents were big on serving and helping others, as a child we went to Mexico for a few days at a time every few months to deliver medical supplies to a local orphanage, but I was too young to remember any of it as anything other than a family trip. My sisters and I keep this tradition going still. Each time we went the trips continued to get longer, and our adoptive parents started to feel more uncomfortable with it. They allowed us to continue going, because it was something that kept us close to our parents, but didn’t agree with our lengthier stays because Mexico is becoming more and more dangerous. A trip to drop off supplies shorty after my 17th birthday at the orphanage they had just received a new baby boy. Martin was his name, and like me both of his parents were not a part of his life. He was a smart, attentive baby, and was very well behaved. Each time I wasn’t there I was thinking and concerned for him. I had been ahead in school and decided I was going to graduate early and commit my time before college to serve in Mexico at the orphanage. Helping the children was the easiest part of my time in Mexico, they were always well behaved, hardworking, and happy doing whatever they were told. The orphanage worked alongside another charity that built houses to keep families together, all they needed was a plot of land and the charity would build them an 8 by 12 foot house. Volunteers as well as older kids in the orphanage would work together to build the houses. This was always hard labor and sometimes in bad areas. Even though I had never seen such extreme poverty, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I enjoyed waking up and taking care of the little kids, and the time I had spent seeing them happy with so little. Every now and then I see or hear something that reminds me of one of the kids, or the area and my heart aches to go back. The kids at the orphanage weren’t in survival mode, they had learned to make do with what they had and to treat everyone like family, they taught me so much and had even less than I did. Seeing that the children knew so little about taking care of themselves, and keeping clean and healthy was absurd. Kids would be filthy most of the time, and there were always sick children. From all the playing, and building, and being outside I could see how it was easy to get dirty, but nobody took care of themselves. The middle aged kids didn’t know about puberty, or how to handle