“One hundred years from now, it will not matter what kind of car I drove or what kind of clothes I wore. All that will matter is that I made a difference in the life of a child.” Between you and me, I always thought that saying attributed to Forrest Witcraff was pretty weak. C’mon, all of us make a positive contribution to a kid’s life one way or another, right? It’s all good stuff, but is that all that matters? And if we do something good for a child once and it takes maybe ten minutes, are the remaining bazillion seconds and minutes of our lives wasted?A three-week service vacation to Salvador, Brazil, with Cross-Cultural Solutions (CCS) (http://www.crossculturalsolutions.org) sent my logic packing. CCS placed me in a hospice for AIDS and HIV-positive kids. The compound – and I mean that literally – was big, concrete, austere and devoid of any soul. For unknown reasons, we (Julie, another CCS volunteer) and I couldn’t take them outside the open-air facility so even a two-block walk to the ocean or the nearest ice cream vendor was out of the question. These kids’ entire universe was smaller than a suburban WalMart.
For the most part, the kids ran wild and were left to entertain themselves. That meant three weeks of watching them shred our arts and crafts supplies within 15 minutes of our arrival then trying to entertain and keep them busy for the next four hours. The kids loved on us, hit us, hugged us, tormented us and almost peed on us a few times. And so, at the end of those three very taxing weeks I hired five professional performers to entertain them as my way of saying “goodbye.” (I whined at the exorbitant $100 fee until I remembered that I’d dropped four times that much, without a second thought, on an amethyst ring the day before. Perspective is everything).
The performers (three girls, two guys) were amazing – they wore these ridiculously silly clown outfits as they sang, danced, used puppets and interacted with the kids the entire time. I sat in a corner of the stage behind the performers, rather than in the audience, during the show so I could watch the kids’ faces and expressions.
And they were enchanted.
And, when the artists finally finished (and they performed well after their paid 1 ½ hours), the kids weren’t ready to let go. One little girl crawled into a clown’s lap and wailed hysterically. A few more kids started crying. It looked like this well-intended departure gift was going south in a hurry, but I knew that none of those kids would have traded those two hours of absolute joy.
The kiddies in that Brazilian hospice taught me the value of time. All seconds, minutes and hours are not created equally, and two hours (or 120 minutes or 7200 seconds) watching little kids laugh at clowns were, so far, those most important two hours of my life so far. Because it made a difference in the life of a child.
Get out and give back.
Jane Hess is a free-lance writer. Please send your comments to
http://www.getoutandgiveback.blogspot.com.
