God Works Both Ways

This past week I had a chance to work at Guayaquil´s Children´s Hospital. A medical team, gathered from all over the US, came dont through a foundation named Project Perfect World. They came for a week to perform life-changings surgeries for children who cannot afford them.

I saw spinal X rays that looked like this ¿ and thats not an exageration.

While the doctors efficiently executed their operations, I had the opportunity to see it all. To translate for the children and their parents through the whole process. To answer questions about the suregery. To tell them ¨Its time to go in now.¨ To rub a crying mother´s back in the waiting room and make small talk. And then to see the surgery. See femurs being shortened and screws and rods straitening spines. And then to hold tiny legs as they wrapped a cast around the entire lower body. And then to wait with the children after they came off anathesia. To see them squeezing their eyes in pain. To see them shaking in the cold. To rub their forheads and tell them to rest. To grab a blamket. Then to see them smile. To give them stuffed animals and teach them to say ¨Excuse me, You are beautiful.¨ Then to call for their mothers in the waiting room and tell them that their daughter came out of the operation speaking english. Then hearing in that broken english a little girl say to her mother¨Excuzamay your bootiful.¨ Then we brought balloons and coloring books to all the children waiting in recovery. I was in scrubs and a lab coat, handing out X rays to parents, explaining that the surgery went well. Then I explained the list of 7 medications to the parents.

I saw tears of fathers letting their little girls go into surgery.
I saw tears of joy, and gratitude for the miracle operations.

It was a very emotional week. Seeing all the suffering that children live in. But I also felt immense Joy, in spending quality time with the children and families, seeing their smiles, and their parents gratitude. I couldnt count how many times I was blessed by strangers passing by in the hospital last week. I couldnt count how many times I felt like crying with joy.

The more and more I spend time down here, with every intention to serve, I am amazed of how the reverse is the reality. I have come to serve the children with illness, the struggling families waiting for the water trucks, the isolated men and women with leprosy- Now, I know it to be true that when you set your life on serving, the reverse happens too. Annie made to the motto of Damien House ¨The hand that gives, receives.¨ And its TRUE. Its the blind leap of faith that she takes everyday. Its the transformative power of God that is an everyday struggle to keep faith in. The people I have come to give myself to here, are all calling me to change my life. They are the ones healing my judgments of a divided and hopeless world. They are the ones calling me to BELIEVE.

This week, I came to serve. And again, I was the one who was blown away with amazement of how the children have transformed me. Amazed and inspired by this medical team. Inspired to do something great and to do it for someone or something greater than myself.