A Traveling Skeptic

I’ll admit I was a skeptic.
Prior to me embarking on my volunteer trip to Honduras, I took the time to scour travel blogs about journeying abroad. I read through pages and pages and that all proclaimed the same bold statement: It changed my life!. My first thought was that this was going to be no different than volunteer work I participated in back hone in North Carolina (Crazy, right? But hey, I was 18!). I would soon find out I had underestimated the country I was about to enter.
I began to realize my mistake almost immediately after entering the airport. There wasn’t any event that caused my slowly creeping realization; it was the Spanish that had immediately surrounded me upon entering the terminal. It wasn’t the halting, chopped up version intermixed with English that I heard so in the US. This Spanish was a relaxed melt out of your mouth sound that surrounded me in comfort and serenity. Something about those warm, dulcet tones had already altered something within me.
When I was picked up to go to the volunteer compound, the sun was beginning to set. If you’ve never seen the sun set behind rolling, green mountains with an undisturbed landscape, then you are missing an important part of the human experience. Its sheer beauty took my breath away. My skepticism was fading, but there was the nagging idea that the rest of my journey would resemble my previous work .
Little did I know I had not seen the best of Honduras yet: the people. My volunteer work began the next day in Villa Soleada, but my memory of the work is overshadowed by the memory of the people. Never in my life have I seen such a dedicated people. They rose every morning and began their work hours before the sun- and the volunteers. Men, women , and children pitched in. They passed their jugs of water around, and the kids would take turns running to bring back food. They worked in 104 degree heat, sans shoes. For days I watched them while we worked, listened to the deep chuckles and high pitched giggles mixed into rapid Spanish, and found myself changed. I realized that these people did not need us, as I had assumed. They were welcoming us as friends into their lives to work alongside them, not fix them. The Hondurans I met gave me a fresh perspective of humanity.
I'll never forget the day I uttered the words I had found so difficult to believe: It changed my life.