Day 4:
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see,”-Mark Twain. Despite the language barriers between the patients and I, the smiles exchanged spoke more than words ever could. Their grace spoke volume and reminded me that human communication performs far beyond strings of words.
After one of our surgeons finished a successful surgery on a patient, the patient’s sister greeted him with an expression overfilled with joy. She broke down in tears and had offered the surgeon a Guatemalan shirt that she had picked out for him. Her positivity and light spoke across all language barriers with no need for a translation.
The kindness I have encountered on this trip will forever shift my perspective on the effects of a simple smile. Kindness should not be refined to the outcomes of a hardship, but how someone reacts to it. As we are approaching our last few days of the mission trip, I hope to bring home these life-lessons. While experiencing how people are still capable of radiating joy while facing hardships , I realized that we so often tend to focus on minor inconveniences in our lives rather than the bigger picture. I hope to reflect the same positivity in my daily life that was shown to me during this trip.
Samantha and Charlotte Hirshorn/Blogger & Photographer
