International Experiences

I found myself a stranger in a strange land, with hills of whose greens I had not yet known.  Eastern Europe was unpaved roads and small villages a great many kilometers apart.

To the right you will find a slideshow of my time overseas in Budapest and Romania.

(click on the slideshow itself to see larger images)

Though I desire to move ever-forward, to know humanity in its fullness, I had never once been away from the homespace I had always known.  Until this past summer, I was never outside the reach of my parents and familiarity; I never knew a world apart from comfort.  The hot July saw the newness of so many things—a first transatlantic flight, the first time traveling alone, and, what was more, the first time I was ever truly on my own.  The pull I had been feeling for two years finally gave over to the trip on which I had been called to embark—two weeks in the summer with The Smiles Foundation.  Arriving in the Budapest airport, which would serve as the beginning of not quite two weeks on a mission trip overseas, I found myself surprisingly all right.  I did find mys

elf a stranger in a strange land, with hills of whose greens I had not yet known, and yet I would not have it any other way.  And I was and still am entirely shaken by that which my eyes beheld and my camera captured in my time there.

One of my first days in Romania, we drove to the gypsy village of Salard, a small community of incalculable poverty with which The Smiles Foundation was just now beginning to work.  I thought I had seen much of the lives of the poor, but never had I beheld the full extent of the monster known as poverty.   The images I have seen are those that easily break hearts and spirits and yet the impoverished still remain bright.  It is here I was wholly aware this is still work to be done, feeding off the hope.  Problems only uncover more problems; it is a ceaseless process of trouble and of mending.  Lives change in the wake but the vicious cycle of poverty does not release its victims from bondage so easily.  In being able to see the neglected and the forgotten—the sights and people continuing to exist largely unnoticed or else unseen—I remembered my calling.  I have seen these things.  They do exist.  Seeing the barefoot children and malnourished families of dozen—their “homes” barely more space than a crawlspace or, perhaps, a meager hotel room—

I felt this clawing at my insides that I could change those things.  I could be their eyes and their voice,introducing them to a world of givers and pushing them toward a desire to improve their situation—escaping the vicious cycle of poverty they had always known.  It sickened me to think one might believe they could not do something—anything—to help human suffering.  The hard and heart wrenching things to which I was a witness made me restless.  But in this I realized I held strength in knowing I could give to the hungry eyes of the forgotten and desolate.  All could understand why it was we were there despite the barrier of language and the realities some were too innocent to have faced.  One thing—a word, an idea, even the smallest of acts—is always there to be done.  A smile or the spoken word can change a life; it is we—those who speak—who move the world.  By simply telling the many stories and showing the photographs of only pieces of the experience itself, I could see the effect of my words on people and, in that, the potential for change.  I had given much of my time to the mission, but I received immutable hope and the knowledge there is always one more thing to be done in way of love.

pictures: top right, Emily with three  gypsy children in the village of Tileagd; bottom left, Emily and other mission workers before starting a demolition project.