So at the last minute I decided to go to Guatemala with BuildaBridge International which is an innovative organization that works in the toughest parts of the world bringing healing and hope to youth through the arts. I volunteer with them in Philadelphia so when I heard they were going to be in Guatemala doing an arts camp for a week, I knew I had to be there. We worked in an slum community called La Limonada ( the Lemonade). I taught dance with another teacher, my friend Gina, to children ages 4-10.

This may sound simple and easy, but in no sense of the word was it easy. The sounds, smells, sights and touch that we received were unforgettable. The neighborhood is invisible to the rest of the country. Its in a big mountain ditch with cement houses from the very top to the bottom. In the middle of mountain ditch, is a small sewer river. All the communities pluming and garbage flows into the small river of about more than 11,000 people. The smell is so strong, as soon as you step out of the car it greets you as if you were cooking fish in your house with all the windows closed on a hot summer day.

The most of the kids in our classes are street children who have barley nothing. One boy named Rony didn’t want to take off his shoes for dance class because his shoes weren’t even worth to be called shoes anymore. His heel was in the shoe, but his toes were touching the ground. Another little boy named Samuel had 4 brothers and his mom in his one bedroom house. Four slept on the bed and two on the floor and the mom is 7 months pregnant.

One day a girl name Yali age 5 was screaming at he top of her lungs because she didn’t want to come in the classroom because she didn’t want to work with the Gringos (gringos is a name for North Americans) Some of the kids parents tell them that Gringos will take them away from their families and put them up for adoption.

But at the end of the week we had a recital for the kids to present their play, painting, sculptures and dance piece. It was beautiful to see the smiles on the parents face and the pride the children had to show of what they made. I thank God I was able to exchange someone’s ashes of sadness for oil of joy, even if it was for a week.

For Thanksgiving Day, we had a regular Thanksgiving Day diner at the house of another one of the North Americans we were working with.

It was different not being with my own family and friends for the hoilday and I missed them, but it was comforting knowing that where I was, I was loved.

This thanksgiving I was thankful for the free gift of a smile that cost nothing and yet has the significant power to change someone’s life.

This is the best thing I cold think of to write about. It’s the excerpt from a book I am reading and speaks of the theme that I am wrestling with in my life.

"His words are the essence of truth. He is not offering an opinion; he never utters opinions. He never guessed; he knew and knows. He spoke out of the fullness of his God Head; his words are very Truth himself. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light. Here we have two things standing in contrast to each other, a burden and rest. The burden is not a local one, peculiar to those first hearers, but one which is borne to the whole human race. The rich feel it and the poor for it is something from which wealth and idleness can never deliver us.

Let us examine our burden. It is altogether an interior one. It attacks the heart and the mind and reaches the body only from within. First there is the burden of Pride. As long as you set your self up as a little god to whom you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The hearts fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of a friend and enemy, will never let the mind rest. Yet the sons of earth are carrying this burden continually, challenging every spoken word against them, cringing under the criticism, tossing sleepless if another person is preferred over them. You are hurt because the world is saying about you the very things you have been saying about yourself.

Such a burden is not necessary to bear. Jesus calls us to rest, and meekness is His method. The person knows well that the world will never see him as the way God see him and he has stopped caring. He knows he is weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at he same time that he is in the sight if God of more importance than angels.

Another is pretense. By this I mean not hypocrisy, but the common human desire to put the best foot forward and hide from the world our real inward poverty. To all victims of this gnawing disease Jesus says, "Ye must become as little children". For little children do not compare; they receive direct enjoyment from what they have without relating it to something else or someone else.

The heart of the world is breaking under this load and pretense and artificiality is one curse that I will drop away the moment we kneel at Jesus feet and surrender ourselves to His meekness. All that matters is that I give myself to the one who gave all for eternity.