If you saw Jack Nicholson's movie, Mr. Schmidt's confessions, about halfway through, surely you wondered if this man really did impersonate him. Compensation comes at the end of the film, when in the midst of the disaster that in his life Schmidt realizes that it matters to a child.
Sometimes we are so busy trying to give happiness to everyone around us that we do not realize that it may be enough to make one person happy.
There is a Catholic priest who lives under this motto "begin with the poor.
The worker as a missionary in El Salvador and in Cambodia, and the man who receives the checks contributed by the people of the United States. UU To help children eat meals, books or medicine.
- I have a world where he survives with a dollar a day - says Kevin a priest, He worked children orphaned by AIDS, and all of them, the 270, HIV + child; The youngest is three years old and the oldest is eighteen.
On occasion Kevin left them to visit his family in Cleveland, and the children cried because they were afraid they would never see them again. In the world of these little ones when someone leaves, they do not return. At another time, when the priest was to go to the airport, the children made a raffle to see who could accompany him in the car.
Kevin's philosophy is that sometimes it is OK to feed before teaching people how to fish. If we do not give them fish, the children can not live to learn to fish. He believes that serving the poor is going to a place where they do not love each other, and staying until you would like to but do not need them.
One of my favorite stories is the one that narrates when he went to Honduras to provide help after the devastating passage of a hurricane. Three days after Hurricane MITSH hit the site in 1998, various organizations were insane, collecting medical supplies, aspirin, antibiotics, bandages and first-aid equipment. Hondurans needed medicines not toys, so a beautiful doll was totally out of place but at the airport she had insisted on the doll arriving while this person was packing food for the victims. Their children took the doll from their mother's room and placed it next to the dolls. supplies. She had told them that the doll could not go to be returned to its place, and since it had been her since she was a child she would stay at home and three times she had turned around and three times they put the doll back next to her. the provisions the fourth place that this woman saw her, she had to hug and cry because the doll was leaving.
When Kevin was at the airport, he was not quite sure what to do with the doll that was as big as a two-year-old boy sticking out beside the suitcase, why did they have to bother carrying it? The owner of the doll had proclaimed.
- You will know who to give it to later in the trip when they arrived Kevin wondered more than once why they were carrying the doll ?.
The answer came when they met an 8-year-old girl who had been telling everyone.
- Someone is going to bring me a doll.
At dusk they reached the town of Jutiapa, which still had no electricity. The team planned to leave the supplies at the local clinic and help distribute it to treat the sick people who stopped in a church where the priest commented on the wrist to unison some people said the word Kaila.
-Kaila?
It was a poor girl who did not do very well even before the hurricane after the disaster she offered her help in a temporary shelter in the village, Kaila stayed there and washed the dishes, her family had lost everything in the hurricane , they did not have much in their adobe hut, the girl was so poor that she did not have a toy to play with, the other girls excluded her from her game by mocking her and rejecting her for her misery. Kaila had a dream, someone brought her a doll, she had woken up excitedly and described the doll to her mother, her mother promised that someone would have money some day to buy her a doll.
- No said- kaila
- Someone is going to give me a doll
When she saw the doll, the little girl with bare feet weeping was the same as the one in her dream, she had the same long hair, the bows and the flowered dress.
-Mother told you so - Kaila cried
Everyone cried Kevin was surprised - we thought that our mission was to take all that medical supply, but perhaps it was to make a girl happy.
Sometimes things that seem to have no value or to be unimportant have a very profound impact. You can not make everyone happy or solve every problem but you can make a single person happy, and that is more than enough.
