A Sure Strike

Today, the youth of America have countless places where they can go to entertain themselves. Almost all the children of today’s society know of all their opportunities to go out and have fun as children. Going to Chuck e Cheese, Play Station, the movies, playing video games etc… Once children have experienced a little of any of these things, they start to express their urgent need for them. I was that child and luckily for me, my parents were strong willed and only occasionally allowed us to influence them. An occasional Chuck e Cheese and Play Station made the experience that much better when we did get to go. I am especially grateful for their resistance to our consistent begging for a N64 or Playstation. When I went down to Mexico for my youth group’s mission’s trip, I was able to witness the conditions that these people faced in a city where it’s government is slacking and the people mostly living in severe poverty. The holes in the roof of their make shift house shout out how much they need help. Like, I’ve heard many people say before, kids are resilient.

After working each day some of us had the chance to play with the neighborhood kids. The kids would cry “hombros” (shoulders) for some of us to lift them up and take off running while they would screech and clench on to our heads.

I’ll admit sometimes we lost focus of working and played with them too soon, before we had finished up for the day. The third day of work, during one of our breaks we went with the neighborhood kids, ages probably ranging from about 5 to 8, to a nearby field. This was not a field as you would probably think of one, the ground not made of dirt but of sand, the ground was littered with pieces of garbage trapped by the scattered knee-high leafless bushes. We went there to try and catch some lizards, which unknown to me were very small and even quicker than they were small. Fortunately, these kids were pros when it came to catching lizards. They spotted them at the roots of bushes yards away and surrounded it while one of them moved closer with a stick in hand in order to get it out of the shelter of the bush. The lizard would dart across the sand from one bush to the next and the kids kept on repeating the process. Until one time when the lizard darted across the sand and one of the kids, probably around 10 feet away, throws a small rock at it and nails it.

Impressively the lizard ends up dead after the kids checked it and the high fives are exchanged. They can have fun better than most of us can, while creating memories to boast about for years and years to come.