Today is Wednesday, and Day 3 of the adventure. I woke up that morning around 7-7:15ish to get up to make it to 7:30 breakfast. As my alarm blared in my ears, I drowsily awoke and stumbled around John Chewit to find my roommates trying to wake up from the early rise. I put on some shorts and headed down to the table for the usual breakfast, eggs, bacon, etc. As I went through the motions of eating and trying to wake up, I kept thinking to myself how excited I was to go back to the school and work my tail off with high hopes of seeing some more progress like we had made the previous two days.
As we arrived at the work site, we worked tirelessly on both the lunch room and jungle gym, and at the end of the day the most rewarding moment occurred. Some of the guys brought two kids over from the school to the jungle gym. The two kids had smiles that stretched to the edge of each of their mouths, and looked genuinely happy to see the jungle gym finally take shape. Seeing the kids’ excitement for something that we had done put me in a state of awe and happiness. I had felt a feeling of accomplishment and final realization that what we are doing here in Jamaica is really making a difference. As the two kids were lifted up on to the jungle gym and seeing them standing up there, I thought to myself, “Those two kids will be the first of hopefully many other kids to step foot on that jungle gym,” and immediately got butterflies. I knew going into this trip we would make an impact on these children’s lives, but seeing the excitement in those children’s eyes made me feel like this work was paying off. This manifestation of all our effort to make impacts on those kids was all I wanted from this trip, and I had finally seen the first glimpse of it. This was by far the best moment of Wednesday.
Matt Large, San Jose ’19
Delta Upsilon Fraternity Blog 