One of my close friends, Alaina Burke, is currently a student at the University of North Florida. This past summer, Alaina returned from a Catholic mission trip to Panama. I decided
to interview her about the experience!
1. What made you decide to go on a mission trip?
Honestly, I don’t really know. I guess growing up in a big Christian/Catholic community it was something that I’d always heard of and kind of thought I might do when I was older. For this specific trip though, my brother was going and invited me to come too. I honestly didn’t really want to go but I felt like it was something God was calling me to, so I went anyway.
2. Who did you go on the trip with, and was it your first time doing a mission?
I went with a group from St. Paul’s Church, including my brother. I actually didn’t know anyone else going, besides my brother until pretty much right up to when we got on the plane together. And yes, it was my first mission.
3. How was the trip to Panama? Did the group encounter any complications?
Haha. The journey to Panama was an absolute fiasco. It was the first time I had been on a plane since I could remember. We had a layover from Tampa to Miami to Panama City. The flight from Tampa to Miami went smoothly enough, we arrived at the Miami airport at around 7:30am. We were supposed to fly out from Miami to Panama City at 12:15 and then take a bus on the 5 hour drive from Panama City to the city of Montijo, where we did our mission work. Then our flight from Miami got delayed...and delayed again...and cancelled. So we re-booked for that evening, 6:25pm...which was delayed until 6:45...and then we boarded the plane and sat on the runway for an hour waiting for bad weather to pass before finally taking off. All together we spent over 12 hours at the Miami airport and finally landed in Panama at almost 1am. And we still had a long drive to Montijo. We arrived in Montijo at around 4am and needless to say, we all collapsed in bed right away!
Through God’s grace, however, the entire group was able to keep positive attitudes throughout the entire disastrous adventure, and I am thankful for that!
4. Once you arrived in Panama, what was it like?
We first landed in the middle of the night, and I did my best to sleep on the bus ride to Montijo, so I didn’t really get any exciting “first impressions” of the country. But for the rest of the week I was blown away! The country is breathtakingly beautiful, the people amazingly welcoming, and the entire atmosphere was incredibly peaceful.
5. What specific mission work did you do in Panama?
Our group had three teams: a medical team, a team that worked in schools, and a team that did more manual labor like painting buildings. I was a part of the team that worked with the schools, so I helped do activities with the kids, such as making crafts, playing futbol (soccer) and praying with them.
In the evenings, our entire group would come together to do our “evening mission”, which consisted of going to different communities nearby and doing more of a spiritual ministry. The priest with us would give a talk, some of the team members shared witnesses, and then we would pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet with the people of the community. I speak very little Spanish, but by the end of the week I could recite the DMC in Spanish as well as any native speaker!
6. What was your favorite part of the trip?
Hmmm…that’s a hard one. Honestly, the trip was so great overall that I have trouble picking just one favorite part! I guess maybe I could pick top three (in no particular order):
- Divine Mercy chaplets at the chapels each evening were amazing. It was really cool to pray all together with the different communities, and I really liked learning how to pray it in Spanish! In fact, I think it sounds so much prettier in Spanish, I may always pray it in Spanish now!
- One of the really cool parts of the trip was getting to know the people there. Everyone was so welcoming and hospitable, and friendly! They were all really nice about speaking slowly and giving me time to think/find a translator when I couldn’t understand them. A few nights, some of the teens from Panama, and some of the people from our group went to the park behind the church and played guitar and sang and it was really fun. It’s cool to know I have friends across the world now too!
- Finally, one of my very favorite parts of the trip wasn’t even a “mission” part, it was more of a “tourist” part. Our group took an afternoon one day and went to a waterfall up in the mountains. It was beautiful! We went swimming underneath it and took a million pictures! (the pictures never do it justice though) Even though it wasn’t a part of the “ministry” we were doing, I felt like that afternoon of just hanging out was a huge team-building activity for our own group, I got to know the other team members a little better, and it was a lot of fun.
7. Were there any obstacles your encountered during your mission work?
Ha! When were there not obstacles! We had obstacles from the very start when our flight got delayed. Because of that, and the fact that we didn’t get any real sleep until 4am, we had to adjust our plans for the next day. Initially we were supposed to get up early and start work early in the morning. Instead, because we hadn’t gotten any sleep, we slept late into the morning, and began our ministry that afternoon. That meant that we didn’t get as much work done the first day as we had planned to. And unfortunately, throughout the week, we encountered several more obstacles, from weather to the Soccer World Cup (which is such a big deal in latin american countries that everyone spent all morning watching it, leaving us nobody to minister to!) which also resulted in our not getting as much done as we had originally planned...
Somehow though, God gave us the grace to keep positive attitudes all week, so even though we were constantly having to change our plans, the entire group was all smiles!
8. Are there any funny stories you’d like to share about your trip?
Well, I do have a couple…..
In the schools, the kids were all very curious and inquisitive. At one point, one little girl came up to me and demanded to know where my mother was! She had all sorts of questions for me, commenting on how tall I was (I’m 5’10”, so that’s always something kids notice about me), and asking how old I was, and how old my brother was. To make it even more interesting, she was asking all of these questions in Spanish, and I had no idea what she was saying until someone translated for me!
The food there was delicious, but of course, different from what we normally eat in the US. We ate a lot of the same things over and over again. It was a lot of rice, chicken, and lentils. At one point in the middle of the week, our mission group went out to eat at a restaurant. It was buffet style, and the meal consisted of a lot of the same things we had been eating all week. We had all gotten our food and had sat down, when the waitress brought in french fries to add to the buffet. The five teenagers in our group (myself included) jumped back into that line quicker than lightning! (The fries were delicious, by the way)
Last one, I promise….
In Spanish, the word gringo (gringa, for girls) is a somewhat derogatory term for white people, meaning “yankee”, “whitey” or “dirty foreigner”. At one point during our trip, our group was attending a procession in honor of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. In a crowd of hundreds of Panamanians, our group of pale US Americans certainly stood out. While we were watching the procession, some little boy (it’s always the kids) came up to my brother and called him “gringo”. This comment sparked a conversation among us teenagers (a group which consisted of 4 gringos and gringas of various paleness, and one native Panamanian who was helping out our group for the week), which led to us comparing skin tones. Guess who was the palest of the group? Yep, me. Ghost white. Soy una gringa.
9. What was the most interesting part of your experience?
Probably some of the most interesting, and somewhat challenging, parts of the trip for me were because the language barrier. Panama is a Spanish-speaking nation, and as I mentioned before, I speak very little Spanish (besides the Divine Mercy chaplet!). About half of our mission group spoke Spanish fluently, so there were people who helped translate for me, but I still had a lot of trouble communicating. Especially in the schools, the kids would all come at me with a million questions at once and I wouldn’t understand a word of it! I would just helplessly turn to the nearest person who I knew could translate for me. It was funny, challenging, and at times embarrassing. I ended up laughing at myself a lot!
10. If you had the chance to do it again, would you go on another mission trip?
Absolutely! I would actually really love to go back to Panama again. The group we went with goes every year, and I’d really like to go again next year if I can afford it...poor college student that I am...
11. Lastly, is there anything else you’d like to share about the experience?
Just the fact that I didn’t even want to go on the trip in the first place….and then it was an AMAZING experience. Guess that goes to show that trusting God’s call really does pay off. I really don’t want to hear “I told you so”, from anyone else, but I’ll say it to myself…God told you so!
If you think that God may be calling you to join your local parish on a mission trip, I invite you to take it to prayer!
Geo
Comments
Post a Comment