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Brebeuf students visit St Lucia

Thirteen high school students from six schools in the Greater Toronto Area recently embarked on a journey to St Lucia for a Service Trip experience. The event was coordinated by Michael Rogers and Michael Da Costa in conjunction with Adventure Learning Experiences, the Presentation Brothers and The Toronto Catholic District School Board. A slideshow of photographs from the trip is available here. Take a look also in our Photo Gallery.

Here is a reflection written by Darren Pereira, a Grade 11 student at Brebeuf.

“Were we to know the merit and value of going from one street to another to serve a neighbour for the love of God, we should value it more than gold or silver.” – Blessed Edmund Rice

Service can be defined as an act of helpful activity or aid. Although such service can take a number of forms, many people imagine service trips as feeding the poor or building schools and other institutions in poor, third-world countries. This service is amazing work, but service is not limited to just this, as we learned when we went to St. Lucia.

There were no schools to build, and the citizens were leading normal lives. There were roads, houses, and buildings, and extreme poverty was not something we encountered during our time there. However, the service we contributed was valuable and is sometimes missing in our own daily lives. Our service was simple – to love the people we worked with and to bring joy to the people around us.

In what we did, we acted out St. Thérèse de Lisieux’s philosophy of doing little things with great love. During the day, we would work at the Centre for Adolescent Renewal and Education (CARE). We did small things, like repainting the inside and outside of the warehouse that was CARE, working with the CARE trainees and getting to know them, preparing to work with the CARE trainees in an elementary school, and so on. We spent some days teaching and working with elementary students, as well as an entire morning with them in an elementary school Olympic event. As a large group and family, we Canadians would get together at night to reflect on the day’s work and sometimes prepare for the work ahead of us the next morning.

However, as Blessed Mother Teresa said, “The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.” For some people, running around and playing sports with a group of thirty elementary students in the hot sun would be a large test of patience, and sometimes working with the CARE trainees would be difficult for us as well. Nevertheless, we were always joyful in our work and always approached each day with enthusiasm and positivity. As the days rolled by, we noticed similar behaviour from the CARE trainees, who barely knew us when we arrived but tried their hardest to keep us from leaving on our final days. The change in them was great to see, as results are always the best motivation.

What made this change in them possible was the love and joy we showed as we worked with them. One moment I vividly remember was painting a washroom in the warehouse with Richelle (a Canadian student) and a St. Lucian CARE trainee whose name we did not know yet. We were singing together, laughing together, and enjoying painting the walls together, when Richelle and I asked him what his name was. He replied in his St. Lucian accent, so we did not understand and asked him to spell it. He simply said that he did not know how to spell.

The CARE trainees were all youth who had not been successful in school. Yet, despite the gap we had in terms of education, we were able to connect on a much deeper level – on the level of human friendship. A smile, a hug, a handshake – none of these gestures required an education to understand. No accent, cultural difference, or age difference could act as a barrier to the language of friendship that both we and the CARE trainees spoke. That was the deeper level of our communication and the core of our service: to greet them with our smiles and change them with our love.

As St. John of the Cross said, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love.” And so it was with our work and service. We have returned now after witnessing the transforming power of love, and continue to share this love with one another. In the end, what matters more is not the work we do, but the love with which we do it.

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