....:'-(

Today was awful. Yet incredible.

Went to the university with Vanessa. It was really fun. I had to buy a mask in order to be in the the whole day. ;-) I also got to wear a doctor's coat for a while. It was really weird, when I put it on... it was like all I wanted to do was ask people how they were feeling haha.

Anyways, after being squished into a tiny 8x8 room with 12 people and a doctor trying to help diagnose children... and a surgery going on in the room next to us with the door wide open ;-), we all went upstairs. To the childrens' rooms. It was definitely the saddest thing I have ever seen. I'm glad I was wearing a mask, cuz I think it helped hide the fact that I was crying... (but don't worry, vanessa was a little too I think). I can't express the emotions I felt when I saw those children. Imagine. Third world country. A bajillion people. Few doctors. No parents by the cribs of the sick babies...

But you know what hit me the most. I walked into a room and was about to hand a little boy, who had some type of weird infection that spread all over his body, a soccer ball when I noticed something. He didn't have a pillow. And then I looked around... Nobody did. He was using his arm for a pillow! I mean, I know that probably isn't what should have got me, considering I saw incredibly much worse, but it is.

The boy was so embarrassed to have to strip down to his underwear so the students could see. He didn't have a pillow. He was like 5 years old! The hospital was very run down, and outside the window was basically where the homeless people live... but everyone was content.

No one batted an eye. No one thought it was strange when the doctor doing surgery came out and shook hands with a visitor without changing gloves. No one thought it strange that there where three babies in cribs looking like they could die any moment and there were no parents. No one thought it was strange that there were thousands of people in the hospital lobby that desperately needed help.

Truly, how spoiled are we in America. All I could think about all of today, and probably for the next week is how badly I want to help. I hate blood. I'm not good in spanish. I probably would cry with every child I saw in the same circumstance. But I want to help. Any way I can.

Because I have lived in a country where service is immediate. Where everything is sanitary... all the time. I have lived with more, yet they have been happier with less. I love many things about America, I really do. But I can't express to you how much God has opened my eyes to the fact that I can hardly call life in America real. It is like another world there. The American Dream isn't fake... it's just that. A Dream. There is no conception of having things instantly here. Of self gratification. It is so beautiful. Like "less of me, and more of everyone as a whole."

I have a lot of thinking to do. I hope this post doesn't make anyone angry... I just can't handle the fact that we live so rich, so comfortable, so... plastic. Not saying that we even mean to... because the reality is, as Americans we don't even know. We can't even conceptualize what life is like in other places. We think we have poverty in our country... but we don't... no we do not.

Wow. I wish you could see this. God has flipped my world upside down, backwards, and inside out down here. And I couldn't be happier.

Be CONTENT with what you have... because you have so much more than what you realize.

I love Peru.

Blessings,

Lucas