by International Samaritan | Oct 20, 2023 | Weekend Reflections
Elizabeth, age 14, hopes to become a journalist. That looked like an impossible dream just a few months ago as she didn’t have the money to continue with school past the sixth grade. Money is tight because Elizabeth’s mother is the family breadwinner, and she’s a...
by International Samaritan | Oct 13, 2023 | Weekend Reflections
As the program director in Jamaica, I spend a lot of time praying for the scholars in my program. As I’ve been praying, the word resilience has been echoing in my head for months. Looking at the definition, resilience means “the capacity to recover quickly from...
by International Samaritan | Oct 6, 2023 | Weekend Reflections
This past spring, I went on a service trip to Guatemala with 11 other parishioners from the St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor. I had no idea the impact this trip would have on me. We started off traveling in our minibus to the Francisco Coll elementary school. We...
by International Samaritan | Sep 29, 2023 | Weekend Reflections
Nalubega, a 19-year-old from Kawanda, Uganda, lost hope of pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor when her mother could no longer afford the cost of her school fees. Her mother, a waste picker at the Kiteezi dumpsite, had six other children to provide for too. But...
by International Samaritan | Sep 22, 2023 | Weekend Reflections
When you see children working in garbage dumps, it changes you. You know there is nothing they did to deserve such a punishing life. You can’t pretend you didn’t see it and just assume that everything is going to be OK, because it is fundamentally not. A person...
