Happy Little Accidents - Original Writing

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Happy Little Accidents
I never intended to go to Belize.
Bob Ross, the famous painter, used to say that there are no mistakes, only “happy little accidents.” Whenever he would make a stroke he did not intend, he would find a way to use that stroke to make the painting better; transforming a stray line into a tree’s trunk, or morphing a misplaced color into a bird in flight. As I would watch The Joy of Painting endlessly on TV, I thought about the skill of men like Mr. Ross at making the best of his situation, and turning his “mistakes” around to make the whole work of art turn out better.
None of this occurred to me when in January of 2015, I was informed that the list upon which I had hastily scrawled my signature a few weeks prior, was not a sign-up sheet for the Providence Church band at all, but for a month-long mission teaching children in the Central American nation of Belize. This was not a happy little accident. This was a mistake, and a monumental one at that. Now not only did I lose an audition opportunity I had been waiting months for, now I had to spend a month in the middle of nowhere, working with children who do not even speak English? Naturally, I informed them of my mistake and requested that I be removed from the team. I was informed right back that if any one person left, we would fall below the required number of team members and the trip would not run. Belize was no longer a mission trip; it was a guilt trip, and I had just been handed a non-transferrable first class ticket to a month of work.
Fast forward to late April. I had had four months to think about the trip and my role in it. I had determined that a free opportunity to see a different country did not present itself every day, so I might as well tr...

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... to learn that contrary to what we had been told, the entire town spoke almost exclusively Spanish, and the only people that spoke any English at all were the children who had taken classes at the school over the past two years. We quickly discovered that the language barrier was more like a language brick wall, and we quickly realized that almost all of our English lessons were much too advanced for us to teach with any sort of effectiveness.
The team began a daily routine of staying up long into the night, working by lantern light to revise the next day’s lesson plan so that the students could understand it. As long as we were here, even if we could not teach any of our prepared material, we might as well try and teach the children something. Ironically, our team of instructors probably learned more Spanish during our month there than the children learned English.

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