Driving up the heavily wooded winding road, passing through the gaps of sunlight and shade through the overgrown oak trees,  I thought to myself; how could such a beautiful place hold so much sadness and misfortune.  As our shiny new silver Honda minivan slowly drove into town, I noticed the run down homes and was shocked at the contrast to the natural beauty of these hills.  The nicer of the houses were small, single story, wooden houses with the occasional duct taped window and unpainted walls.  Many more of these houses were so run down, I didn’t think people were living inside.  Plastic tarps were nailed across the roofs, and where there was once a window, there were now gaping holes, with tattered sheets blowing through the openings.  I would be staying here, in West Virginia, for the next week and all I could do was think about how awful it must be to live in these conditions and I felt sorry for the poor people that lived in these conditions.  It wasn’t till the end of the week I realized I was feeling sorry for the wrong people.

We were told we would be sleeping in an old high school that had been shut down for many years but was now being used as a community center for the kids in the area.  We pulled up to the high school it was a rectangular plain brick building.  All the windows had no glass and were wide open, the bathrooms didn’t have flushing toilets, the ground was rotting, and our beds were small cots that felt like you were sleeping on cement.  It started to sink in with all of us, that we were in a whole new world, one vastly different from Park Ridge Illinois. I had to think about things, that in my sixteen years, never, ever, crossed my mind.  At night we had to make sure that our blankets were fully on the cots and not touching the ground. We had to tuck ourselves into cocoons every night because the school was open to the elements and night snakes and insects would try to crawl into the bed with you.  Coming from a suburb where houses have a front door, windows have glass panes, and a bedroom is usually free from crawling bugs and snakes, this was a big adjustment for all of us.
        

Everyday started off with breakfast, prayer, and then going off to our individual sites.  I was assigned a house owned by a woman named ToTo.  She was an elderly woman who lived on a street with mostly decrepit houses.  Her home was the only two story house and it was in pretty good shape compared to her neighbors.  When we first met her she embraced us with wide arms and talked about how thankful she was to have angels like us doing God's work.  She was kind, happy and always smiling.  She later told us we’d be repainting her entire house, and that we’d be painting it a bright yellow.  It was the type of yellow you looked at and it made you think you were looking at the sun.  It was bright and brilliant and hideous.  Hideous. The entire week consisted of us scraping off old paint and repainting it.  The whole time while painting, we discussed how awful of a color it was and wondered why anyone would ever do this to their house.  We didn’t think anything of it other that it was a project for us. The whole time while working on the house, I was embarrassed that these people we were helping were judging me to be a more privileged kid who only chose to help out so it’d add to my conscious.  This embarrassment feeling made me want to prove myself.  I don’t know how else to describe it other than I wanted to show I truly wanted to help.  We saw this women every day and saw how she kept going every day even though she had very little.  She made me feel guilty and embarrassed.  I had felt guilty and embarrassed about even considering I had hard days, when these people had hard days everyday. After a few days, Toto gathered us together and talked to us.  She began asking us what our houses looked like.  She wanted detail.  We described our houses as best we could, describing the beautiful landscape we had, the decorative trims, and fancy wood front doors.  She asked if we were happy in these places.  An interesting question to us, yes, but we all replied with a soft yes. She knew her life was completely different than ours, yet she was able to connected them in unique ways. The next thing brought me a type of embarrassment I had yet to experience.  While we described our houses by how they looked, Toto began explaining her house.  She started with a question. “You know why I painted my house yellow?  Because it’s a happy color, and more people around here need more happiness so I’m giving them something that may put a smile on their face”.  Shame.  None of us even considered  our houses to have an effect on someone else.  A pit began to grow in my stomach.  It was a dark, endless, black hole.  It was embarrassment.  I was embarrassed to have described my house just as an object, a place I didn’t think twice about.  I became ashamed.  Ashamed with the way I had judged Toto for painting her house this terrible yellow.  She made something so simple mean so much more.  She was able to look at her house and see past the wooden planks and glass windows while when I looked at my house I just saw the grand front door, the big front porch, and the green paint that fitted it into its surroundings. I was embarrassed not because I had a nice house compared to these people out here, but because I was constantly looking at the facts of things.  I stayed closed minded and it made me miss the big picture of everything I was doing.

Embarrassment, a feeling of self-consciousness, shame, or awkwardness.  Never had such a little idea about something affected me so deeply.  Never have I felt this aching hole in my stomach.  I was embarrassed by my own small view of the world, holding me back from seeing beautiful acts of humankind.  But this embarrassment, this feeling of stupidity and self centeredness, enabled me to grow a little, to see the broader picture and my place in this world.  Up until this event, I thought I saw the bigger picture of things.  But I hadn’t.  I couldn’t see the big picture until someone showed me how something so small as the color of a house, in the middle of a poor town, could be painted the color happy and make a difference.