The act of doing: Going beyond talking to change lives

“How was your trip?”

That’s the usual question I get after a week of travel. The usual answer is to touch on some of the highlights: my favorite sights, meals, and moments.

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This recent trip to Nicaragua was different for me. It was a bit of an experiment. It was my first time traveling with a group of strangers. The trip was designed to have half the time for touristy things, and half the time volunteering with a Nongovernmental Organization called Glasswing.

The tourist things were fun. We climbed a volcano and then slid down it on sleds. Then we took a boat trip to a private island. And we ate some great meals.

But the biggest difference for this trip was there was the service project in the middle. We drove to a rural school called Escuela La Inmaculada. There were several low-slung brick buildings surrounding a dirt courtyard, enclosed by a wall. This school services about 150 kids from a community where the annual income of mom and dad is about $750 a year. Not $750 a month — $750 a year. Teachers here make about $150-200 a month, so that’s actually an upgrade compared to most of the community.

Almost all of the children walk up to an hour each way in their school uniform. A crisp white shirt and navy blue pants or skirts. They will carry a backpack with what meager school supplies they have. The children learn the basics of reading and writing. They get one meal a day which is cooked over a wood fire in an outdoor kitchen.

The leader of the NGO we worked with told me the average Nicaraguan child from these communities will go to school for 5.6 years, then begin to work to help support the family.

The act of doing

So how do I summarize what happened there? How can I put into words what this trip means for me or for you back here in Seattle?

I really struggled with this thought for a long time. My main realization about this trip slowly crystallized as I made my journey back home. The thing that applies to everyone is quite simple. The important thing is the act of doing. I needed to go out into the world and do the thing. Not talk about the thing, or blog about the thing. I needed to do the thing.

That’s the take away that applies to all of us.

I get paid to have an interesting take on the news of the day and put that on the radio. I’m supposed to articulate myself in an entertaining way. I think I do that as good as the next guy. At the end of the day — whatever the topic is — I talk about what I’d like to change. Or I critiqued what I thought was wrong. Maybe I influenced some hearts and minds, but I didn’t physically do anything.

Something mysterious happens when you go out into the world and contribute. It’s one thing to strategize or criticize. It’s another thing to practice. But at some point, you have to get in the game.

There’s a lot of different things I could say about volunteering with the beautiful children I met. There were profound moments of gratitude, and moments of sadness knowing that many of them would live lives of poverty and extremely difficult labor. There were moments of genuine laughter across a language barrier. But the more I thought about it, the simplest one that can apply to all of us is the important thing is the act of doing.

That’s where the change lives.

You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.

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