Last week I went on a service trip to Nicaragua with a group from my college. We climbed a volcano, laid a few miles of water pipeline, dug ditches, started building a school and made some of the biggest connections of our lives. We prepared months in advance for this trip

with meetings, lists, vaccines and medications. We talked about what we should expect and what we would need while we were there, but no one could prepare us fully for what we were about to experience. We were all thrown into a world completely different from ours in the United States.

We were all ready and excited, our bags were packed with all the things we thought we would need and we headed to Managua, Nicaragua. For the first time in my life I was the odd one standing in line at Subway. People were staring and pointing at us as we tried to rack our brains for the Spanish we learned our freshman year on how to order politely. The first day we climbed (and slid down) a volcano and I thought that was going to be the highlight of the trip. I stood in one country and I could see into another, and in the opposite direction was the ocean! It can't get much better than that, right? Wrong.

The first working day we went to a village, La Coyotera, to help put in some pipeline so that each of the 25 families living in the village could have clean, running water and a faucet in their homes. This seemed like no big deal to someone who has at least three faucets in her home, but when I saw the men, women and children bringing multiple bottles to fill up with clean water out of our coolers, it became evident to me that this was a very big deal to them.

I didn't think very hard about it until I started to meet and talk to the families. I put a face and a name with the people who didn't have clean water. I learned their stories and I bonded with them. They brought me so much joy and laughter, and we couldn't even understand each other half of the time. We were not there to help them or to give them a handout, but we were there to serve with them in order to reach a goal.

I was told that one of the things that would be a take away from the trip was the happiness that everyone you meet would have. "They have nothing and yet they are still happy." I would definitely agree with this, but what I took away wasn't the happiness they had within themselves, but the love they had for everyone surrounding them. There were old women who were working their butts off right next to me in the blistering sun who were concerned that I was getting sunburned. A woman opened her home to all of us working so that we wouldn't have to use the restroom behind a tree. The people shared their water with the kids whether they were their own or not.

If you asked why they were working so hard, they would say it was because they wanted their children or grandchildren to have it better than they had. They were working together as a team, they raised money together and they will celebrate together when the project is finished. No one complained that they had more or less than another and no one asked. They all worked the same and gave what they could, even if it was just walking around filling water bottles or offering smiles. No one sat down and asked me to dig their hole or fill their bucket and no one was left with an empty bucket. I may have left Nicaragua tired, burned and permanently stained with dirt, but I am thankful for every moment, smile and lesson.

If you would like to help through monetary donations or voluntary time with a water project, school or any other service please visit http://amigosforchrist.org/