A Love Story

When I was a kid, my older brother went with our church's youth group on a mission trip to Puerto Rico. I helped out with the fundraisers, I held car wash signs and helped out at dinners, but I was too young to go on the trip. By the time I was in high school, my family had moved somewhere new and though I was a part of a youth group that did great things like go on retreat and on day trips to volunteer at soup kitchens, we never went on a week long mission trip.

Fast forward about eight years, I had found my first church as an adult and the minister was talking about taking a group to Mexico to volunteer at the orphanage where her and her husband had lived and worked for a year. I was thrilled, this was going to be my Puerto Rico trip!

I went to the Casa San José for the first time in 2006 with the best of intentions, I was going to do the work project, play with the kids, and bond with the other group members. I didn't really think too much further beyond those ten days but then I met Lupita, the kind woman who runs the Casa, B and S, two young girls who were patient with my rusty high school Spanish, and G, a boy with severe disabilities who was left at the Casa as a baby and would be celebrating his 13th birthday while we were there. About halfway through that first trip, as I sat on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, I realized that I wasn't just on a mission trip. I was falling in love, I would forever be connected with the Casa San José.