My Best Experience

One’s life can truly be measured based on the experiences that he or she embarks upon.   I have been blessed with an abundance of extremely positive experiences in my life.  Perhaps the best experience of my life occurred less than a month ago, as I was given a once in a lifetime opportunity.  I was selected by Molloy College to participate in a new program, called Experience El Salvador, which allowed me to travel to El Salvador to run a boys and girls’ camp.    This trip has proved to be the best experience of my life, as it provided me with a newfound appreciation for life, permitted me to make life long friends, and most importantly allowed me to go out into the world and do good.

            I traveled to El Salvador as a missionary to give the children who live there the best week of their life.  Three students from Molloy College and four students from Dominican College accompanied me on this trip.  Through collaborating and working together, we were certainly able to achieve our main goal of providing these children with hope as well as the best week of their lives.  The most remarkable aspect of this experience was that it did not appear that we did much at all, but to the children what we did was everything.   The gratitude that these children displayed for acts as simple as a piggyback ride still resonates with me today.  I set out to provide these children, who are much less privileged than I am, with the best week of their lives, but in reality they provided me with the best week of my life.

            I still remain in contact with many of the families from El Salvador today.  We communicate about what can be done to make the lives of their children in El Salvador better.  The families continually express their thanks, and inform me that we inspired their children to want to be more.  This truly must be the best feeling in the world.  Now that I am back in the United States, I have been brainstorming about different things that can be done to help my new family in El Salvador.  This upcoming semester, we are holding various fundraisers on campus, and we began a drive collecting toothbrushes and toothpaste.  I will never forget the children of El Salvador, and they will always hold a special place in my heart.  I live my life around the idea that it is important to go out into the world and do well, but it is more important to go out into the world and do good.  This is exactly what this experience allowed me to do.

El Salvador Experience

Vocabulary: 
Embark: (verb) to set out on or begin something
Abundance: (noun) a very large amount
Occur: (verb) to take place
Permitted: (verb) allowed
Missionary: (noun) a person who is sent by a church or religious order to a foreign country to teach, convert, heal, or serve.
Accompany: (verb) to go with
Collaborate: (verb) to work with someone else on a project
Remarkable: (adj) unusual or exceptional
Gratitude: (noun) the feeling of being thankful
Display: (verb)to cause to be seen
Resonate: (verb) to resound; echo
Brainstorm: (verb) to find ways of solving problems by having members of a group talk freely about their ideas.

Vocabulary Activity:
Match the word to its definition.
Embark:                                                                                To show
Abundance:                                                                          To remain with
Occur:                                                                                     Allowed
Permitted:                                                                             To begin
Missionary:                                                                           To work together
Accompany:                                                                          To think out loud together
Collaborate:                                                                          A lot of
Remarkable:                                                                        Thankfulness
Gratitude:                                                                             To happen
Display:                                                                                 A servant of the church
Resonate:                                                                              to go with
Brainstorm:                                                                         Outstanding

Grammar Point:
Being that this event happened in the past, almost all of the verbs were written in the past tense.  When changing a regular verb to the past tense you must add -ed to the end of the verb.  Can you find any examples of this in the writing?

Grammar Activity:
Write a short journal entry about what you did last summer.  Be sure to use the correct tense.