Today at St. Jude’s in Beirut…

I just got back from volunteering at St. Jude’s in Beirut, which is why I haven’t posted anything all day. Even though I’ve been volunteering there for a year, I still look forward to seeing the kids each week, as if I just started volunteering.

Today, a four and half year old boy from Dahiyeh entered the playroom wearing a t-shirt that said: ALWAYS HAPPY SPIRIT. When I asked his mother, draped in a black chador from head to toe, if she knew what his shirt said, she shook her head. “We don’t know English,” she said, asking me to translate. When I translated these three words for her into Arabic, she finally smiled, took a deep breath, and sat down.

While her son and I were playing with these toy dinosaurs, he gave the T-Rex some french fries–before making it play the piano with its feet. Though he was bald and quite ill, you would never know from the enthusiasm with which he was playing with his toys just how much he was suffering. And every time I looked at him across the table, I saw written in big letters on his shirt: ALWAYS HAPPY SPIRIT.