Charity: Homelessness and New York

When you think of charity, what do you think of? Helping, unfortunate people, the poor. Many people think of many different things when they do think of charity, they also all think differently when they think of the meaning of charity. Truth is, charity can be a lot of things, but to me it is only one thing, and this story here is to tell you, the reader, what charity means to me.

Every year, in the first week of June, I go with my church on a mission trip. Every year we go somewhere different, and I’ve only been on two, but the one that impacted me the most would have to be the summer I went to New York City. Now New York is a big city, many things go down in New York, so yes, I will admit to you that I was scared to go. Luckily, I over came my fear and head into the trip as confident and a championship boxer heading into a match with a tomato can. When we got there, it was a mess. It seemed like everywhere I looked there was a homeless person sitting among the trees or and beggar on the street asking everyone who walked by for money, I was definitely in another world. But when I saw these people, I didn’t feel fear, I felt sorrow. I wanted to help, I wanted to give that guy a home or give that woman some food, but considering I am a 15-year-old girl. I was helpless.

Everyday we went somewhere different, and about three days into the trip my family group leader had announced to my group that we would be going to the homeless shelter, I was actually thrilled by the fact that we were going. This was the one thing that I actually wanted to do. When we got there, we immediately started passing out food to all the people, after we were done surviving all the people, we had the chance to go and talk to them. Not only was it fun to get to know them and listen to there stories, but the looks on there faces when we were talking to them was honestly so priceless. You could tell how happy they all were that we were there to talk to them and asks them about their