Subject: Pictures...what, what!!!

Hey Jay! I hope this finds you doing well! I wanted to let you know that I just uploaded a new set of pictures from the school. They turned out really well and I think they might be useful for fundraising and for your students to spread the word about what they will be doing and who they will be working with. I also made a video, which is crazy hard so mad PROPS for all the videos you have put together for the mission trips.The pictures are on facebook and tell the students they can feel free to tag themselves so that they can share with everyone in their network. To be honest, their friends can tag themselves too because the more people that see it and hear about it, the better. The video will be on my blog (well that is if it ever uploads!) and we can do the same thing with facebook (not really sure how to make that happen, tag the post?). I also wanted to talk to you more about the work you are doing as I also think that can aid in raising the energy around the project and getting people involved whether it is donating a dollar or 500 (lets dream big, life is too short not to). Drumroll Please!!!! You all will be the architects of an amazing learning environment where school is a magical place that teaches you about all the secrets the world has to offer. Together with students, you all will be painting murals, cleaning up the library and making the school an enjoyable place to be. You will interact with students to let them know that "Look!" there are so many sides to Americans. Just like there are many different kinds of Vincentians, oh the ones from Layou wear cropped pants and the ones from Georgetown write "Gully" everywhere, the world, not just their homeland of St.Vincent, is FULL of people who are different and you know what, ahhwee (all we), meaning the college students from WCU and the primary school students from LGS, kind of get along quite nicely so doesn't that mean that the whole world can get along. See, when you start to have kids thinking like that, that is when you are really promoting world peace and friendship. Love is viral. If these kids can learn something from you all in the week that you are here it will be that someone, from a completely different planet, can come to my planet and is capable of showing me a hug that is so overwhelmingly full of love, maybe even more than I can get from my own mother, that the world is a small place and really all of us are linked together through the one simple fact that we are humans and we have tender souls that are yearning for love.Through love and a recognition of belonging to the wildest bunch of Doc Martins* that have ever existed, that is to say humanity, a child will be able to find within himself a seed of hope. Just a little bit of light and water from teachers, pastors**, neighbors, family and friends and there you have it, that little seed of hope is growing into a nice, strong tree. I, for one, have always found it downright amazing how trees have the ability to spread their happiness around the world (like it is just the most natural thing to do). You see, if the world was full of people who had trees of hope growing inside of them, we would stop all this nonsense, all this war, all this meanness and realize that life is too short to allow anything but love to come out of us and that in giving, you shall receive.

You all will be lifechangers, seed planters, difference makers.

so just in case I forget to say it in the future, thanks for planning all this out. i know it is not the easiest thing to organize and that there are football games you might rather be watching (either Noah's or some European league) but what you are doing, simply by giving all students at WCU the opportunity to have this once in a lifetime experience that will open their hearts and their minds to always being on the lookout for someone else who they can link souls with, whether it is in Guatemala*** or a kid in their class who looks like life might have dealt him a hand that was harder to make a winner.

You, you are the stuff heroes are made of. A real role model of sorts.

The world. It is. A good place. To be

love smithers

PS- I am putting this on my blog, I know it is our personal emails but shoot, I figured there are people out there reading my blog and they need to hear about the wonderful things you all are fixin to do (would you call that Carolina dialect?!)

PPS- I may request that you bring along strange things like thai curry paste, italian gelato (more on this mordern marvel when you arrive) or exercise balls. Brace yourself, the requests are always small but they get quirkier by the day.... don't they call this cabin (island) fever?

*Doc Martin(s): this guy was an AWESOME gunslinger in the wild, wild west. For additional research material be sure to watch "tombstone."

**pastors: by pastors I mean the golden gems in our community who guide us through our journey of faith in a way that dignifies us as curious humans who often fall short of acting on the intentions of our heart. These are people who remind us that the meditations of the heart, the yearning for peace around us is not just a fairytale or an afterlife (does it make me thuggy that I really wanted to write crackpipe dream?!) but a real possibility while we are on earth. Well, at least the good ones do it and aid humanity along in its struggle to take just one step forward.

***I have been working with Jay for the past few years. We originally took at group from the University of Ohio to Rabinal, Guatemala to build with Habitat for Humanity's Global Village program. We then took a second group from WCU back to Rabingal with GV. Amazingly, a student, organized a trip the year after the GVtrip, by partnering with one of our translators and working with a program for malnourished children. Needless to say, the town of Rabinal holds a special place in the organizational heart of the Wesley Student Foundation at WCU.