When I think about what made me who I am today, I think of last summer when I was in Tecate, Mexico. I went to Tecate for a mission's trip with about 15 other high school students from my church. This was my second trip to Tecate with my church and we were going to be doing the same type of work down there-build a house for a family and help run a VBS. Since I had gone on the same trip the summer before, I knew what to expect and I had the mindset that I was going to serve God by helping to build the house and by running VBS.

When I got there, I still had that mindset for the first 3 days; it wasn't until the 4^th day that my mindset changed. As I was helping to paint one of the walls of the house, one of the neighbor girls, Liliana (4 years old), started to beg me to go play soccer with her (during the day, about 3 people from the team would go play with the neighbor kids, while everyone else worked on the house). I looked out the door and saw that there were already 6 of us playing with the kids. I tried my best to convince her to play with the other neighbors and my other teammates because I was so focused on serving God by building this house, but for some reason she didn't want to play with anybody else, she wanted to play with me. So I decided that I would go play with her for 15minutes and then go back to working on the house.

We began to play soccer, but she quickly changed her mind and decided that she wanted a piggyback ride instead. So I put her on my back and started to run around and twirl around like she wanted me to. While I was giving Liliana piggyback rides, her older sister and my friend Lindsay came over to play with us. As the girls were climbing all over us, I noticed on Lindsay's t-shirt (the team t-shirt) that it said "Amar es servir" and the English translation (to love is to serve) right below it.