Children of the Mission :: Babysitting Descriptive Personal Narrative Essays

Children of the MissionA few teenagers atomic number 18 session on the ground at a lower place a network of slides. There are a few younger children there with them, doing the various things children do at five years old. The mottled sunlight creates exotic patterns across the faces of those under the network of slides, and it plays with the features of the smaller children on their laps. A slight breeze picks up every now and then, but for the first time in a week its a warm breeze that brings cheer, rather than rain. One tot finds the camera stowed under a teenagers knee. This is an object of mystery. Another child grabs the progress to of an older girl, showing her the round, convex mirror in the shade that shows a distorted chain of mountains of the entire playground.For some reason, that mirror is the principal image I remember from our day of babysitting. It measured nigh two feet in diameter, and in its metallic reflection, every one appeared as a shot blob, or, if a pe rson was lucky, he had eyes and a wide-open mouth. Everything looked rearwards and uniform in that mirror, and it fascinated me. The irony in my attraction to it is that tho as when I looked into the mirror, when I looked at the playground around me that afternoon, I was blind to what was actually there. The sun, the breeze, and the delightful children all combined in my science to look like something I thought I knew. It is only now, terzetto and a half months later, that I realize I was not satisfactory to comprehend much of anything I saw that day.Our rooftop daycare is located about a half mile from the intersection of Wilson and Wilson in Upt testify Chicago. It occupies the roof of the Uptown Mission and Homeless Shelter. The Shelter crouches on a wide, deceptively clean street where the shadows have eyes and the sharp stench of pee permeates the air. Last summer, our youth group came here as missionaries to try to military service the homeless people. On this particul ar sunny afternoon, we were to baby-sit their children. However, since there were to a greater extent babysitters than children, I wonder how effective our effort actually was. As I sat watching the kids run in and out, my mind flooded with memories of my own childhood. I noticed that despite the difference between the adults whod grown up in upper-middle-class Topeka and those who were homeless in Chicago, there existed many similar characteristics between the children in both conditions.