My name is Abigail Marshall, and I just recently returned from serving as a missionary for the LDS Church three months ago in Brasilia, Brazil. It was an incredible experience, being able to spend a year and half among a people I’d known so little about before, and I came to truly love their culture and admire the people.
When I first came in contact with Ascend Alliance, I was reminded a little of my experience as a missionary because of the selfless efforts made by those who live so far from the lives of those they are helping. I often wondered as a missionary how I would be able to relate to a people whose language I had only just learned, and what they would think of me as the foreigner. I learned quickly that when one is dedicated to helping others that every wall and difference seems to vanish and is replaced by a better understanding of the culture, the people, and their needs.
Being a missionary, I passed through different places in which I could see the temporal needs of the people. The Brazilian culture is a generally hospitable one, and neighbors weren’t hesitant to lend the occasional cup of sugar, even when they had little to give, but there was often too much need for it all to be met. It reminded me that no matter how much good we do, or how much we give there will always be someone, somewhere that needs help.
Although most of our work as missionaries consisted of improving lives by personal change and belief, that’s not to say that we didn’t have some opportunities to help temporally. There was a time when I’d been serving in the city Lago Sul that some of our friends recruited us to help clean up one of the churches in the area. Between Karin, Bruno, my missionary companion and I, it took us about three hours to clean one room of the church, thanks to the dirt that it had accrued over months of not being thoroughly cleaned. We scrubbed tile, cleaned out closets, hosed down mats, dusted out cob webs, and killed families upon families of spiders, and even found an opossum living in one of the cupboards. Did I mention this was the nursery where all the children played? It was nauseating, but it stands out in my mind as one of the greatest experiences I had on the mission, because we were able to contribute something a little bit more this time.
Service doesn’t have to be something big. Really, sometimes the smallest acts of service mean the most to people. That’s why service is possible anywhere, even within your own home. Homemade cookies, a phone call, cleaning leaves out of the rain gutter are all simple enough to be done without even leaving the block: the important thing is that we reach out. Our purpose in life seems to be to improve the quality of our lives, and I can attest that I’ve never felt a greater satisfaction than when I was giving of myself for somebody else’s sake.
So many people in the world don’t have the resources we’re so lucky to have here. There’s a strong need in every part of the world for more service, Brazil included, and there’s nothing that opens the eyes so much as being in the middle of that need. Could I have imagined the difference it made in my life? Never. But it gave me a desire to help continually, no matter where I am, and that has made a big difference in my life. I guess you could say that Brazil and I did each other a favor, although I feel much more indebted to the people there for the change I saw in myself than the good I did that impacted them.
