Student Profiles: Taylor Strength
Sophomore Taylor Strength could have stayed at home and participated in homecoming festivities or have had a normal sweet sixteen birthday party, but after hearing how life changing her church’s mission trips to San Salvador, El Salvador were, she instead found herself en route to a new week long adventure abroad on September 26.
“My mom went last year and was talking about how amazing it was,” Strength said. “This year it was on my birthday and I didn’t want to go, but I felt a pull to go so I went.”
Strength has gone on mission trips to Houston since she was in seventh grade, but this year El Salvador was the biggest mission trip that she has attended to date.
“I just love mission work. It’s fun,” Strength said. “I started out doing things in Houston and we would go to the Third Ward-which is the poorest part of Houston- and pick up trash, paint houses, and play with the kids there.”
Despite the fact that El Salvador is a completely different country, Strength had some similar experiences as her two other trips to Houston.
“We went to a church in El Salvador and we hung out with the kids and played games with them,” Strength said. “The kids my age spoke some English but the younger kids couldn’t understand English at all. We always had to have translators because we couldn’t understand them and they couldn’t understand us.”
Strength visited with other members of the church in El Salvador, but spent most of her time on her mission trip with the local children.
“The kids were so sweet and they were hugging all over you because they live in a really poor part of El Salvador,” Strength said. “They don’t have parents or they have parents who are in gangs and do drugs so they aren’t always loved. It was just fun getting to love on them.”
Strength may have missed out on some of the homecoming festivities back at home, but she did not miss out on celebrating her sixteenth birthday in El Salvador on September 30.
“It was my birthday and a guy named Alberto and other church members came out with guitars and started singing,” Strength said. “It was all in Spanish so I didn’t understand what they were saying but the church did and they were like “ooooh” and I didn’t get a word he said. And then he gave me his guitar pick and gave me a hug and that was it. It was so cute.”
Other birthday festivities included hiking to a waterfall, visiting a local beach resort and indulging in a wedding cake that was accidentally delivered instead of a birthday cake. Even though attending a mission trip during the school year meant a pile of makeup work and missing out on activities with her friends and youth group, Strength would definitely do it all over again.
“Everyone in El Salvador is so grateful for what they have and here everyone complains about everything,” Strength said. “That was hard because I feel so different now.”
Strength, who is involved in choir and who loves to read, has definite plans to travel to El Salvador again next year.
“Leaving El Salvador was so hard and it makes you want to go back again,” Strength said. “The people were very nice; they don’t even know you but you become their family. It feels like a second home there.”
