"'Sit and talk with me,' she said. 

"From that moment on, I realized that, if for nothing else, companionship and connection were what these children craved.

"It was not dust in our hair or the sweat on our backs, they would remember, but our hand in theirs.

"A trip like this is life-altering in so many ways, and the images of faces of Liberia will never leave me, but our most cherished gifts were from the hearts of the children of Bromley: their strength and resolve, which strengthened us, their purest love which overflowed our hearts, their hope which feeds our hope, and their radient smiles which still fill our days."

The Mission Team arrived as the “givers,” but left as the recipients of the love so freely given by these children who, in the end, gave so much more than they recieved. 

“I began to fully comprehend the charge that Jesus entrusted to all of us,”  Haeringer said. “To be his hands and his feet and his mouth while we are privileged enough to walk the earth.  I moved more deeply into the understanding of that universal truth that we human beings need each other, that as Margaret Rizza wrote in Mysterium Amoris, 'The meaning of life is the mystery of love.'"