Juice and graham crackers

We went to an orphanage yesterday. It was what one would expect in Guatemala: dirty, understaffed and overcrowded. I've been to places like this enough that I am no longer shocked at the conditions. There were about eighty children. They were all beautiful and most of them were naughty in that endearing child way. Allegra and I went armed with a hundred balloons and small pumps. The children mobbed us and we asked them to form a line. The first kid in line was smashed against our stomachs and our backs were to a wall. We were cornered by a mob of kids, our only defense was the arsenal of balloons. We inflated and we inflated. We got tired but we kept inflating because it was the best we could do to give these children a little joy. Most of their joy seemed to come from popping those balloons and then getting back in line to ask for a different color. I started to get claustrophobic and annoyed about giving new balloons to the same kids who just popped them. I started to feel overwhelmed by how many children there were and how many needs they had. I started to feel the weight of an unjust, upsidedown world that doesn't care fo the innocent and vulnerable. I started feeling bad... but then I made myself let go of the world's problems and just worry about the balloons.
I didn't do anything to change the lives of those children. I am not going to take one home. I did not give them money or clothes or food or anything very useful. All I did was find the strength to stand there for two hours between a wall and a mob, blowing up balloons. Sometimes that is all you can do.
It is like this:
"This is life's nature: lives and hearts get broken--those of people we love, those of people we'll never meet. She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes. You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and graham crackers" (Ann Lamott, Traveling Mercies, p. 106).