Agros Blog

Little entrepreneurs changing the world

A couple weeks ago, 11 year old Rachel Lingenbrink and her mother Terri arrived at our offices in Seattle’s U-District laden with a shoe-box of luscious vine ripened tomatoes, sweet golden yellow tear-drops, and red cherry-toms. Rachel also carried with her a Tupperware container filled with cash ready to give it all as her part in supporting a Guatemalan village called Xeucalvitz , which in the Ixil language means “Half-way up the Mountain”. Rachel has been three times to this remote Agros village of nearly 100 families, endearing herself to the kids there, broadening her worldview, and seeing the plight of the rural poor through tender eyes as only one so young can.

This summer, as part of her family’s growing commitment to serve the poor, she and her mother spent two weeks in the beautiful Spanish colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, immersed in an intensive Spanish language program. Meanwhile, her older sister Sarah (13) was immersed in an ecological program in Costa Rica. Father/husband Steve kept the home-fires going in his law-practice, knowing that what he’d gotten his family into by venturing forth four years prior on that first trip to Xeucalvitz was bearing fruit in ways he’d hoped, beaming on his way into the office, eager to check the latest e-mails from down South!

While in Antigua, Rachel’s enterprising mind kicked into gear, fueled by Terri’s encouragement, to purchase colorful woven bracelets called “pulseras”. The child vendors of Antigua often peddle them along the cobbled streets of the city. Rachel thought she could do the same back home along the paved promenade of her neighborhood. Her idea was to open a lemonade stand with her sister and sell pulseras for the poor, telling would be buyers of their heart for helping those less fortunate in a high mountain village far away.

After biting into a sweet golden yellow tear-drop tomato, I led Rachel and her mother Terri into the accounting office carrying the purple-topped Tupperware treasure chest she’d handed me, and introduced her to Claudia Alvarenga-Beech, asking if she could give Sarah a full-accounting and receipt. As the pennies, quarters and bills spilled onto Claudia’s desk, her calculator began to sing as she tabulated the total…a whopping $89.26!! A minute later the printer hummed, producing the receipted accomplishment, handed over to a grinning Rachel.

This type of sacrificial and creative giving exemplifies a heart-felt response, which all of us long to nurture and release when we pause long enough to think about it. So be it a lemonade stand or some other expression, may you and I be encouraged to step outside the “box of comfort” we tend to insulate our lives with, and listen for what we might do too.

Thank you Sarah and Rachel, may your gift and the spirit behind it, touch hearts that read this to “go and do likewise”