By Sarah Estevez

St. Agnes A.H.S., College Point, has always fostered in me a purpose of helping and serving others in my community.

 Our prayer to St. Agnes of Montepulciano asks us to love all with whom we come in contact, as well as help us understand who God wants us to be.

Over the summer, I decided to attend an Operation Smile International Student Leadership Conference in Ireland and become more aware of God’s calling to help others.

Operation Smile is an organization that sends American doctors overseas to perform surgeries on children born with a cleft lip or palate. Operation Smile’s co-founders are Dr. William P. Magee and Kathy Magee.

Cleft lip and palate are both congenital deformities that appear as splits in either the lip or palate of its host. Those who have these facial anomalies suffer great physical discomfort, even death, as well as social problems of being bullied or ostracized.

I came into contact with many different people from around the world while I was at the leadership conference. Many of them spoke only broken English, but the way we communicated was through smiling at one another.

Smiling is said to be a universal language, and by smiling to one another, we were able to break the language barrier. We realized we all shared the same goal.

Our goal was that we wanted to help fix the smiles of facial cleft patients. This is because we understood that being able to smile was the true key of humanity uniting.

Everyone at the conference wanted to be part of a chain reaction in which they helped inspire change. We not only wanted to be leaders but also part of the big picture. We knew that we needed each other to help out Operation Smile because it was too big to handle alone.

At the leadership conference, we listened to influential speakers who lectured on what the makeup of a leader is. A leader is not necessarily the smartest person or a person in a high position. A true leader is a person who can truly listen to others with an open mind and tries to inspire others to help their cause.

I believe in the Scripture saying, “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another” (Romans 12: 4-5).

This is true because we all make up the body of Christ, and we all have different gifts and talents to contribute to society.

At this conference, we acknowledged each other’s talents, and we used them and our similar goal of wanting to fix smiles to link us together in a chain reaction.

Our International Student Leadership Conference’s chain reaction continues, and our goal is to build an Operation Smile hospital in Paraguay.

I am so grateful to have been able to attend this conference because I came away with a greater appreciation for humanity, and I want to make a difference in the world.

My biggest wish is to be able to go on an Operation Smile mission to help out and see surgeries being performed.

I also wish to go on a mission to see lives changed for the better – one smile at a time.