Each year around the first of November (the date on which the "Day of the Dead" [Dia de los Muertos] is celebrated), kites become quite prominent in the skies of much of Guatemala. Some communities celebrate festivals featuring giant kites such as those in the photo above and the video below.
Per tradition, the giant kites began as an attempt to ward off bothersome evil spirits. More recently, the constructing and flying of vividly colored gigantic kites has evolved into a community wide celebration. Many of the kites carry messaging to draw awareness to different struggles faced by the population.
A few days ago our youngest child, Taylor, got in on the kite-flying action... albeit on a smaller scale and with more modest ambitions. He was not seeking to chase off evil spirits from our driveway. Rather, he was quite content to have a brief reprieve from schoolwork (kindergarten- specifically, sitting relatively still in one location- is apparently fairly taxing).
I think we all can appreciate the symbolism found in the simplicity of a kite flying through the air. There is an intrinsic inspirational quality felt when one witnesses a kite, big or small, propelled by unseen forces to greater and greater heights, lightly, but defiantly, challenging gravity's pull.
As an organization, we seek to embody many of those same characteristics- light, colorful, buoyed by hope, and constantly challenging the purported constraints of reality as we strive to provide world-class healthcare to our underserved patient population (i.e. our neighbors).
~Thank you for flying with us.
Top Photo:
SantiagoGG, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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