GREENFIELD — It’s a moment that doesn’t get old for Aaron Greenwalt.
It comes after the journey to another country, the digging of holes, the assembly of playground pieces, the pouring and setting of concrete: It’s when a community comes together, the countdown is counted off, and children run to the playground and start climbing on it.
Often, it’s the first time they’ve played on a playground. Broad smiles break out, and their parents’ hand-wringing about whether they’ll know how to climb it fades.
“The kids — that’s pretty awesome, just seeing their faces,” Greenwalt said. “They always know what to do.”
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The 2005 Greenfield-Central High School graduate traveled to Grenada in February with a team from Kids Around the World. During their week there, team members installed one refurbished playground at a school on the northern tip of the island. They installed another at Youth With a Mission’s Grenada base, which invites local children to tutoring clubs.
“We are pretty excited about the new addition to the base!” YWAM Grenada posted on its Facebook page with a photo of the playground.
It was Greenwalt’s sixth trip with the Kids Around the World, a Rockford, Illinois-based ministry that began installing refurbished and new playgrounds around the world in 1994. The organization has since added other facets to its work, such as sending rice-and-nutrient meals packaged at packing events and offering training for teaching Bible stories to children and their families.
Greenwalt, who is part of Brown’s Chapel Wesleyan Church in Greenfield, learned about Kids Around the World through a church in the Marco Island, Florida, area that his family attends when visiting Florida.
He took his first trip with the organization several years ago to deliver a playground to Cuba. Other trips have followed: Romania, North Carolina, Mexico, Cuba again. Through those trips, he’s not only ministered to people in those locations but has also built relationships with fellow repeat team members and staff of the organization. “They’re all very passionate about kids,” he said.
One of those friends made is Mike Young, who works in pastoral/staff care at the organization and has led trips Greenwalt has taken.
“What an amazing young man. He’s a quiet, working heart,” Young said of the local attorney. “Anything that needs to be done, he’ll jump in and do it.”
Young estimates Kids Around the World has installed more than 830 playgrounds during its 25 years. About 60 to 70 more are housed in a warehouse, waiting for sponsorship.
To extract a playground, replace rubber decks and any other worn parts, give a fresh coat of paint and house the equipment until delivery costs about $15,000, he said, and shipping adds a few thousand more dollars depending on destination. But it’s still more affordable than $45,000 to $50,000 to buy a new commercial-grade playground, he added.
He cites research touting the developmental benefits and social skills-building of playing on a playground and points out that in most places KATW installs playgrounds, “The kids have very little activities to not only give them a safe place to play, but something that benefits them.”
He’s also seen results from playgrounds of the kind quantifiable by research — the way a playground opens a door to give New Testaments to children in their language, or the moments of joy for a child who’s experienced hardship or tragedy.
He talks about a playground installed in Haiti after a 2010 earthquake. A little girl who’d lost her family and the lower part of a leg crushed in the rubble was at the playground dedication. Doctors would later tell Young she’d been silent over the previous three months.
Yet as she emerged from the tunnel of a tube slide, “The smile on her face lit up the sky,” Young said. “That’s the kind of hope that play brings to a child who doesn’t have a reason for hope.”
Greenwalt is hopeful that the playgrounds in Grenada will be a safe and positive place for children living in what he said some call “the broken paradise,” where the beauty of nature abounds but where alcoholism is prevalent and many children don’t have fathers involved in their lives.
He also doesn’t expect it to be his last playground-installing trip.
“I’m already looking at some others,” he said. “I keep my eye out.”
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To learn more about sponsoring a playground or traveling on an impact team with Kids Around the World, visit kidsaroundtheworld.com.
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