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Es loco! Es loco!" Five little brown hands covered five giggling mouths. Apparently, these clamoring little girls who wanted to "help" me paint their bedroom in the orphanage hadn't understood a word of my broken Spanish. Whatever I had said must have sounded pretty weird, because now they were calling me crazy.

Eight months earlier, I was feeling pretty crazy as I sat in a planning meeting for our two-week trip to Maracay, Venezuela. I was only 14. I'd never even been out of the Midwest without my parents, let alone gone to another country. And I wasn't at all sure how to share the gospel with people who'd never heard it. I wondered what I was getting myself into.

When I first arrived in Venezuela, I felt like I was in paradise. Little brown children with gorgeous black hair swarmed all around me, begging for my attention. They loved to give me hugs and sit on my lap, and they were desperate to be held and loved. I sure wasn't complaining about that!

I love kids, and these were some of the most lovable I'd ever met. They didn't whine for toys or grumble about their surroundings. They simply enjoyed life. And though they looked at us, the strange Americans, with wide-eyed fascination, they accepted us as though we had always been there. But we didn't just want the girls to accept us—what we really wanted was for them to accept Jesus.

My two-week missions trip in Maracay opened up a whole new world for me. The members of my church group spent the majority of our time working on the orphanage. The building needed a new roof, a new ceiling and new paint. Despite much rain, sore muscles and any number of dead mice and rats, the structural projects were fairly simple to accomplish. But our real mission—introducing the orphans to the God who loved them—was a bit more challenging.

The 12 little girls at the orphanage had almost nothing—two changes of clothing apiece and a small box of toys for all of them. They all lived together in two rooms, neither one as large as my bedroom at home. Their meals were sparse, and none of them had any extra pounds on their skinny bodies.

But their poverty wasn't what struck me hardest. What truly blew me away was their trust, their openness and their willingness to love and be loved. Each of these girls had faced more hardship in her short five or 10 years than I would in my entire life. Most had been abandoned by their parents, but not one was bitter or angry. They were mostly happy, content, and thankful to have a home and "sisters." It was obvious to me that God had been protecting these girls all along, preparing their hearts to receive his love from a bunch of "loco" teenagers.

By the second week of our stay with these girls, we had each "adopted" one or two of the girls as our special friends. I'd become quite close to Claudia, a tiny 8-year-old. She followed me everywhere, getting a big kick out of "helping" me with whatever I was doing, even following me up a ladder to help me clean the rats' nests out from the dropped ceiling. "Loco" continued to be my nickname, and I loved to hear her say it as she waited for me at the gates of the orphanage each morning.

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