We met Evan toward the beginning of our time in Sarah Court. He has always been fun and full of energy. We’d always drop in and say hi to Evan and his family, and he eventually began coming to tutoring. Each week after tutoring, when we would drop the kids off at their apartments, Evan would take off running, hoping we’d engage a game of tag. Sometimes we’d play and sometimes we’d wait for him to come back and take him to Erica’s apartment. Erica, Evan’s mom, told Anna that he struggled to connect with things at home. Brought up speaking Spanish, Evan lost much of the language once he began school, given that his classes were in English. Evan also struggled from Alopecia, a condition where he lost hair in patches. It caused him to be isolated in ways from his lively, close family.
Evan is a constant. With us each week at tutoring and at every day of the summer camp, our whole team knows Evan and has developed a real care for his story. Last month, Anna noticed Evan started to look different. His hair, she thought, was darker. The next week, Evan was lying through his tutoring lesson. Where he was struggling with reading, unable to give attention to words and their meanings, he comprehended everything he read. It was impossible not to notice Evan’s changes.
When Anna went by Erica’s that week, she told Anna that everything had changed for Evan. Not only was he reading and doing better in school, but he was also picking Spanish back up. He was engaging at home. And, yes, his Alopecia had subsided. Erica, grateful, said that the only change in Evan’s life had been the tutoring center. She said he wakes up every Saturday excited and waits for us to knock at his door. She said she knew it was helping him, and that the help was impacting much more than school. Anna relayed the information to our team, revealing that the Lord was using the tutoring center to heal Evan.
And, at our last tutoring session of the semester, when Evan finished his lesson and began sprinting across the field, it was hard not to notice the Evan giggling, waiting to play tag that week, was not the same Evan we had met in the beginning.
– A Boy With a Ball Love Story
