HI my name is Carmelo Batista, I was El Lider Del Dia (the leader of the day) and today’s theme was poverty. We attacked this theme with two questions: what resources are needed by people experiencing poverty and how do you define poverty? I now understand that no matter how low my life is, someone has it worse than me and they could still smile. Today I was cleaning shoes with a kid named Carlos who was a sixteen-year-old working on a busy Saturday morning. As I was trying to unlock the skills of shoe shining, Carlos and I had a conversation about poverty. I always tried to avoid saying that word while speaking with him because I didn’t want to darken the mood. But Carlos was completely different from what I thought the word poverty marks people as. He was laughing with me when we were exchanging stories of how our home treats us. By the end of that he was smiling, I thought poverty would make you forget about the good things about life but for Carlos he found something to be happy about when he had nothing. That made me feel bad that I take things lightly when someone who almost my age works hard just for five dollars to feed his family every morning. Being leader today showed me that no matter how hard things are I can still push with a smile on my face. It took a sixteen-year-old boy to show me what the line before this one really means.