Westminster Christian School senior Gabriella Zenoz lost count of her community service hours after 4,000 or so. Zenoz is Westminster’s Silver Knight nominee in the area of Social Science.
A few years ago, Zenoz moved back to Miami after her grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. Her desire to help her grandmother led to the creation of her foundation, Loving Smile.
“The people I connect the most with are the elderly and children,” she says. “I felt those two age groups need the most love.”
Because her grandmother was in the Golden Age (Edad de Oro) group at her church, she started doing events for that group first, joining forces with the ministry’s founder.
“We do arts and crafts, we sing songs with them, we have the Golden Age Olympics,” she says. “We’ll bring a speaker in. We’ll serve them breakfast. Most are lonely. We spend a lot of time with them and make sure they are heard. We’ll be their grandchildren for the day.”
Those events are held every second Saturday of the month, transportation is provided, as needed.
Once a month they go to the Chapman Partnership for the Homeless in Homestead.
“We do monthly field days with the children over there,” she says. “We want the kids to use the day and remember that they are still kids. I try to make it as fun as possible.”
They bring bounce houses, do face painting. They play games on the soccer field and the basketball courts. They take a cake and celebrate all the birthday for the month.
At school, Zenoz is the Missions Club president. She’s been on missionary trips to Nicaragua and Cuba and helped organize a trip to Ecuador. This summer they plan to go to Guatemala.
“The summer of 2016 I went to Cuba,” she says. “That was the first missionary trip I took. I was there for 16 days. We did a small vacation bible school. We brought clothing, toys, medical supplies and we went from home to home, helping these families.”
When she went to Nicaragua, they built a house for a family. They also visited a school and brought backpacks filled with hygiene products, school supplies, accessories and toys. She was there for seven days.
“That same year, I went with a different group and we went back to Nicaragua,” she says. “We were there for 16 days. It was like the Cuba trip where we brought clothes, school and medical supplies and went from house to house.”
She was back in Niagara in February where they built another house in Managua.
While she did not go to Ecuador, she initiated the collection of items for the victims of the 2016 earthquake. Loving Smiles, working alongside “Moms for Ecuador,” the City of Miami-Dade County Schools and the Red Cross held collection drives at 155 public schools and 11 private schools. In all, they sent 200,000 pounds of goods to Ecuador.
At school, Zenoz is a member of drama. She played volleyball from fifth grade through last year and she also participated in track and field.
Zenoz plans to keep going forward with Loving Smile no matter which college she attends. She’s been accepted to five universities and is waiting to hear from 10 others.
“My dream is to become a physician and open a children’s hospital financed by research and providing free medicine to those in impoverished countries or even our country,” she says.
Zenoz is being honored by the Miracle Society of Big Brothers Big Sisters as the Youth Award recipient for 2018.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
