The trash truck drives through our neighborhood in Talanga usually about once a week. Even though we have the luxury of a trash truck (in most Honduran neighborhoods, people burn their trash in the front yard because no such municipal service exists), we haven't been taking advantage of it recently because you have to physically put your trash in the back of the truck (no just leaving the bins outside the house) at the appointed hour, which is always between 5 and 5:30 a.m. This not being my ideal wake-up time nor the ideal for any of my house compañeros, we had to pile the trash into the bed of our truck and take it ourselves to the dump that sits close to the edge of town.
This morning as Brooke and I pull up to the dump, I feel my heart in my throat because I see Yeris, a mother of two kids in Comedor, leaning over the edge of a dumpster digging through the trash. Next to her, actually sitting waist deep in the piles is her oldest son, Diego, who is 14 and thus out of Comedor's age range, but still a familiar face to me from the neighborhood.
This actually isn't a shock to see Yeris here, she and her sister are often sifting through the garbage heaps behind the marketplace and in comparison, those dumpsters by the market are even worse than the ones were we are this morning because you have to compete with about half a dozen dogs and other neighborhood kids for anything good to be found in the piles.
Anyway I am trying not to have this emotional reaction, I don't want Yeris to notice and think I'm freaking out - I usually stop by the dumpsters just to chat because there are a number of older siblings of Comedor kids who are always hanging out there, picking through the trash. Comedor was started in the first place after the past volunteers got to know the kids who always by the dump looking for food and eventually figured out that they all came from the same part of town, Nueva San Diego. So that's how the need for a kid's food program was realized and the neighborhood of Neuva, usually referred to as El Pantanal (literally means "the swamp") was chosen.
But at this moment, not only am I embarrassed, dropping off my own enormous bags of trash, which Yeris and Hoche immediately rip open and begin sorting through, I almost cannot catch my breath at the thought of my own mom and 14 year old brother sitting there, digging through these piles that smell absolutely terrible in the baking heat of the sun.
Now that I'm sitting here and thinking about how to write about what this morning felt like, I remember this quote (probably from a yearbook or a greeting card) in a kind of ironic way: Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our break away. I don't think this quote is talking about the kind of 'breath-taking' moments that I'm talking about, but anyway, I feel like I've had a lot recently. Actually, they're more like WTF moments (for those of you who share my generational lexicon).
Not all of the WTF experiences have been as striking or as salient as this morning at the dump, but still they make me think. In one, I am seated in a circle of mothers from a village where we had just explained how to make an oral rehydration solution for babies and children. I never even heard of 'oral rehydration solution' before a month ago although the name is relatively self-explanatory. Here it can be a matter of life and death because kids get such severe diarrhea from parasites and other bacteria in the water that they die of dehydration before they can be seen by a doctor.
In another moment, some of us are weighing the kids, just to keep track of their growth, and Elvin, who is 9 years old and very developmentally delayed, weighed in at 34 pounds. I know my sense of age-appropriate heights and weights is skewed from Comedor kids because they are all skinny but isn't 34 pounds like an appropriate weight for a three year old? It is, I just looked it up online.
Unemployment is such a degrading situation for so many families in Comedor. In a lot of ways, a marginalized urban community like Nueva is worse off than an extrememly isolated, rural community (like Majada Verde where we are working on the potable water project) because those rural families often have a small plot of land of their own to subsistence farm. In Nueva, if not for the dumpsters, I think people would actually starve.
There is such a shortage of jobs of any kind in Honduras (an estimated 36% of the population is unemployed or underemployed), many Comedor moms get inventive. Vanessa sells a kind of fried banana pancake at different bus stops and junkyards during the day. This means that Alex, her 9 year old, is in charge of Yordi (age 3) and Carol (age 1) from 7 am until dark while their mom is walking through the city vending. Jefferson (age 9) collects plastic and aluminum bottles from the street to recycle and we'll often see him out on the highway out of town on the weekends, looking for bottles, when it isn't his turn to accompany his mom to the lumberyard where she works.
Is there a more user-friendly way to communicate what I am witnessing? For the blog, I usually try to keep make the details approachable and censor the ugliness and my own confusion. I guess I'm at the point in this year where I'm having a hard time comprehending this kind of suffering ... and how we can be so blissfully ignorant of this reality in the U.S.
The weird (maybe not weird ... just hard to reconcile) part is that people really are so generous in the States. Everyone hears about the kids, the kids especially, and they want to help. Who wouldn't want to feed Elvin? Probably only Mr. Stooge. But none of us is Mr. Stooge. So we write a check out of our own surplus to feed Elvin, never mind that we don't raise our voices about the global systems that make it so that Elvin's mom cannot feed her son herself.
I think that sometimes our attempts to be good individuals make us sweat the small stuff to the point that our worldview becomes really small. We confess that we're bad friends, parents, children, colleagues etc. at times but forget to ask questions like why does North America account for 34 % of the world´s household wealth and 6% of the world´s adult population. (And no, it's not because the only hard working people in the world are the descendents of the Pilgrims.) Our sense of justice is too limited if we only remember to do right by those immediately surrounding us.
Ultimately, I'm not sure exactly where to focus my disappointment with the ways of the world or how not to become that self-righteous, reproachful person. I think mainly I feel like my own education in school and church was missing some crucial components. How can we be so fixated on personal morality to the point that we are utterly blind the larger social and economic structures that we create, support and participate in that we - not only rob our brothers and sisters of their human dignity - but do it at arm's length so we don't have to witness it?
My own soapbox is a little uncomfortable to stand on, so I'll just end with this small section from a book that I've finally gotten around to reading and is just as great as everyone always said it was. It's Tracy Kidder's book on Paul Farmer (titled Mountains Beyond Mountains) and Farmer's international work, especially in Haiti, as a physician and advocate for a preferential option for the poor:
" How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, "God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us." Liberation theologians had a similar answer: "You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is." "
This morning as Brooke and I pull up to the dump, I feel my heart in my throat because I see Yeris, a mother of two kids in Comedor, leaning over the edge of a dumpster digging through the trash. Next to her, actually sitting waist deep in the piles is her oldest son, Diego, who is 14 and thus out of Comedor's age range, but still a familiar face to me from the neighborhood.
This actually isn't a shock to see Yeris here, she and her sister are often sifting through the garbage heaps behind the marketplace and in comparison, those dumpsters by the market are even worse than the ones were we are this morning because you have to compete with about half a dozen dogs and other neighborhood kids for anything good to be found in the piles.
Anyway I am trying not to have this emotional reaction, I don't want Yeris to notice and think I'm freaking out - I usually stop by the dumpsters just to chat because there are a number of older siblings of Comedor kids who are always hanging out there, picking through the trash. Comedor was started in the first place after the past volunteers got to know the kids who always by the dump looking for food and eventually figured out that they all came from the same part of town, Nueva San Diego. So that's how the need for a kid's food program was realized and the neighborhood of Neuva, usually referred to as El Pantanal (literally means "the swamp") was chosen.
But at this moment, not only am I embarrassed, dropping off my own enormous bags of trash, which Yeris and Hoche immediately rip open and begin sorting through, I almost cannot catch my breath at the thought of my own mom and 14 year old brother sitting there, digging through these piles that smell absolutely terrible in the baking heat of the sun.
Now that I'm sitting here and thinking about how to write about what this morning felt like, I remember this quote (probably from a yearbook or a greeting card) in a kind of ironic way: Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the number of moments that take our break away. I don't think this quote is talking about the kind of 'breath-taking' moments that I'm talking about, but anyway, I feel like I've had a lot recently. Actually, they're more like WTF moments (for those of you who share my generational lexicon).
Not all of the WTF experiences have been as striking or as salient as this morning at the dump, but still they make me think. In one, I am seated in a circle of mothers from a village where we had just explained how to make an oral rehydration solution for babies and children. I never even heard of 'oral rehydration solution' before a month ago although the name is relatively self-explanatory. Here it can be a matter of life and death because kids get such severe diarrhea from parasites and other bacteria in the water that they die of dehydration before they can be seen by a doctor.
In another moment, some of us are weighing the kids, just to keep track of their growth, and Elvin, who is 9 years old and very developmentally delayed, weighed in at 34 pounds. I know my sense of age-appropriate heights and weights is skewed from Comedor kids because they are all skinny but isn't 34 pounds like an appropriate weight for a three year old? It is, I just looked it up online.
Unemployment is such a degrading situation for so many families in Comedor. In a lot of ways, a marginalized urban community like Nueva is worse off than an extrememly isolated, rural community (like Majada Verde where we are working on the potable water project) because those rural families often have a small plot of land of their own to subsistence farm. In Nueva, if not for the dumpsters, I think people would actually starve.
There is such a shortage of jobs of any kind in Honduras (an estimated 36% of the population is unemployed or underemployed), many Comedor moms get inventive. Vanessa sells a kind of fried banana pancake at different bus stops and junkyards during the day. This means that Alex, her 9 year old, is in charge of Yordi (age 3) and Carol (age 1) from 7 am until dark while their mom is walking through the city vending. Jefferson (age 9) collects plastic and aluminum bottles from the street to recycle and we'll often see him out on the highway out of town on the weekends, looking for bottles, when it isn't his turn to accompany his mom to the lumberyard where she works.
Is there a more user-friendly way to communicate what I am witnessing? For the blog, I usually try to keep make the details approachable and censor the ugliness and my own confusion. I guess I'm at the point in this year where I'm having a hard time comprehending this kind of suffering ... and how we can be so blissfully ignorant of this reality in the U.S.
The weird (maybe not weird ... just hard to reconcile) part is that people really are so generous in the States. Everyone hears about the kids, the kids especially, and they want to help. Who wouldn't want to feed Elvin? Probably only Mr. Stooge. But none of us is Mr. Stooge. So we write a check out of our own surplus to feed Elvin, never mind that we don't raise our voices about the global systems that make it so that Elvin's mom cannot feed her son herself.
I think that sometimes our attempts to be good individuals make us sweat the small stuff to the point that our worldview becomes really small. We confess that we're bad friends, parents, children, colleagues etc. at times but forget to ask questions like why does North America account for 34 % of the world´s household wealth and 6% of the world´s adult population. (And no, it's not because the only hard working people in the world are the descendents of the Pilgrims.) Our sense of justice is too limited if we only remember to do right by those immediately surrounding us.
Ultimately, I'm not sure exactly where to focus my disappointment with the ways of the world or how not to become that self-righteous, reproachful person. I think mainly I feel like my own education in school and church was missing some crucial components. How can we be so fixated on personal morality to the point that we are utterly blind the larger social and economic structures that we create, support and participate in that we - not only rob our brothers and sisters of their human dignity - but do it at arm's length so we don't have to witness it?
My own soapbox is a little uncomfortable to stand on, so I'll just end with this small section from a book that I've finally gotten around to reading and is just as great as everyone always said it was. It's Tracy Kidder's book on Paul Farmer (titled Mountains Beyond Mountains) and Farmer's international work, especially in Haiti, as a physician and advocate for a preferential option for the poor:
" How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant, as Farmer would later explain it, "God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us." Liberation theologians had a similar answer: "You want to see where Christ crucified abides today? Go to where the poor are suffering and fighting back, and that's where He is." "