I understand now the frustration of this sort of endeavor; to try to raise awareness on a topic to have a handful of people jump onboard to join you in the fight, but for the most part, to raise people's awareness for a day or a week or a month, but only to have them go back to their day to day lives where they live in America, get in their cars, drive to their jobs, go out to grab food because they forgot to pack a lunch, come home, make dinner, sit down and watch a couple episodes of Grey's Anatomy on dvd and then head to their beds. I know this because this is what I did today.
I go through phases of being more aware of the world around me, but for the most part, I am a girl completely devoid of any social responsibility to those who are in situations that are not as good as mine. The sad thing is that as a whole, Americans are plagued with this affliction of complete unawareness. And you can't really blame them. Most of them have never experienced anything other than their norm.
I hadn't either really...
Until a year and a half ago when I went to Honduras, but even now, I still do not understand the extent of what I saw there.
Let me just tell you a little bit about Honduras.
Honduras is a country in Central America that has boarders with the Caribbean, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. It is about the size of Tennessee. The terrain is mostly mountainous on the interior and has narrow coasts. You can start at the coast and within approximately 10 miles, be in the heights of a mountain range. The government of Honduras is a democracy. Life expectancy is approximately late 60's. And the literacy rate is approximately 32% illiterate. Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere with an extraordinary unequal distribution of wealth. Most of the country is below the poverty line with 44% living with less than $2 a day and 23% living with less than $1 a day. 22% of the population is undernourished and there is less than 1 doctor for every 1,000 people.
That is compared to the U.S. where only 9.8% of our country is below the poverty line (which is still appalling, but not nearly as bad.)
Ok. So that was a crap load of statistics. But the reality of Honduras is that it is a beautiful country with unbelievable people. They are dirt pour, but they are a joyful people, always ready to laugh and joke around (though they don't really understand sarcasm..)
They have nothing, but because of that, they seem to have everything.
The family we were building for down there was an amazing family that we got to work side by side with, as well as people from around the neighborhood who just wanted to lend a hand because they were family. Every morning, we would arrive at the worksite and work through the day moving and laying bricks one by one in the repulsive heat and humidity, praying for rain to fall for some relief. We must have moved a house worth of bricks 3 times across the yard.
But every morning, the dad would send out his girls to the local store to buy 2 liters of Coke for us because it was the only thing he could afford to say thank you to us. None of us wanted to drink it because all we wanted was water, as we were sweating our body weight out by the hour, but it was how he knew how to say thank you.
And as we built with them and got to know them across a language barrier, we became part of their family. We laughed with them and danced with them and cried with them when it was time to leave.
And through it all, I saw that all I wanted to do was create a family across boarders; across languages; across economic differences; across social differences.
And even now, I look at pictures and wonder how my family is settling into their new home. I wonder if I will ever be able to go visit them again (they said we had a home to stay in any time we visited!)
But you don't need to go to Honduras to do it. There are people ride along side of us on the sidewalks as we walk to the coffee shop who would love a chance to know what it's like to go home, make dinner, sit down and watch a couple of episodes of Grey's and fall asleep in their warm beds.
So. What do we do?
We start small. We make it happen, one brick at a time.
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