My friend Adrienne just finished working on some type of water system in India with a local NGO. She struggled with the president of the NGO and talked about being driven to tears. I am right there with her. It is so hard to do work abroad and try to be productive in a foreign country where you just don’t fit in. It’s hard to balance between doing what you feel is right, and not being a freak.
This is the other side of the “glorious” story. When I was in Ecuador, some of the major things that I learned about the culture and about myself were so hard to handle, and yes they did drive me tears. It was even harder to come back with not only new experiences, but a brand new weight on my shoulders. People like hearing about the experiences, but they do not want to hear about the weight. You can see them fidgeting in their seats and trying to get out of the conversation, once we shift from the rockin’ music and sexy dancing to the abuse, the alcoholism, the logging, the street justice, and on and on
But most of it is my fault. I find myself wanting to protect people from the harsher realities of life in the less developed world. I don’t want it to seem scary. It’s not usually very scary from day to day. It’s scarier that the wood that was used to build my house or my furniture may have been snatched from the economy and the health of rural Ecuadorian villages. People actually are much poorer now that the international logging companies do what the rural villagers used to do, but much much faster. It really presents me with a responsibility to find out where things come from when I buy them. The stories still adulterate my mind and I still shutter and come close to tears when I think about some of them. These moments were NOT glorious moments. In addition to being enlightened, I was humiliated. I was devastated. I was weak… and I wanted my mom.
When we first got to Borbon, there was a health promoter meeting, where the medical representatives come from all of the surrounding villages and report deaths and births, exchange information, etc. Our project is a health project so the leader usually goes, and there are several others from our group that occasionally attend. It’s a good way to find information on what’s happening in the communities. I didn’t actually go to the meeting. I heard the story from our project leader.
Occasionally babies die in rural areas. Being born is pretty risky, when you don’t have access to hospitals. This one survived the birth and was born healthy. Unfortunately, the mother’s milk never came in. This can be a big problem, but mothers can sometimes find wet nurses… if the father permits it. I can not understand why he wouldn’t allow them to find a wet nurse. This was a baby! I don’t even know why it starved to death. Was it somebody’s pride? Did he get going on this “I make the decisions around here” idea and couldn’t snap out of it, once the baby started suffering? What the hell kind of human nature is this? We’re supposed to play music and climb coconut trees, not knowingly kill our babies. And the mother? Why didn’t she fight? Maybe she would have gotten beaten or killed. Maybe she did fight. Maybe she got beaten. I can’t even imagine her feelings of guilt from having an imperfect body. She thinks her baby died because she couldn’t feed it.
That’s enough for now.
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