This past weekend, some friends and I went to San Juan del Sur, a very touristy town in Nicaragua on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. The hostel we stayed at about 45 minutes from the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border, if you're driving very fast down a highway in the bed of a pickup truck while the resulting wind makes your eyes drier then Ben Stein's while simultaneously permanently damaging your hearing in your right ear (I would be completely deaf is I did not have the foresight to sit on the opposite side on the return trip, thus exposing my already damaged ear to more wind; you can't go deaf twice, as they say in Nicaragua!!!).
It was immediately obvious, despite this town possessing a higher population of foreigner residents than the average Nicaraguan city, that we were in a place of greater poverty than we usually experience in our neighborhoods. The building (houses especially) were just a bit older and a bit more shoddily constructed, even by Central American standards. The presence of street hawkers selling sunglasses and iPhone covers mostly to wealthy tourists was more conspicuous, even to the point of them entering into restaurants and attempting to make sales (the restaurants did not seem to care).
While I enjoyed my weekend, I couldn't help but be keenly aware of the tremendously different experience I was having in comparison to that hawker five feet aware. Even beyond the obvious reality that I was a tourist and he a resident--that this was my getaway while this is sum total of his existence--it struck me how different our two days cohabiting San Juan were spent. While I spent over $100 on nice meals, a "booze cruise" and various other luxuries, I suspect my fellow human selling his sunglasses has never had $100 to his name. While I retired at night to an adequate if not exactly plush bed, it is not out of the realm of possibility that he might live in a small shack on the floor or perhaps somewhere on the beach. If not he, than certainly some of his countrymen face this sad reality.
I hadn't expected to notice the poverty so acutely this past weekend. In an ironic twist, I had asked a friend if she had a book that I could borrow to read on the bus and beach, and she lent me George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. The novel chronicles the time Orwell spent as an early adult penniless in those two great European cities. He speaks of actually spending nights on the street spent sleeping on benches and days spent hungry for lack of money. He talks about how a life of poverty ruins people, rendering their bodies ravaged from malnutrition, their minds weakened from monotony and their wills crushed by the boredom of having nothing for which to strive. In comparison, my life of relative comfort feels like not just an unworthy privilege, but more like a crime against those that have so little. The tough words of Saint Basil the Great come to mind, and never seemed truer to me than now: The bread in your box belongs to the hungry; the cloak in your closet belongs to the naked; the shoes you do not wear belong to the barefoot; the money in your vault belongs to the destitute.
Even beyond my material wealth, I also have the freedom from worrying about the day-to-day concerns of poverty. I drove through a very low-income area in Costa Rica this afternoon, where the houses are made out of wood and the streets are littered with trash because public services such as garbage receptacles and pickup are inconsistent or non-existence. It was not any worse than sights I have seen in Guatemala or even southeastern Washington, D.C. Yet, in light of my weekend in Nicaragua, I was more aware of what I was passing through. In the midst of such unwarranted suffering, my petty complaints throughout the course of a day are downright offensive. Things like waiting in line for lunch an extra few minutes or being charged an extra buck for a roundabout taxi ride do not seem like valid things over which to get worked up. The stress of an additional homework assignment or appointment would be comical if it wasn't the case that some people have stress about finding food for their children.
I am not under the allusion that I will never treat myself to another product that I don't absolutely need to survive or that I will cease to ever complain about minor inconveniences again. However, I do feel it is worth trying and being mindful of the great blessings with which I have been given. If we wish to see any change in the world, it must begin with ourselves.
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