2008

Sometimes it takes removing ourselves from our everyday environment to see life as it really is. This summer I visited rural Mexico with a group of 9 other people. We thought we were going there to help with the building of an orphanage but we may have received more from them than we had to give.

We visited an area called Dzan about a 4 hour drive from Cancun. There, many people live in thatch roof houses, some with stick and mud walls. Many homes had piles of wood stacked up outside for cooking and there were very few cars even in the town. We met children so poor they have never before seen balloons and a family that shared, not a bed, but a hammock to sleep in every single night. In our consumerist society it’s easy to get sucked into the mindset of ‘need’. I need an ipod. I need more clothes. I need a new computer. And we are always wanting something else, something new. The truth is, we don’t really need half the things we pine after. Visiting this society, where most people didn’t have many of the things we take for granted as so necessary brought to light how very much we already have, and how little we really need to be happy. It’s amazing how rewarding one cold bottle of coke can be after a hard day of manual work helping someone else.

Not only did these people have less than many of us, but they seemed happier, more content. The children, of which there are many, were content to spend the day playing with each other, running around, and trying to hit birds with slingshots. There was no need for Nintendo, Wii or Xbox for entertainment; they found happiness from the simplicity in life. Strangers on the road would smile warmly as I passed, an act that translates across language barriers. One village that we visited stood out to me in particular. From their houses you could see that these people did not have a lot, yet they did not come to us to complain or ask for more, in fact, they did everything they could to serve us and be kind to us, strangers they did not even know. Here in our ‘developed’ ways, despite all that we have, we can be so cold and un-giving to even those we do know, matter of fact a stranger. It almost seems as though the more stuff we have, the less content we are becoming.

When life is reduced to basics, it’s not the things we have, or what we know that really truly matters. Life is about people. In rural Mexico I noticed how important community is to the people there. Everyday I would see the face of a new child playing in the house where we stayed. Neighbors more than just lived next to each other in their own secluded house but knew each other, helped each other. I feel as though we have lost something in our built-up developments. We’ve become insular and lost the meaning and richness of being part of a community. It use to take a village to raise a child, now it takes cable TV.

Is all this to say that we should all be poor and therefore happier; of course not! There are some areas we visited where poverty and lack of education has taken its toll significantly. The purpose of our visit was to help a couple living there who are in the process of building an orphanage. They have a family of 7 children already living with them that they helped to remove from extremely poor and abusive conditions. Hearing the details of their story and what they have been through is enough to soften anyone’s heart. It puts faces to the numbers that are just statistics of poverty. It makes the suffering in the world a real thing, not just a story or the state of world affairs but the lives of individual people, individual children — each with their quirks and own sense of humour, their own personality. In the past it has been easy for me to think that there really isn’t anything I can do to make a difference in the way things are. It’s easy to think that there’s too much poverty in the world, too many hungry people, too much corruption to be able to change things. All of us that went on this trip realized however, that although we can’t fix everything that’s broken in the world we can do things to make a difference in the lives of individuals. And to those individuals, that difference can mean the world.

Every Christmas as a kid I remember being told, “it’s better to give than to receive”, and of course I would think — Ok, great thought, now where are my presents!? But maybe there’s truth to that old adage. When the group of us that went to Mexico discuss our time there we are in ways amazed at how fulfilling it was to be doing things for other people expecting no reward. We worked hard, getting sweaty and dirty shoveling earth and marl in the hot sun, something most of us would never regularly be doing, and would complain if we were made to! But there is an unexplainable reward in giving to those that need help that is worth more than any of the things we can buy or get for ourselves.

We all thought that we were going to Mexico to be a helping hand and to give to the people there a little of what we have, but without realizing it, the people there taught us all so much about satisfaction, simplicity in life and community. We learn’t that all it takes to make a difference is to step out and start doing something to make a change. We were shown that happiness isn’t found in what we have, but through people. In the words of G. K. Chesterton “There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”