The summer after my sophomore year of high school I went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic with my Aunt and her church. I had always been involved in different community service organizations but I was extremely interested in visiting a third world country.
Growing up, my mother always reminded me of how fortunate and blessed I was to have a roof over my head and food on the table every night. Whenever I was bratty, she would threaten to bring me to the homeless shelter to see how hard other people had it. Immediately I would shut my mouth for fear that I would have to go to that unknown and uncomfortable place where poor people had to live.
I felt a great deal of sympathy for those people but it was too hard for me to watch them suffer. As I got older, I invited the idea of seeing how other people lived to help me open my eyes to their struggles. I was no longer fearful of visiting with poor people, I wanted to learn from them and help them in any way that I could.
When we first pulled into the little village where we would be building the church, in the run down van the pastor provided us, I could sense just how little the people who lived here had. The road was not paved and the houses were small and decrepit. However, when I met the adults and children of the community, they greeted our group with smiling faces and I could sense how grateful they were for our help.
The first night they invited us to their church service. Although the service was entirely in Spanish I was taken aback by the amount of faith around me. It was truly a sight to see the love these people had for their community and their god despite their harsh circumstances. If they can be so happy with so little, why can’t we be happy with so much?
Arriving at my spot in the woods this week I reminisced about my time with the people at La Casa de Vida in the Dominican Republic. The way that they lived reminded me greatly of the Ladakhi, how full of life they were despite their situation. As I was reading Ancient Futures, I was struck deeply by the ways in which Western influence permeated the Ladakhi’s way of life and destroyed some of the beautiful aspects of their culture.
“The political and economic structures that encouraged mutual aid and interdependence in the village have broken down; in time of illness or other need, a person in Leh is more likely to seek help from relatives in the village than from the strangers on the other side of the wall in the next apartment (Hodge, 2009).” Where there once was strongly knit community ties, there now is greater emotional distance among the Ladakhi as they strive towards a Western way of life.
The people in these third world communities see all of our wealth and material items and think that we are happier because of it. However, they do not how having all of these things affects us emotionally. They also do not see that their way of life, however simple it is, has many emotional benefits.
It is saddening to me that Western culture looks down on these communities in other parts of the world and assume that they are struggling simply because they do not have the money or materialistic items that we do. Neighbors in our wealthiest cities do no know each other and are often arrogant towards one another.
There is virtually no sense of community in an apartment building in NYC. I think it is important that more people travel to these foreign countries and see how the people truly live in these small communities. I think people will begin to realize that our way of life is not the greatest out there and that these people are not truly poor even though they have no money. We should not push our way of life onto other people who have been happily surviving without our influence. Instead of us teaching, we should start becoming learners.