What April said...AND

Duke GROW 2011 has been an extremely humbling experience thus far. I like to think of myself as a pretty low maintainence person who adapts well to different conditions. But after a week of being in Siuna and Las Quebradas, I´ve realized how untrue that really is. For instance, having meat at every meal (besides breakfast) has always been an assumption for me. Meat, for me, is a staple. But this is not the case for most people in the world. In Nicaragua, rice, beans, and plantains are the main dietary staples. There are no showers here, as we know them. We have been washing by pouring bowls of cold water on ourselves. We are handwashing our clothes.  But they are not unhappy. Quite the contary, actually. Juan´s family, for instance, is honestly the happiest family I have ever met. This really got me thinking about what I can live happily without.

In chinese, there is a term, chiku, which literally means to eat bitter. Figuratively it means to bear hardship. I used to consider myself quite able to chiku. Not anymore. Spending 2 or 3 hours in the gym cannot even compare to an hour of work in the garden in Las Quebradas. April and I have the sunburns and the blisters to prove it. During our first morning session, we cleared the field with machetes and raked the remains with forked branches, experiencing both a downpour and a blazing hot sun. It was the toughest physical job I had ever performed, not because of the energy spent, but because of my pasty white skin and my girly hands, which are both signs of privelege. So the next time you´re in the gym and you feel like you are invincible, remember: you are basically in a laboratory with controlled conditions. Sorry to burst your bubbles, gorilla juiceheads.

One thing I am just starting to realize is that when we travel abroad or even domestically to ¨serve¨ underpriveleged populations, we need to focus less on pitying and more on respecting/admiring. When we pity, we see ourselves as the only ones with something to offer, when in fact, quite the opposite is true. It is only when we view service as a mutual process that we can have a real impact.

OK. So this post was way more philosophical than I would have liked. I´ll try to keep it more lighthearted next time. We are a third of our way into GROW and I am having an awesome time. Everybody we´ve met so far has been  extremely helpful and welcoming. I feel terrible that I cannot communicate with our freinds here on a deeper scale. ¨Baxter, you know I don´t speak Spanish.¨

GlobeMed Love,
Amos