The
rain started around 6:30 in the morning. The often soft and occasional hard pit
pat of the rain on the tin roof outside my door functioned as a second alarm
clock. While the banana leaves open to soak up the last precious drops of water
at the end of the rainy season, a lonely city mouse found shelter under a one
of the many small memorials that lay along a main road in Cochabamba valley. The
rain stopped about an hour and half later and slow but determined Saturday life
began.
The top story of the five story
apartment across the street comes alive with two women doing their family’s
laundry. My host family dad begins to smooth out the edges of a key that he
just copied for the man who is waiting at the front gate. The sky is still
grey, but the glee of children’s voices are still heard. One of the
grandchildren that my host grandparents watch a couple days in the week gets
her hair tangled in the rope swing hanging from the tall fig tree in the back
patio. Untangling her hair only took a few seconds, but I still had to instruct
her on the art of calmness, which seems kind of ironic. She will later find out
that some kids a couple kilometers down the road wait hours to play while they
sale cigarettes out of an old shoebox.
Child labor is hard to look at and even
harder to compartmentalize while swallowing an unnecessary substance that only
slows down thought and only furthers the sadness that can sometimes be felt, it
is part the human condition.
The next day you are brought back to
reality, even though you never truly left, and you begin to the think about the
complexity of the situation. The forces that work to keep products less
expensive, people less expensive, and companies like Coca-Cola never forgotten
because that syrupy brown substance that truly makes your life better becomes
ingrained in every society that can be bought with money and taught greed. The
sadness that comes after analyzing the situation of an underprivileged child,
or trying to analyze the situation, becomes less apparent with the next laugh
or remembering the first couple verses of Matthew 5, but sometimes knowing the
face of Jesus is the face of every truly suffering person doesn’t dissolve the
sad thoughts. Do these sad thoughts generate empathy and love, or do they make
us apathetic and passive? What do we do with these thoughts? The answer is
different for every person, it might be in the form of a donation, service
work, change in lifestyle, but it must be something. How we handle the sad
thoughts in our lives contributes to our actions and relationships we
participate in every day.
Sadness can come in many forms; our
group will be separating for the first time in over a month. Each of us will be
traveling to the location of our assignment. After putting many hours into
developing relationships and understanding thought processes, we have the
opportunity to start over with another group of individuals that our
assignments require. It doesn’t feel like a requirement, but only a natural
process that helps us to cope with daily struggles. Hopefully these new
relationships develop into providing relief, encouragement, and enthusiasm in a
place that might not have these qualities. These things might not happen, but I
also hope the opposite is not accomplished. Over the past month or so we have
heard several people talk about development, and what development looks like.
A book that we will be reading
throughout our assignments is “Walking with the Poor” by Bryant L. Myers. Myers
uses the term “Transformational Development” to describe the process a person
or community goes through to make life better. This book should be in the hands
of every development worker, especially if development work is being done with
the love given to us by God. A quote from the book that has stuck with me is at
the end of the last chapter. “Transformational development is a journey that
everyone is on and that everyone must seek.” I have only read the first
chapter, but I think this quote is important because it states that development
work is not a one sided affair. Finding ways I can help without damaging will
be one aspect of the next two years that will require much contemplation, and
might not result in many actions.
I will be staying in Cochabamba for two
more weeks of language study in the morning and office work with my
organization in the afternoon. I am excited to begin forming relationships with
my supervisors and eventually begin living in my village. I will begin
purchasing all the supplies needed for my time out in the village. I am told I
will be given a room in a family’s house or next to a family’s house. I will be
cooking for myself, so purchasing a gas stove and possibly small oven is on the
agenda. I don’t know if bathing will be done with a bucket or by a shower, I
have many questions.