Some thoughts & other

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.