Guatemala changed Bert Weiss - heres his heartbreaking new perspective on poverty: I’d seen poverty. When driving along the highway in Mexico, I saw the aluminum siding homes that surely had no electricity. In Brazil, I could see the favela and the slums of Brazil from downtown Rio. In Nicaragua, I saw the men carrying water in buckets back to their homes from the city well. But I’d never touched or felt poverty until this trip to Guatemala. There is only survival mode in the parts of Guatemala I helped out in. Nobody is working their way up the corporate ladder or for their IRA or for their vacation to Cabo. It’s strictly survival. “How does my family eat today?” “Where will we get clothes?” “How do we get water?” “How can I provide shoes for my children?” I’ve never seen people work so hard just to survive. It’s a woman in her seventies hauling nearly a hundred pounds of vegetables on her hunched back to sell at market. It’s a man at the bottom of a pitch black, 100-foot-deep dirt hole for eight hours, shoveling dirt into a bucket, attaching it to a rope while two other men manually pulled the bucket to the surface to make a well. It’s a dirt-covered, 7-year-old boy begging to shine your shoes for what is the equivalent of one American dollar. It’s literally 15 people stuffed in the back of an old, pick up truck huddled together for warmth as all are transported downtown to look for work. The part of Guatemala I saw is an endlessly dusty place with little running water to shower, drink or wash clothes or your body. It’s an entire dirt or clay home the size of most American living rooms that houses six people; a stove and filthy blankets to sleep on while chickens run around you. It’s a 6-year-old boy with a three week unattended burn that occurred when he fell into the family’s cooking pit. No Tylenol. No ointments. No Band-Aids. Three weeks. It’s a woman with untreated, incurable ovarian cancer waiting to die lying on a blanket above a cold dirt floor. It’s a place where children run on dirt and stone roads shoeless and don’t think twice about it. It’s a country in which children are overjoyed when handed a pencil. Receiving medical attention is like hitting the lottery. Each Tuesday, Pray America finds the poorest kids from surrounding villages and donates new shoes. I stared and laughed with giddiness for about an hour watching these kids get sized then handed a basic black shoe. One boy was so excited he ran out of the factory without his new shoes. I saw women almost cry with joy as we handed them pigs to raise and sell for more supplies at a later date. These women are all widows and don’t live day to day. They live minute to minute. A new pig, just a new pig, was a gateway towards a better life. On the plane ride back I watched a Guatemalan woman try and figure out how to open the lavatory door. It took two flight attendants to explain it to her. It’s made me look at everything differently. It’s made me realize how lucky I was to be born where I was. To have the opportunity I have. I now realize that optimism is a gift. My sincerest hope is that my son will always be reminded of this trip in his soul. It’s possible my expectations were too high for an 11 year old; that he’d come home, look around and say, “I have too much crap, let’s donate it!” That didn’t happen, but he has seen a new world and now understands that he lives a privileged life and he has a responsibility to help make the world a better place. My intention is to go back again next year. This time, with my wife, Stacey, and Hayden. I’m already excited about the possibility of building a house for one family. You know how much that’s gonna cost? An entire house? $2000. This trip fed my soul. I really feel changed. Not in the kinda way way where you’re impacted for a week then forget the life lesson. This one, I can say, has slightly changed the course of my entire life.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:38:26 +0000