I'm just hungry, I guess...
I had one of those pulled-up-short moments today we bathtub philosophers sometimes have. (Bathtub philosopy, like bathtub gin, is easy to fabricate and of dubious quality and value. Also I do my best thinking in the tub.)
I was quite hungry today before supper and I remarked to DH I was in a hurry to eat because "I'm starving!" Zap. No, I'm not. I may be hungry, and ready to eat, and looking forward to food, but there IS food. I am not starving. And goodness knows far too many people actually really are, and have no food and no way to get any today.
It struck me, that as tight as things have been sometimes, the food may have been uninteresting, repetitive and perhaps poor quality, but it was there. I have never *had* to fast for an entire day, though I may have chosen to do so. And I thought of those who seriously have no choice. Not those "starving children" our granmas shamed us with...the real people who die of inanition every, what is it? 3 minutes?
Sobering thoughts. I dare not use that phrase ever again. :-\
Gratitude is awesome. I sometimes am in awe of how lucky I am to have a house and healthy, clean food. I know that I've worked for everything that I have, but some people aren't as lucky. I saw a documentary once where an emaciated mother was sitting by a hut with her head in her hands. She had no hope of finding food for her children, who only had a small handful of food that day. Her children were dying of starvation and there was nothing she could do about it. The total powerlessness of that is sobering. I feel a bit obnoxious for not doing more. One of my best friends is considering starting a boarding school where orphaned children can live and learn and move up in the world. If he gets it going, I hope I can go there and help each year.
We had dinner last night with a friend who just returned from Guatemala for (what I thought) had been a 4 month Spanish language immersion trip. She was fairly tight lipped about her trip and we talked a lot about other things. Towards the end of the night she pulled out pictures and then I realized why. This was no ordinary immersion study tour. She had been volunteering in orphanages.
I was taken aback. I told her I was expecting pictures of beautiful landscapes and friends, but nope. Slums and little girls in poorly fitting clothes. (including one, by the way, that was the funniest picture I'd ever seen: a pregnant woman at a bus stop wearing a t-shirt that read: Don't f*ck with me, I'm from Texas).
We talked a bit after that about how narrow our understanding of life really is. I am so very fortunate.
Thank you for sharing your bath tub philosophy.
Wouldn't it be great if all us Vegwebbers could get together to volunteer somewhere like that?! We'd be a pretty great group even with our diversity, especially focused on one thing- helping the world- like we all try to!
Wouldn't it be great if all us Vegwebbers could get together to volunteer somewhere like that?! We'd be a pretty great group even with our diversity, especially focused on one thing- helping the world- like we all try to!
That would be great. I'd bring the hummus!
A friend of mine once lent me "The City of Joy" by Dominique Delapierre, about Calcutta's poorest street people and ricksha pullers. When I returned it, she asked if I had enjoyed it. I replied, "That isn't the sort of book you "enjoy." It's the sort of book that changes your life."
For some odd reason what struck me the most during the reading was how dependent Westerners are on electricity. I mean, it's just there; you plug something into the wall and it works. Well, not in Spain unless you're sure you've contracted for the power you need to use; they have installed modern circuit-breakers that will cut you off if you overuse your quota of power at given moment!
Now, electricity and the use thereof didn't figure prominently in the book, but that is what stayed with me for some odd reason--that and where the skeletons used in most medical schools actually come from.
i remember watching the frontline they did on the rwanda genocide. i remember being practically paralyzed by the story of the girl they interviewed at the beginning (i won't go into the graphic details, but it was heart wrenching) and thinking "i have no right to complain about anything ever again." the problem is, i've said that before and still slip off into griping about traffic or work or some other triviality. it's amazing how impossibly lucky i am and how often i tend to forget it.
reminds me of tom waits in down by law, sitting on a street corner singing "it's a sad and beautiful world." sometimes i don't know what else to say.
in the name of small steps, though, i did see this on cnn the other day and thought it sounded interesting. i like the concept. maybe it's not volunteering in a foreign country, but it is something.
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=about
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=about
That's great. You can loan just $25. I think it's easy to talk about having to go somewhere else to help out because it makes the excuse for not doing anything more plausible. "I'd like to help, but I can't afford it / take time off from work." The expense of traveling is my big excuse, at least. I volunteer weekly locally, but I"m going to give kiva some more thought. Thanks for sharing the website.
what i like is that you have the opportunity to reinvest the money after it's paid back. so, in theory, an investment of $25 could lead to one person's success, who would then give it back so it can be used for another person's need. that's the way the world is supposed to work, isn't it?
i also think it's a nice feature that you have the option of recouping your investment at that time. i might not be able to "give away" big chunks of money, but if i have the chance to get at least some of it back, i might be able to do more. it's just sitting in the bank at 2% right now anyway. that's not going to do a lot for me, but it might really help someone else.
just wish you didn't have to pay by credit card...
what i like is that you have the opportunity to reinvest the money after it's paid back. so, in theory, an investment of $25 could lead to one person's success, who would then give it back so it can be used for another person's need. that's the way the world is supposed to work, isn't it?
i also think it's a nice feature that you have the option of recouping your investment at that time. i might not be able to "give away" big chunks of money, but if i have the chance to get at least some of it back, i might be able to do more. it's just sitting in the bank at 2% right now anyway. that's not going to do a lot for me, but it might really help someone else.
just wish you didn't have to pay by credit card...
Thank you so much! I just donated $50 each for 2 woman. My bf and I will keep reinvesting it. I know its not much but hopefully it will help these woman.... :)
It's midnight here and I just got in from my "one-day vacation" to the coast, where I found an English language copy of--The City of Joy! The universe just chuckled! The copy I read was in Spanish and the translation was a bit...well, translation. Let's see if the English version is better!
Don't cringe - other than Harry Potter, I read fiction every few years.
City of Joy is supposed to be fiction based on fact, so maybe that's why since you mentioned it, it has become the fiction book I want to read. I was thinking back on it and I can't remember the last fiction book I've read. I have five book cases and a wall with books piled up along it and none of them are fiction.
I think the last book I read was Laurie R. King's Califia's Daughters. It's not a deep read, but I like King. My favorite types of stories come from authors like Arundhati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Paul Scott. I think I was permanently traumatized by The God of Small Things.
I have to agree with you. I do like fiction, but more and more I go for biography, history, and other non-fiction. (I just discovered that even 2nd Hand English books are hideously expensive, if you factor in the $25 apiece train fare, meals etc. And the bookshop I've always used is less and less appealing in what they carry, and more and more expensive. $10- $15 for a secondhand book is not cheap.) I love reading other people's diaries and correspondence, because they were there. As Izaak Walton says, "The reader will not believe that such things could be, but I was there and I saw it."
The God of Small Things definitely has two halves, and you can see the join! The happy childhood memories contrasted with the traumatic adult events of Partition and of course the progressive "partition" of the family. The main motif seems to be rejection--of self, of others (particularly the father), of systems, etc. As a survivor of abuse myself, I found the ending unpleasant and unbelievable--the whole "twin thing" taken too far. BUT she did get me interested in trying Indian pickles. Just from her description I knew I would love lime pickle! And I do. Whenever I find it in our Asian store I buy as many jars as I can afford to at the time.
I think Ms. Roy must have synasthesia, from her descriptions of the market, the pickle "factory" etc. in the first part of the book. My form of synasthesia involves sound and colour, but taste and associated with colour and texture is a common form and I recognized it when I read it.
I saw a documentary on ricksha pullers and it was obviously made by someone who had read the book--or maybe M. Delapierre saw it first and then wrote?? No, probably not... I know these men need the work and there usually isn't anything else for them but I so could NOT allow someone to haul me plus the weight of the ricksha along the street while I sat in comfort.
This isn't completely relevant to the topic at hand but when I think of human society or even just single humans, I really like to think of it all in animal terms. By relating animal societies to human societies, because seeing as we have evolved from animals, our psychology and sociology should theoretically be based on animals, and it is easier to analyse non-human animals because we arent actually part of it. (Hopefully you still follow me, I will eventually get to the point- after I clear the rest that is in my head)
It is so incredible that we, as humans, even have the ability to care for another starving being- especially seeing as we are not directly connected/ related to them. I am trying to understand it. Is it that we have the ability to imagine our own sufferring if we were in that situation or is it something else?
It is also so incredible that we have this ability to care and feel sorrow and pity for people, but at the same time we are generally unable to connect it to any useful way to help. How can people go on living and supporting things that continue to oppress various groups of people? It is not that they do not feel or do not have a heart, it is just that we seem to really lack that ability to connect problem and solution (or sometimes problem and cause). We all do it. There is always an excuse to avoid giving when we live in such comfortable lives ourselves, and one part of it is because there are always people living in much more comfortable lives and giving nothing away. It seems to be the people living the most comfortable lives that support the oppression and those living poorer (only wealth-wise definately not life-wise) lives seem to give the most.
Humanity is such an incredible jumble of everything, yet so so incredible. One thing we do have going for us is our ability to hope.
Interesting point...empathy for the suffering of those beings some would consider "beneath" them on the evolutionary ladder perhaps is more accesible than empathy for their equals? Perhaps because we are where we are, some would think that the suffering human "isn't all that badly off" or "could do better if they really tried" (as some people react to the overweight etc...somehow, it's got to be your own fault!) Or they just don't want to see the reality of that human suffering because they're so relieved it isn't themselves ("don't look and it won't hurt").
The lower a person is on the socioeconomic scale, the more they realise how much it hurts to be hurting, be it in terms of food, money, shelter--because they are closer to it. The truly needy are often the most truly giving and generous perhaps because they know what it's like. They aren't insulated by "things" and concepts that say "help yourself". Maya Angelou once remarked that recieving help from someone who is giving something they really actually need themselves, makes the exchange rich indeed.