Poverty in the proper perspective

Throughout my life, there have been those moments where I am apt to say "a-ha" or "that makes sense". Indeed, we all go through those moments where something dawns on us that wasn't obvious or apparent before, for whatever reason. Sometimes, the realization made is something basic or fairly inconsequential. However, there are other times where the revelation if profound and extensive. I had just such a moment when I was in high school and it is something that I have never forgot. While I was fortunate enough to grow up in a fairly affluent and well-off household, I did not truly know just how fortunate I have been as compared to other people in other parts of the world until I travelled to Mexico.

The fact that The Money is written by a person with an Hispanic name and was, as is obvious, money correlates nicely to the revelation that I will talk about in this brief essay. As noted in the introduction, I was raised in the a fairly affluent, but not rich, household. We were never on public assistance or anything like that and we grew up in a neighborhood with people of similar socioeconomic stature and accomplishment. Early on, I remember being a bit confused when listening to people complain about how poverty and such were such problems in the United States. Indeed, that was not my experience and, at first, I was not fully aware of the different outcomes and experiences that were and still are experienced by people in other economic classes.

As I got older, the societal details and realities slowly became revealed to me through my education and the media. However, I found out the disparities that truly exist when I went on a missions trip to Juarez, Mexico. What I discovered is that while poverty in the United States is fairly rough, typical poverty in the United States versus typical poverty in countries like Mexico are two entirely different things. What I learned is that while the United States has a lot of problems with inequality, politics and so forth, those problems are all much larger and much more protracted in Mexico. The trip I took was a team of kids my age and our mission was to build an addition onto a house so that a man's grandparents could live with him and his wife and kids. When I say "house", I by no means refer to a house along the lines of what an American would expect, or even demand. Instead, I'm talking about a rather crude stucco shack with a rather simple door and no artificial ventilation. It was basically just a shed or an earth structure that was meant to shield the occupants from the rain.

Another part of the trip had a tangential and similar effect. Rather than stay in Juarez proper, we stayed out in the boonies in an open field using tents. We literally had to bring our own water in a big tank. Indeed, the water was so dirty and impure and the area so suspect at night, we literally made camp in a field with a portable supply of water that we had to use for anything that involved water. Whether it be bucket showers, drinking or cooking, we had to use our water tank for all of that. Beyond that, a rather nasty cloudburst came through on the evening after we finished the house addition and it blew over all our tents and soaked our clothes. We had to make do in a Mexican laundromat so that we had clean clothes to wear home.