Life Ain't Fair

Remember growing up how your momma would tell you that when you would complain about having to go to church on Sunday morning instead of getting to stay home and watch cartoons, or some other totally irrelevant and selfish thing you complained about as a child?

Well, I gotta tell ya, chances are, your momma really had no idea how true that statement is. I was thinking about the night I spent in the village. They use a shared generator for electricity at night, but Auntie can only afford one outlet, and so while they have a TV, they don't have light bulbs. They use candles because eight dollars a month is all she can afford to pay for electricity. Some days Joel and I go to Coffee Bean and spend eight dollars on Ice Blended Caramels.

Like I was sayin', life ain't fair.

But every time I am at this woman's house, she sends her 10 year old son to buy me a Coke, a cold one at that. When she found out that I was coming for Hari Raya, she rushed to the market to buy flour and sugar to make cookies for me. She sent me home with about half of those cookies...cookies that are still sitting on my cabinet because we have so many snack options around the house that I forget about the ones she gave me. You know what she has for a snack? Coffee. Cuz coffee fills your belly without costing too much.

While I was trying to decide which college to attend, which boy to marry, which store to shop at in the mall, she was trying to decide whether to let her 16 year old daughter marry the 34 year old man who was offering well over a year's wages as dowry for her.

It overwhelms me sometimes how unfair life is. She did NOTHING to deserve being born on an island ravaged by war and poverty, and I did NOTHING to deserve being born in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But that one detail, the place where we are born, determines who we are. It determines our religion, even if you don't realize it, because if you had been born in certain places in the world, you would have been born into their religion, and it determines your world view, your idea of right and wrong; it determines whether you'll spend $40 for a meal or struggle to feed your family on $4 a day. In some countries, the place you are born determines if you will even have the chance to better yourself; so many places in the world people are utterly, totally without any kind of hope.

I have to tell you that as I type, I feel incredibly thankful to have been born in America, even with all of her faults and flaws, there is always hope in America, always a chance for a better life. For Auntie, her hope of a better life involved so much sacrifice that it makes me wonder how what she has now could possibly be better than the life she left behind, and yet I know it is.

And see, as I ponder on this depressing reality, I can't really complain that while I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the bedroom, Auntie and six of her kids were sleeping on the floor, using towels for pillows. While I lay awake from 12-2 as Max tossed and turned, they were out there working tirelessly to make cookies for me and my kids to eat the next day.

I am sorry I promised you a witty post about my adventures, but it all seems so vain of me in retrospect. Selfish and vain. And I was hoping for a happy ending to my post, hate to leave you with a downer, but I'm feelin' kinda down myself right now. And tired. Very, very tired.

Come back tomorrow. I promise to be witty AND positive. :)