When I was 16-years-old, I spent a summer in the Dominican Republic volunteering to help build facilities in a remote village. Los Guantes was accessible best by foot, and you had to cross a river to get there. The rickety bridge across the river was so sketchy, that it was safer to actually wade through the water.
I lived in a two-bedroom shack, with a young couple, their elderly mother, 3 little girls, two dogs, 5 chickens and a goat. The kitchen was a separate shack, and the fields or the river bank served as our natural grounds for our morning rituals.
In my idealistic worldview, I had joined this organization to do my part to educate rural people about health and wellness (Our job in Los Guantes was to build latrines). I truly believed, when I left home, that I was setting out to help humanity. In reality, my parents reluctantly paid money for me to live in a shack where I dug up dirt to build make shift toilets that probably were never used!
That said, my summer
That's incredible, Mallika. It's always those uncomfortable situations that help us grow, and appreciate all that we have in our lives. I can relate to the feeling of powerlessness- and also the remembering that happiness is universal.
Amazing when some of us in the western world see people who appear to us as not having very much. It's always a shocker that you can find some of the happiest people in the world living in those conditions. Beautiful post. 