An entry from my Journal

Here is something I wrote in my journal tonight....

When I decided to study abroad in Costa Rica I was thinking of the exotic, beautiful, tropical, peaceful paradise. However, what I have encountered so far has been far from these expectations. I am living in a loud, dirty, dangerous, huge city.

This week has been challenging and I need time to process some of my experiences this far because so much has happened. The material we are learning in class is not easy stuff to take in. One of my peers today described the week as ¨heavy¨. We aren´t breezing by classes. Even though at times it is very hard, I appreciate the struggles because I am learning so much. This week in class one topic we focused on was poverty and to be honest it has taken a toll on me emotionally. For me growing up poverty seemed to be something that was very distant, as if it was something that happened to other people that lived far away from me. However, now I am experiencing it on a very personal level.

Today Don Elmer was our guest speaker in class and he shared with us about poverty. Now when I heard that we were going to have a speaker talk to us about poverty I was not expecting that the speaker was going to be poor himself, I was expecting some government official to come and give us statistics on poverty and how the numbers keep increasing. However, this was not the case, we had a poor man speak to us. This surprised me because so often I associate the poor with not having a voice but that class I heard the voices of poverty. Don Elmer is a 40 year old poet and very talented artist who grew up in El Salvador in a garbage dump. Here he would wake up early to shift through garbage for food and things to resell in the city. For his family a can of rusty sardines was a huge blessing. And often ate spoiled jarred baby food. He was thankful for the rich who threw away things that were not fully used and prayed they would continue this habit. What was very interesting about Don Elmer was that he wasn´t ashamed to be poor either. He embraced it. He came right out in the beginning and stated he was poor. He lives in a tin shack with a dirt floor. Don Elmer believes that we should have a strong social commitment to where we live and to defend our culture and not to copy others. He emphasized the need to live with what we have and realize that we need to invest our resources in our neighbors.

Me experience thus far has made me look at my live and begin to reevaluate it. I have so much. I take so many things for granted. Yet I still seem to need more, I feel disgusted for this after witnessing poverty on this level. I feel overwhelmed and frustrated at times with this reality. I don´t know what I can do to help. Where do I begin? It seems to me that in American I tended to ignore poverty and not pay too much attention to it. I would push the issue to the side because it didn't concern me. Here in Costa Rica it is hard not to notice it.

There was a little girl about 4 years old who came up to me in a store in San Jose grabbing my arm and started talking to me. I didn´t know what she was saying so I simply smiled thinking she was just being friendly and asked my little sister what she was saying. She explained to me that she was homeless, lived in the streets and went around asking for money. After I didn´t give her any money she later went around to every other women in the store to ask for money. She left empty handed. So many old, sick, handicapped, dirty men have gotten in my face and asked me for money in the streets. One child was sitting by my bus stop yesterday with a cup help out for change. Poverty is all around me. So what do I do with all this? I want to help but where do I begin? Do I pass by the people on the street and ignore them or do I give them the change that is in my pocket?

We all have this call from Christ to be more like Him. But what does this look like? Often we have no idea because we need to go out of our comfort zones first before we can understand it. Americans are all about being comfortable and they rarely do things that make them uncomfortable. But Christ went out of His comfort zone for us so maybe we should start by doing the same.