Stepping out into the Nicaraguan summer heat from the national airport in Managua, I felt blessed.
“What a beautiful country,” I thought in the first moments of my volunteer service trip with the American Jewish World Service (AJWS). “ What a beautiful time to be here.”
Our group had entered what looked, at least to me, to be a paradise—particularly given the cold March rain spell that our group left behind in the Northeast. Driving from the airport to the NGO that generously hosted us, I appreciated the banana trees, the palm trees bearing coconuts, and the generally beautiful surroundings. The houses along the countryside were composed of tin roofing and adobe walls painted in bold, bright color schemes, lending, I initially thought, a tropical air to the neighborhoods. However, these images of paradise were quickly overwhelmed by the circumstances in which these houses are constructed.
Nicaragua is among the most notoriously poor countries in the developing world. Well over 50 percent of its population earns below two dollars a day—the lowest in any country in Central America. To anyone living in the United States, the level of poverty in Nicaragua is truly unfathomable. Our group first encountered such destitution while visiting the personal farming plots of several of the campesinos, literally the “country people.” The stated purpose of our trip was to help install irrigation pipes for several of the campesino families, which would allow them to produce enough food to eat and to provide them with a surplus stock to sell in the neighboring towns (to which they travel by cattle; owning a car is a luxury the campesinos do not have). An estimate of the amount of money each of these families might make in any given year is equivalent to $500 in U.S. purchasing power. We ended up preparing the plots for five of the ten families our project aimed to help.
In our conversations with them, we asked the campesinos what else they might want or need had the grant for our trip been larger. They laughed, and replied with something along the lines of “Where should I begin?”
To prepare the plots, we worked with only basic tools, such as pickaxes, shovels, rakes, small mallets, machetes, and a tool that we came to affectionately call El Barro, a thin metal bar weighing over 20 pounds with a pointed end used to dig a hole. Even Wesleyan’s small, under-used Long Lane Farm has more to work with then the land on which these Nicaraguan families depended upon for survival.
When I first decided to go on this trip, I thought it would be a good opportunity to get my hands a little dirty for a good cause. I really didn’t think too much about what the week-long trip might actually entail. However, it quickly became apparent to me that my physical labor was not the reason I was in Nicaragua. Middle-aged and elderly women were far more skilled and efficient than I—who some might call a strapping young man of 20—at wielding a pickaxe, and they did so with ear-to-ear smiles on their faces and in flip-flops.
So what was I doing in Nicaragua? It didn’t really become clear to me until I came back to the States, when I got back to my dorm room at Wesleyan. I opened the door to my “dingle” filled with ugly institutional furniture, my cheap mini-fridge humming quietly just as I left it a week earlier. Half-opened bags of potato chips still sat on my desk without a single insect on them, and the light on the bottom corner of my laptop breathed slowly and evenly.
The stark contrast of the two worlds I had experienced in the past week was difficult to grapple with, but the perspective I have gained from it is invaluable. In the text study AJWS provided us with on the trip is an article by Peter Singer, a famous Australian Philosopher working at Princeton. In “The Singer Solution To World Poverty,” he contemplates moral judgment. Singer writes that when we are faced directly with a person in need, our consciences are overwhelmed by the suffering of a fellow human being. Consider this hypothetical situation:
You are rich (congratulations) and own a Mercedes with a white leather interior. The car is your pride and joy.
One day, while you’re taking it for a spin about town, you drive along a railroad track and see a person whose leg has been severely injured by a passing train. He is bleeding heavily, and pleads with you to take him to the nearest hospital; if he doesn’t get there soon, he will need to have his leg amputated. You know that this means he will ruin the beautiful white leather in your car, and that it will cost $1000 to re-upholster, but you take him anyway.
You then go home and try to relax after such a jarring experience. You flip through your mail, and in the process toss away an envelope from a group like OxFam, that is asking for a $100 donation by providing medical attention to children with diarrhea that will realistically save three lives; you do this despite the even greater good it will do than helping the man by the railroad track. The envelope saves three lives. You saved one leg. The donation cost $100. You spent $1000. How often do we throw away mail like this and see it as junk?
This is the basic premise from which Singer goes on to argue that it is selfish for the more affluent members of today’s society to indulge in any luxury as simple as going out for a nice dinner or buying a TV as long as their money could be going towards saving the lives of others. As extreme as Singer’s point is, its fundamental message holds great value. I am not trying to preach; who am I to say that you shouldn’t go out and indulge in a juicy steak or a mean vegetarian burrito every now and again? But after visiting our brothers and sisters in Nicaragua—even for one week—I was abruptly reawakened to my privilege, as well as that of the Wesleyan community at large.
I think that removing ourselves from the insanity—and appreciating the convenience—of our lives in the developed world is not a bad thing. I think that every so often ignoring our own cynicism which calls someone “naïve” for trying to make a difference in the lives of others, is important.
So I think that it couldn’t hurt if next time you flipped through your mail and find a letter from OxFam, or a similar aid group, you wouldn’t toss it away. You would not tell yourself that you do not have the time or the cash. Instead, you would grab a pen and a checkbook, and kiss goodbye the $100 that would have provided you with two or three weekends of beer.
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