I've never really be surrounded by this kind of suffering before. It's pretty shocking. Most people from the United States haven't unless you're in an extreme circumstance like war or homelessness or work at a shelter of some sort. There, it's more emotional suffering than anything else. Thank goodness for the psychiatrists.
Living in a place like this, there's a lot of ups and downs. Everyone is to expect the crazy amounts of poverty, and I think I was pretty emotionally and mentally prepared to see homeless women eating out of a pile of trash on the side of the road and dirty, shoeless kids and adults running around. I was prepared for the homeless people with schizophrenia talking to themselves, and people (mostly kids) asking me for money. I was definitely prepared for all the cat-calling and harassment the gringas get when walking down the street.
In a place that is so aesthetically beautiful, I definitely was not prepared for this level of pain.
See, I work for a school where the rich kids go. They are the entitled ones. The president's grandchildren go to the school I work for and a handful of them have body guards that hang out in the front of the school during classes. At lunch, the kids have people deliver hot meals to the school's gates. Not all of them, but a lot of them are rude, disrespectful, and very clearly think they are better than. With those kids, it is a constant battle, and since I'm the art teacher, those kids are less likely to take my class seriously.
Because of this, I do not feel that I am doing much to help anything in this country or this community. While I'm working at this private, bilingual school, the public schools don't have books, sometimes desks. While I have enough to eat every day and the worst is that sometimes when I ask for something without cheese it still has cheese, animals are starving to death. I no longer can count how many starving animals I have seen. Sometimes they're pregnant. Sometimes they have a broken leg. Here, there is poverty and there is sadness, but I have not seen suffering like that of the animals. It is constant neglect and starvation and pregnancy and scavenging and fear and fighting. Every single day it is an emotional battle, the desire to help and the knowledge that in my situation, I'm not sure of if or how I can. And it doesn't really seem to bother anyone and I don't want to become de-conditioned to this.
In fact, I think this is going to make me just more motivated to fight for animal rights. I'm definitely including it in my classes.
But that does not change the fact that this battle is going to rage for the next 10 months.
Sometimes I think that the only reason I have ups at all is because the downs are so intense that laughing at a joke seems like the best thing in the world. True joy is what I was expecting from people, because they do have a rougher time of it, it would be balanced by the joy. However, it feels pretty empty here. Even the happiness is tinged with pain. But imagine growing up and living your life in a place where this pain is a daily occurrence and observance. People who work at factory farms are more likely to be abusive and have mental health problems. This is not nearly as bad as that, but it can cause a place to be less than joyful, to say the least.
I blame that assumption I had on the ethnographies I've read and a few choice teachers that I've had that have done something to glorify the pain. There's always the study that comes out that says poorer countries are happier and even though these children are starving to death in Africa and don't have any vitamin A in their diets, they still dance, you betcha. I had also convinced myself that humans have it way worse than animals in Honduras, and therefore any animal suffering should pale in comparison. And so I didn't see it. I looked it in the face and was blind. Over the past 4 weeks, though, the light has gotten much brighter and I feel that I am seeing very clearly.
Life is suffering, yes. I have begun my journey of coming to terms with that in my own self. But the thing is, all of this that is here is man made and consistent. As we have created it, it is our job to stop it. It is not something that we should just come to terms with.
Being surrounded by suffering that you are actively trying to alleviate, like building houses and wells, or organizing food shelters and medical supplies makes the suffering bearable because you know that even if what you are doing isn't a lot, at least you have a hand in something. You are digging away at a pile or shit with a teaspoon, but at least you have a tool. I have no tool. I swim through that shit to get to my fancy job or my fancy house and I cannot get my tunnel vision to turn on.
I need to find a spoon.
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