The sun is beating down, the wind is beating strong. It blows the trash amidst the dusty bowl. A plastic bag gets stuck to my leg. The buzzards are fighting with the horses: who will get the best treasure? This is the environment in which they spend their days. Racing to the fresh pile the dump truck has deposited, competing for the plastic bottle that will complete their 50 required to earn $1. I notice her sitting amidst the workers, waiting for them to come spend 20 pesos on her fruit juice. She is beautiful: blue eyes, wrinkled tan skin, rings on all her fingers. She is so grateful when I show an interest in her life. She offers me one of the battered, worn metal pieces of jewelry she has salvaged from the dump. In this moment I am grateful; not only for the nice jewelry that I myself possess, that I’ve received as gifts over the years, that collectively may be worth as much as she earns in a year. I am grateful for the sheer kindness of a stranger that has shown up in my life, that she is willing to part with one of her precious finds because she thinks I deserve it.
I politely decline her offer, not wanting to offend her with the truth that I would rather not stick someone’s old, dirty earrings in my ears. I settle for telling her that I would rather she keep them for herself; she needs them more than I do. Instead we share a mutual gift: a conversation, an interest in each other’s lives, a question and a kind smile. And the next time I visit, she remembers my name. Why do we have to save gratitude for one day a year? With my job in Nicaragua, we would take our visiting high school students to the city dump, where they’d assist a local NGO in providing mobile classes for the children that would work at the dump or wait all day for their parents to earn their only source of income.
Dirty and shoeless, they ran after the truck, excited for the one hour every two weeks they had to practice their math or writing skills. After the visit, silence on the bus. The students felt full of shame and guilt, and I shared their discomfort. Why are they so thankful to find a battered toy or a beat-up pair of shoes, when we can’t find happiness until we have a brand-new pair of the latest Nikes? The answer can’t be found, and there’s only so much we can personally do to solve these problems of mass division in our world. Yet the one thing we can do: turn our guilt into gratitude. Turn “grateful” from a feeling into an action, turn “gratitude” from a once-yearly excuse to eat a large meal into a daily lifestyle.
Appreciate what we have instead of taking it for granted. We must learn how to be grateful for more than just our worldly possessions, for some basic necessities come with more than just a price tag. Living in Nicaragua made me ever-mindful of what I’d under-appreciated my entire life: access to education, electricity, clean running water, shoes on my feet, a roof over my head and three healthy meals each and every single day. This realization lies deep within us, yet sometimes we must travel to another world to find it; sometimes, it may only be unearthed by a simple act of kindness.
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