Post by Irish Eyes on May 2, 2005 21:50:34 GMT -6
I'm leaving next week for 9 days in the Amazon Rain forest, and am very very scared!!! I am going with a group (www.adventuresforsingles.com) but have had no contact with anyone yet (not like Denny's,for sure!). One of our things is to visit a tribe that still lives traditionally, hunting with blowguns, and we are supposed to bring toys and gifts for the locals and the school (as well as medical supplies for the clinic, but that has already been covered, I am told). That just feels so darned WRONG! I strolled up and down the aisles of the local dollar store (as was recommended) and I'm like: Why do we want to pollute them with this crap? I bought hair ties and brushes, batteries, mirrors, crayons and paper, flash cards for addition and subtraction, all as suggested, but WTF? They live in Amazon Rain forest! In homes on stilts! Where will they keep the paper? It reinforces in me the very wrongness of our ethnocentric point of view that everyone in the world needs to get an MBA and earn a million dollars a year. There is, I'm sure, a whole different measure of a man and his worth in the Amazon basin; as there is in Jamaica, and in Africa. We can't judge other people in other countries according to our standards. I'm so tired of hearing 'but they're so poor". Give it a break -- they may not have a big screen TV, or any TV, but they are NOT poor -- they have family, down time, friends, happiness. Wait by the train terminal in one of our outlying suburbs for the man of the house, or the women rushing to pick up her kid(s) from daycare, and ask them about the quality of their life. Then tell me who is poor.
(It might be us!)
(It might be us!)