This past Saturday I (Nathan) had the opportunity to help a local family in the nearby shanty town of Los Guidos, one of the poorest areas in greater San Jose. A local missionary family has decided to tear down and rebuild the home of the Calderon-Morales family. Roberto and his wife Liliana reside with their daughter Ingrid, 6 months pregnant, and her 5 year old son in a 350 square foot home in conditions that can only be called heartbreaking.
The house consists of two tiny bedrooms a bare kitchen and bathroom that is something of an indoor outhouse. No real running water, no lighting, no shower. The toilet, sans water tank, sits askew atop a dirt floor; a corrugated drainage pipe haphazardly attached to the back, draining the waste into the family’s backyard. To flush, the family pours a bucket of water into the bowl and hopes that most of it makes it through the pipe; what doesn’t, litters the dirt floor around the toilet bowl.
Our team of volunteers, mostly members of a youth group, spent the better part of the morning just carrying out the trash from the back yard. Immediately behind the house, garbage littered the ground, soaked with the waste from the makeshift toilet; a short distance down the slope—the family dump. We hauled away old refrigerator liners, tires, couches, a car windshield, burned furniture, a dead possum, and maybe 17 broken TV’s. The family, in an effort to prevent erosion, has been piling up whatever they can find to keep their hill from washing away. Sadly, they don’t seem to understand the devastating effects the unsanitary conditions can have on their family: Ingrid’s son is currently in the hospital with a serious infection.
Confronted with the fact of such desperate poverty, it is often hard to know how to respond. I spent a few hours cleaning up the garbage of the Calderon-Morales family; they have spent a lifetime living in it. In some ways, it is easy to judge, after all, they don’t have to throw their garbage in the back yard, or leave their waste on the dirt floor of the bathroom. But then again, after a lifetime, perhaps they don’t know any better, perhaps after so many years of facing a problem so big, it is simply easier to ignore it.
For me, it is almost impossible to describe what I felt that day. In a way, it was a day of sharp contrasts: the satisfaction of helping a family in need with the sadness of seeing a family in such great need, the rugged tropical beauty of the Costa Rican mountains sweeping down towards the valley with the raw stench of human excrement and rotting garbage, the hope of the future with the despair of the present. As I write this, my eyes are filling with tears and I hear my voice, haunting me with the complaints I have all too often voiced for the things that I do not have. Perhaps that is the greatest contrast of all. We who have so much, so often ask for more, while Roberto, standing in his back yard, the smell of poverty so tangible one can almost taste it reminds us: “A veces, no nos toca aprender, sino aceptar. Dios tiene su propio propósito. Él nos ama. Dios siempre nos provee, siempre.” (Sometimes, it is not our place to understand, but to accept. God has his own purpose. He loves us. God always provides for us, always.) A good reminder during the economic difficulties many of us our facing because of the downturn in the American economy.
The house consists of two tiny bedrooms a bare kitchen and bathroom that is something of an indoor outhouse. No real running water, no lighting, no shower. The toilet, sans water tank, sits askew atop a dirt floor; a corrugated drainage pipe haphazardly attached to the back, draining the waste into the family’s backyard. To flush, the family pours a bucket of water into the bowl and hopes that most of it makes it through the pipe; what doesn’t, litters the dirt floor around the toilet bowl.
Our team of volunteers, mostly members of a youth group, spent the better part of the morning just carrying out the trash from the back yard. Immediately behind the house, garbage littered the ground, soaked with the waste from the makeshift toilet; a short distance down the slope—the family dump. We hauled away old refrigerator liners, tires, couches, a car windshield, burned furniture, a dead possum, and maybe 17 broken TV’s. The family, in an effort to prevent erosion, has been piling up whatever they can find to keep their hill from washing away. Sadly, they don’t seem to understand the devastating effects the unsanitary conditions can have on their family: Ingrid’s son is currently in the hospital with a serious infection.
Confronted with the fact of such desperate poverty, it is often hard to know how to respond. I spent a few hours cleaning up the garbage of the Calderon-Morales family; they have spent a lifetime living in it. In some ways, it is easy to judge, after all, they don’t have to throw their garbage in the back yard, or leave their waste on the dirt floor of the bathroom. But then again, after a lifetime, perhaps they don’t know any better, perhaps after so many years of facing a problem so big, it is simply easier to ignore it.
For me, it is almost impossible to describe what I felt that day. In a way, it was a day of sharp contrasts: the satisfaction of helping a family in need with the sadness of seeing a family in such great need, the rugged tropical beauty of the Costa Rican mountains sweeping down towards the valley with the raw stench of human excrement and rotting garbage, the hope of the future with the despair of the present. As I write this, my eyes are filling with tears and I hear my voice, haunting me with the complaints I have all too often voiced for the things that I do not have. Perhaps that is the greatest contrast of all. We who have so much, so often ask for more, while Roberto, standing in his back yard, the smell of poverty so tangible one can almost taste it reminds us: “A veces, no nos toca aprender, sino aceptar. Dios tiene su propio propósito. Él nos ama. Dios siempre nos provee, siempre.” (Sometimes, it is not our place to understand, but to accept. God has his own purpose. He loves us. God always provides for us, always.) A good reminder during the economic difficulties many of us our facing because of the downturn in the American economy.
2 comments:
Thank you for this meditation, Nathan.
Thank you, we're counting our blessings, seriously.
Hoping you guys had a nice Good Friday (good for us, anyway). And have a great Easter.
Love,
Blaine and Elisa
P.S. Please pray for Edd Williams who is currently in critical condition in the hospital.
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