Taking a Reality Check

Taking an awareness trip to another country has always appealed to me — see how other people live, and often, how they survive whatever conditions they find in their reality. If a modicum of danger exists in the trip, so much the better. Each trip becomes a kind of pilgrimage, a reawakening of people’s needs in other parts of the world. These trips also remind me that we all belong to the same human family with the same needs — food, shelter, clothing, — but more than that, the need for love and to be treated with dignity. It’s easy to see the lack of these necessities in Guatemala where poor people and poor conditions dot the breathtaking mountain landscapes at every turn.

Roads with switchback turns disappear up into mountain peaks capped by the wisps of clouds descending like a blanket over the dark green patches of earth. It’s a scenic photographer’s dream.

A closer look reveals a different reality from the postcard photos. The smooth contours of the hillsides are the result of deforestation for fuel. The people need to eat, and they cook on wood-burning stoves. Every day on every road, men, women and children trudge up the hillsides to their villages hauling as much wood as they can carry on their backs, their burros or their horses to use or to sell. During the rainy season, the bare hills slide into villages, killing inhabitants or destroying their homes.
Mountain trails masquerade as roads, with vehicles turned into torturous prisons as they knock those captured inside from side to side or up and down. Worse than any amusement park ride, a ride to a village five miles away could take 20 minutes. Walking is often easier, certainly cheaper and less dangerous to life and limb.

Finally, the trip ends, the photos are neatly stored in the digital camera, and I return to my reality — running water that I can drink, lights that respond to the flip of a switch, a bathroom or two inside the house, a stove that doesn’t depend on me to gather wood, clothes that I don’t wash in a river, roads that measure distance in miles instead of time. It gives me new eyes to see my reality in light of theirs, and know that we live easy and well. When we really see, we know that we are mandated in justice and in love to ease their burdens, to improve their conditions, to give them hope for tomorrow.