Ecuador Reflections
by Cassie Dara-Abrams July 25, 2007 My two-week long trip to Ecuador in July was a pretty life-altering and eye-opening experience for me. Through my experiences I think the largest change that undertook me and shook my world was seeing, feeling, and experiencing the sometimes obvious and other times not so obvious gap, well more like a huge gorge, between the communities I visited in Ecuador and my home, California.
While playing with the young children at a free school in Quito where our group volunteered for a day and dancing with the children during our goodbye celebration after spending a week in the Casa Condor community in Pulingui San Pablo, I discovered profound differences between the kids and families of Ecuador and those of California and the United States. Two of these stark differences were the amount of resources and the amount of happiness. The children and families I met during my short time in Ecuador have so few resources, including clean and plentiful water, education, medicine, safety, and equality. Yet they, especially the children, have so much happiness and laughter of which they most gladly shared with my fellow American and Canadian friends and me. However, back home, in California, and more generally in North America, there is a bountiful amount of resources—money, education, and choices. We in North America have access to such a great number and amount of resources that many of us forget to even consider water as something other people around the world are not even able to have access to. Considering all of these resources one might think that people in North America would have overflowing happiness, but I have seen—and personally felt—this is not usually the case. I for one have many times felt unhappy with schoolwork or not receiving enough or the "right" birthday presents. This disconnect, polar opposite connection, has for most of my life, because of my other world travels, been an idea that I've thought about and left in the back of my head. Yet now, resulting from my experiences in Ecuador—getting to know those amazingly fun and peppy children—this disturbing connection between resources and happiness has fought its way to the front of my thoughts, constantly gnawing, wanting to be solved as quickly as possible. Playing and dancing with the children, the dirty, sick, unfairly deprived, and yet still awfully cheerful children of the indigenous Ecuadorian communities at times reminded me that I would shortly return to my home in California, where I constantly am surrounded by such wealth that it overwhelms me—such despairing differences. I want to better understand why there is this heartbreaking gap and how I, as one person, can figure out how to do my part in trying to change it.
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