Looking out of the window passed a faint reflection of yourself and into the eyes of a mother holding her infant on the side of a dirt road—is the moment your life changes. In that moment, you see more than yourself and your inner bubble, and if you're me, you're happy because of it. It was one of those moments where I became conscious, awakened if you will, not to the issues with poverty because I stare at those as if a deer in the headlights, but instead, I was conscious of my eagerness to submerge myself in these problems.
I want to spend my life fixing these issues living on dollars a day. It's easy to look in and sympathize. It's one thing to sit on your thousand dollar couch and wire money to people in need, but another to take on those problems as if you are one in the same. I want to look around and empathize. After telling people about how I was leaving on my mission trip, they would tell me how great of a person I was. "That is so kind of you, I am so proud of you, You're such a great person for doing that...," but I never fully accept these compliments; I do not feel abnormally generous or honorable because I see this as something everyone can and should do to help someone in need. There is no type of person who should be expected to make a change. The cookie-cutter person is anyone. Don't merely hold the door open for someone—hold out your arms and open your eyes to what you can do. I do not believe one should receive praise for doing what is right.
Random acts of kindness should be done simply because it's kind and it's what humanity expects of you, not because you know you will get an extra pat on the back for it, or in a more current generational sense: more likes and or comments for it. It is one thing to capture a life changing moment and share it among friends, but it is distinctly another to try and change your life by taking a particular photo and fishing for a certain reaction. Would you act the same if no one knew what you were doing? Many resonate with how others perceive them, fixating on what they need to do in order to create an image, but what they really lack is their own depth and humility. How do I know? I suffered from the same absence and wanting to be understood by the wrong people. It was up until my recent trip to Belize did I come face to face with what consumed me; I sat on the back of a golf cart leaving our dazzling tropical resort and crossed the bridge into the lesser and diminished town square.
I saw children in torn rags, from the outside you'd think they were sad living in poverty, but if you can look past the tattered clothes and bare feet, you can see the unbroken smile that in many ways reflects a happiness you can never reach. It's paradoxical to me because they're ignorant to the world outside of their own—ignorance being bliss—but to anyone looking in, their ignorance represents the ugliness and hopelessness in the world.
To think about what they will never touch, see, hear, or feel; they are paralyzed to the world around them but have no idea. What pains you more: knowing they're ignorant or watching their faces when they become educated of their life-long diagnosis. Riding on the back of a golf cart and now in a bus bouncing on a dirt road trying to make sense of what cannot be understood. If these thoughts didn't keep you up at night, I hope they do now.
