Taking a Step Back...

Well, tonight was downer of a night. It started off well enough. We had just returned from a day spent in the bush and I was relaxing, eating dinner out by the pool of our hotel while some of the guys swam. Near the end of my meal, I noticed a bunch of people congregating on the beach in front of our hotel and looking at something in the water. And when I say people, I mean a lot of people….probably over 700-800 along about a quarter-mile of the beach.

Curious, I walked down to the beach and found Charly who was talking to one of the locals. When Charly was finished talking to him, he translated for me that a young boy had drowned in the water and his body was floating in to shore. He then pointed to where the body was and in between the waves, I could see a body floating lifelessly, being carried wherever the current would take it. I guess the kid, a local, had been wading in the water, got caught by a wave, and dragged out by the strong current where he drowned.

Of course, this isn’t something I see every day and I was pretty horrified. It was hard to see a body floating like that…and it was harder for me to find out that it was a kid, probably around my nephew’s age. Just the thought of that made me tear up. Somewhere, maybe in the crowd, this kid probably had parents and siblings who loved him and are going to be sad when they find out what happened.

I know life and death are viewed differently here and in other developing countries than how things are viewed, say in the U.S. Life in the developing world is hard and people are not expected to live long. Those who do live a long life are the lucky few. Even knowing that, this was still something you can’t totally prepare yourself for. No matter how much you gear yourself up to observe the harsh realities of the world when you travel to developing countries, nothing truly prepares you to see a child’s lifeless body floating in the sea about to be swept to shore in front of you. It sucks.

It stinks even more that people live in a world where they have to live with a different outlook on life in general. People in the developing world definitely have more of a callused attitude when it comes to death. They have to; they see it all the time. Me, well, I feel like crying every time I hear about a tragic death…particularly a death of a child or young person.
I can handle the flea bites here. I can handle the freaking mosquitoes, the ants in my Min Sao dinner, going without showers for days, the constant car sickness I get in the field. That’s all whatever. What I have a hard time with is seeing firsthand that life’s not fair. I hate seeing that people aren’t dealt the same, fair hand in life. It makes me sad, but at the same time it makes me determined to do something, anything, with the overly fair hand I’ve been dealt in life…I suppose that’s what led me to the field of work I’m in. I’m not trying to make myself out to be some saint, obviously I’m not, just ask my parents, lol, but I do sleep a bit better at night knowing I’m doing something, no matter how minimal, to make someone else’s life just a bit more fair. Or maybe I have a case of African Sleeping Sickness…who knows.

Bottom line, whether at home or abroad, I truly think each one of us can do something, no matter how big or how small, each day to bring some goodness and fairness into others’ lives.

Yes, more of a contemplative blog, this one. But seeing what I did today definitely made me think about life for a bit...so I thought I’d share...