May God who loves you, and whose will is for you to know love, grace and peace, fill your Thanksgiving plates and cups with abundant love, grace and peace today–and every day.
This is a hard way to making a living for a single mother of four who nets a few dollars a day selling hard candy, little bags of chips and flavored ice chips from a push cart.
And by the way–in the culture of poverty here, if you offered to push the cart up the hill for her, or offered her money out of charitable generosity, she would look down at the ground–daring not to make eye contact with you–because she would feel “shamed” by you.
Well-meaning Christians and churches from prosperous countries really need to know the cultures they venture into to help people in mission trips. Some never get that, and go barging into countries doing more harm than good.
The same could be said of those who go into poor or ethnic neighborhoods in their own, local cities and towns to “save souls” and do good works, without getting to know the local ways, the culture or the unique struggles of the people who live there, and first listening to what people truly want and need, not what you may think they want or need based on your life experience, upbringing or culture.
But the point of the picture is that, considering how hard it is just to survive by working hard in so many places in the world–including the U.S., of course–what are you thankful for this week?
Kids in far southern Belize, where there are massive amounts of rain, trudge miles through the wet routes to school.
The quest for a secondary school education is a daily struggle for children in remote parts of the Toledo district.
As evidenced by pictures obtained today, students from Jalacte village have to walk miles through mud and water to get from their village to where they can catch a school bus to take them into town.
And it is not only Jalacte village where the road is in dire need of fixing.
Many of the other villages also suffer the same problems including Crique Sarco and San Vicente.
Some of these children, about 50 or 60 of them, attend either the Toledo Community College of the Julian Cho Technical High School.
They have to be up at 4 am in some cases to get ready and make the difficult journey from their village to make it out to town for classes.
And when the day is done, they have to retrace their steps to get back home.
Then 8 hours later, they have to repeat the process all over again.
Former students tell of a similar ordeal they had to endure, and it is a situation that continues to this day.
Some of the roads to some of the rural Toledo villages are so bad that some days the students arrive at school late or some don’t make it to classes at all.
It is a sacrifice that continues to be made as the boys and girls aspire to gain an education in order to improve their lives and contribute positively to their communities.
Most Belizeans have small, affordable Belizean-made washing machines, but not even many middle-class people have dryers because the price of electricity runs through the roof with good, American-made dryers even if you can afford one (and air conditioning, which is rare in Belizean homes, also runs the bill up). And then there are the many with no electricity–many people in large neighborhoods villages surrounding the big twin towns San Ignacio/Santa Elena, where I live, have no electricity.
So one sees clothes hanging constantly on clothes lines (including my own, since I have no dryer) everywhere in this developing country.
So considering all that, what are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?