My mom shared an inter­est­ing sto­ry with me. Over the long week­end, my par­ents vis­it­ed a fam­i­ly in Ense­na­da. My dad had met the father in a pre­vi­ous vis­it. She described them as a very lov­ing unit with high val­ues, morals and integri­ty. She also said that they were incred­i­bly poor. My dad knew this in advance so my mom packed a few toys my nephews donat­ed and clothes to give to them, but she had no idea how bad it was. I’m also sad that she did­n’t tell me this in advance, I would have put togeth­er a gift bas­ket with a ton of books and good­ies as well .

The eldest of 4 chil­dren is 14 and every Hispanic/Latino girl knows how excit­ing it is to be 14–turning 15. I’m cer­tain they can’t afford a quincenera, not many peo­ple can, actu­al­ly. But from what I hear, this is the least of this child’s con­cerns.

The part of this sto­ry that res­onates with me the most is that the young girl real­ly val­ues her edu­ca­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, school is end­ing for her because there aren’t enough teach­ers or the dis­trict isn’t pay­ing teach­ers to teach after this sum­mer. This is a region not very far from the U.S. bor­der. It’s real­ly quite dis­heart­en­ing. How is one sup­posed to lift her­self and her fam­i­ly out of pover­ty if the resources are just not there?

My mom said that she noticed that the stu­dious girl was doing her home­work on a note­book so filled that she could­n’t find a clean area to write on. It got me think­ing of how many note­books, pens and pen­cils we just toss away.
I thought I’d share this sto­ry in an attempt to get you to appre­ci­ate what you have. This fam­i­ly, like many oth­er fam­i­lies in the area are only a few miles from the wealth­i­est and most pow­er­ful coun­try in the world, a land of grand oppor­tu­ni­ty.
Yet so many of us are here and take pub­lic edu­ca­tion, a pen­cil and piece of paper for grant­ed. We skip school because we just don’t feel like going…we pass right by libraries–never enter­ing them. Poor chil­dren look for­ward to going to school…but they live in a sys­tem that has failed to pro­vide the resources that will lift them out of poverty…and soon they will grow into adults and most will repeat this cycle.  This is one of the first times in my entire life where I blame the sys­tem and not the choic­es of the indi­vid­ual.

My par­ents are plan­ning to vis­it them again soon and you bet I will have a real­ly big box filled with pen­cils, note­books, books, etc., not only for this fam­i­ly, but for the neigh­bor­ing kids as well.

I’m shar­ing this sto­ry so that you can remem­ber that per­haps what you’re going through isn’t so bad. Imag­ine not being able to send your kids to school because there just isn’t one to send them to. It hap­pens every day, all day long in oth­er parts of the world. But this sto­ry hits too close to home. Chil­dren and fam­i­lies like this one strug­gle every day to pro­vide for their kids. They want the same things we all want for ours. They’re just like us…but their strug­gle is real. There’s no free health­care like there is here, there’s no free edu­ca­tion like there is here. They can’t go to a library and use the inter­net for free like we can here. There is no book store–no Barnes & Noble where you can just sit and read books and not actu­al­ly buy them like we have here (and like I have been doing since I dis­cov­ered the mega book store).

I will leave you with this thought: what do you want out of life? What is get­ting in your way? Is it out of your con­trol? Why aren’t you where you want to be? Have you not the resources? If you live in this coun­try and are legal­ly here, you have the resources. If you live in this coun­try and are ille­gal­ly here, you, too have resources. If you can’t suc­ceed for you, do it for the mil­lions and mil­lions of peo­ple in the world who actu­al­ly don’t have much of a choice. I will com­plain a lot less today and do a lot more. If only for today.