I am flooded with options when all I want is simple.

It’s been a little challenging coming home during the holiday season. While in Trujillo, I’ve gotten used to simple entertainment: talking, eating, singing, playing sports or cards; the kind of relationship building stuff you do when you don’t have a lot of money (you know, kind of like college). I brought a chicken to a family shortly before coming to the States. The mom asked me to cut it into 11 pieces, one for each person. I didn’t know how, because, you see, I’ve never had to cut a chicken into 11 pieces before. I bring a gift bag to a neighbor and she tells me that she has never gotten anything in a “fancy” bag before and she’s almost 50. In their culture, Christmas means time together as a family and maybe a special meal, but not necessarily presents and definitely not mountains of presents. I come home and enter the holiday shopping season. I see people drop more money in one store than my Honduran friends make in a month. I think in Lempiras and am shocked as a Honduran would be when I figure out the exchange. I have a hard time knowing that the people that surround me in this shopping environment are not thinking about my Honduran friends when I think about them all the time. The great discrepancy in lifestyle makes me emotional. The fact that I can stand in front of a wall of kitchen utensils to choose “just the right one” makes me emotional. Even though I want to bring the whole store to Honduras to share with my friends, I tell myself that they are just “things” and they don’t need them to be happy. Though I know this, it breaks my heart that I/we have all these choices available to us and they don’t. And the hardest question for me to come to terms with is “Why?!”

It is not their fault that they are born into poverty any more than it is our doing that we are born into affluence. The question then becomes, “What are we going to do about it?”