Most of the time I wonder what it’s all for. I wonder if I’m doing any good here. I wonder if it matters that I’m here. I wonder if I will change or benefit anyone or anything while I’m here. Most of the time I wonder because most of the time I see no difference.
I have finally seen a difference. A small difference, but nonetheless a difference.
I can’t take much credit for this difference, but I know that if I weren’t here it wouldn’t have happened. That’s an exciting feeling. That’s a good feeling.
The Peace Corps Alumni Foundation has a scholarship program, and earlier this year I helped a handful of students who qualified fill out their applications. My role was miniscule. All I did was introduce the scholarship, edit and type the essays, and pay the small fees needed for the parents of each candidate to travel to Alaminos and get their tax exemption forms. All the work was done by the students. They are the ones who have worked endlessly for the last four years despite numerous physical and emotional setbacks, and they are the ones who wrote essays that moved the scholarship board to grant two of my students the scholarship.
The scholarship will cover tuition, books and course material costs for four years, pay for housing and food, and then offer an additional sum for fieldtrips and any other school related events. This is huge, and when I found out that two of my students were awarded the scholarship I was thrilled. Thrilled might be an understatement. I felt like a proud mama. People say your wedding day is the happiest day of your life, or the day your first child is born, or the day you graduate med-school, but for me the day I found out Reynaldo and Ericka were receiving the scholarship was the happiest day of my life, and I think few things will top it.
This gives two students the ability to go to college. It gives them the opportunity to further their education and hopefully will equip them with everything they need to find a job. If they are able to find jobs in their respective fields they will be able to support their families and move their families out of such extreme poverty. Not all of their problems will be solved, but they will have a chance very few people here have to fight the cycle of poverty.
I think too often middle and upper class Americans take higher education for granted. I think too often middle and upper class Americans often take food and other basic commodities for granted. A very small percentage of students from my school will go on to college, and an even smaller percentage will graduate and an even smaller percentage will find jobs due to a series of circumstances I often compare to predestination or the caste system in India.
Being able to tell Ericka and Reynaldo that they received the scholarship was a powerful experience. Neither students ever expected to receive the scholarships and both looked at me with a dazed expression before they erupted with joy to the point where they couldn’t sit still. Then, being able to meet with Ericka’s mom so she could sign the scholarship forms was a humbling experience. This is a woman whose husband was murdered when Ericka was only six and her sister was two. This is a woman who has worked endlessly to save enough pesos to keep Ericka in school this long. This is a woman who has been homeless, has found herself living with a drug addict in manila to stay dry amidst Filipino rains, and has been remarried all for the benefit of Ericka and her sister. This woman is a survivor and has passed on her skills to her daughters. Ericka was in and out of school depending on her families’ financial situation. She worked in grade school washing dishes to help her mom make money and she took care of her sister while her mom was off seeking a better life. Ericka never stopped studying and never stopped hoping. I knew though that when I talked to Ericka about the terms and conditions of the scholarship that neither her nor her mother ever expected such a miracle. I could see that Ericka was grateful but cautious. She knows that she needs to succeed in order to relieve her mother of all of her struggles.
Everyone knows education is valuable and that an education has the potential to change a persons’ life, but until I saw two students who one day had no thoughts of being able to pursue a degree, and then the next day the opportunity to choose to study any course at any school in the Philippines I never realized the power an education had to completely transform a families’ life. One day you are preparing your kids to work in the fields for the rest of their life and the next that child is opening a bank account and is on his/her way to a life with a salary enough to buy food and medicine. Hungry nights no longer await your children, and they won’t be passed on to your children’s children. Something so simple and so cheap can change the future.
In the Philippines an average college educations costs 3,000 Php a semester. That is about $75. It is not expensive yet it is enough money to determine the fate of millions of people here. My happiness for Ericka and Reynaldo can’t be accurately expressed, but when I look at the rest of their class I wonder why the world is so unfair. I am grateful for the scholarship money. Eternally grateful, but there are 100 other graduating seniors from my school this year and many of them will not be going to college despite their amazing minds and the abilities they have to create, think and question. And my school is just one of several on my one little island. Imagine what the world would be like if every child was fed enough food, given enough sleep, and had access to medicines when he/she was sick. Imagine how many bright minds there would be sitting in our classrooms absorbing knowledge and gaining the ability to critically assess and analyze the world. Imagine if all of those minds were given the change to grow to an even greater level at college. The world would be exponentially better. So many more ideas and creations.So many more able minds and hands working to solve the world’s problems. If that were the case entire generations wouldn’t be born into poverty. If that were the case dreams would be dreamt and people would strive for things they have never seen before. I wish there was a way I could help every student here go to college.
It is interesting to observe the optimism that has spread amongst the fourth year population here. Before the results of the alumni scholarship were announced I offered all the students who qualified a copy of another scholarship they could complete. Only three students took it. After it was announced that Reynaldo and Ericka received the alumni scholarship all the students who qualified for the other scholarship came to me to ask for a copy so they could apply. I ask them why now and not before. Without fail they all said they never thought that students from Anda would win a scholarship, but now they see that it is possible. Ericka and Reynaldo have set a momentum here and I can only wait to see what good they do with their degrees and the opportunities they have awaiting them.
My host sister and I built a compost pile everyone should be jealous of. It’s massive and composting at the speed of light (that’s maybe a slight exaggeration, but really, this things on steroids). I’m pretty excited about it.
I have had the opportunity to talk to Leah quite a bit lately and I’m very grateful for that. Leah, if you don’t know her, offers a lot of peace, strength, understanding and perspective. She is someone who I have an immense amount of respect for and who often offers me a lot of spiritual guidance.
She was recently talking about prayer and how she thinks that you can feel the prayer other people offer you. I think this is true.
I don’t know what I think of the traditionally Christian concept of God. I have a hard time believing God is all knowing, all powerful and all good. I don’t know what I think about prayer. I don’t know if I think there is some sort of supernatural being who listens to our prayers and answers them and makes those things happen. I think if that were the case a lot of suffering would be eliminated.
I do think though that people are deeply connected to each other and all life forms on earth and beyond. I think we are all a part of something big and grand, and I think we have lost a lot of our abilities to communicate on a spiritual level. For me prayer is the same as offering feelings of love, positive vibes, or good thoughts to other people. I don’t know how it works but I know that these things really have the power to bring security, hope and strength to people who need it. It sounds like I’m a naively optimistic hippie when I say this but I think if we open our hearts (I think this is something that happens on both a metaphysical and physical level) we are able to release some sort of current or transmission that is able to be received by other people. I do believe in miracles and I like to think that some prayers are answered but it makes me sort of upset to think about because I don’t know how God would pick and choose certain prayers to respond to while not responding to other, so for me prayer is the process I described above where we exchange our humanity, our souls, our love with other people who we may know or who may be strangers from a distant place.
After this Leah and I started to talk about miracles and spiritual experiences. I have seen miracles happen and have great faith that the impossible can happen if you choose to believe it and see it and let it happen. I don’t know how that all works, but it does. When we were talking about spiritual experiences the issue psychology and expectations came up. A devout Christian who walks into a church and expects to feel or see the Holy Spirit may very well have an experience where he/she sees the Holy Spirit. Some people say this is like the placebo effect where your mind is able to create these events to give you the sort of faith and encouragement you may need at a particular time in life. Spiritual experiences have been said to happen among people of all religions and even among non-religious people. Whether or not God, or whatever you want to call the supernatural, really does make himself/herself/itself present in different ways to different people during these religious experiences is of little significance to me. Whether these experiences are all in a person’s mind or are tangible and “real” (however you want to try to define real) doesn’t matter to me. If they are real, then great.If they are made up in our heads, well great. I don’t think such an experience can be belittled if it simply some reaction of the brain. To me that demonstrates the complexity and the miracle of brain composition. It makes me think that whatever divine being was around during creation was pretty amazing to be able to wire our minds in a way that we can perceive such vivid images and experiences.
Another thing Leah and I were talking about recently was violence and the role of violence in changing the world. She said that she is reading a book about the preacher who went to Sudan and Uganda and fought with a machine gun killing anyone who tried to hurt the community he was trying to protect. Is this amount of violence necessary to create the change he wanted?
Nelson Mandela, a man who is known for ending Apartheid, a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, and a man typically seen as a role model of peace came to the conclusion that an institution as violent as Apartheid could only be ended with violence. He said you can only change things if you speak the language of the oppressors. If you don’t speak their language they will not hear you and will not respond.
Martin Luther King Jr. is typically seen as another role model for peace. People say his peaceful techniques are what led to the downfall of segregation in the U.S. and the Jim Crow Laws. But, I wonder if his peaceful techniques would have been heard if Malcolm X and the Black Panthers weren’t promoting violence. Is it possible that the white government responded to the demands of Martin Luther King Jr. because they would rather work with him than with a violent African American population? If there wasn’t a violent counterpart to his work, how much longer, if it would take longer, would it take for anything to change? If the peaceful protesters weren’t violated, beat and sent to prison would the general population respond to their cries? Even if MLK never used violence himself, he was assassinated and violence was used against him making him a martyr and giving his cause even more strength and momentum. Is violence necessary to create change?
And then you have Jesus. Jesus was a peaceful guy. He walked and healed and prayed and loved, but ultimately he was crucified and it was only because of this violent death that he was able to resurrect. While he did have followers before the resurrection, it is the story of the resurrection that is so often shared with people and so often used to spread Christianity. It is how people really knew Jesus was the son of God.
I met a man in India who had been having a conversation with two missionaries who were trying to “save” him. They were talking about how Jesus was a sacrifice and shed his blood because he loved Ram, the man who I talked to. Ram asked why he would want to believe in a god that could only change the world by killing his own son. It’s a good question. If God is all-knowing then he would know that Jesus would be crucified. Why was this the only way? Couldn’t God have used a completely peaceful way of spreading his/her love? Why is violence always involved, and why do people only seem to respond when there is violence?
It makes you wonder about justified violence. Is there such a thing and if so who determines what’s justified and what’s not and where are the lines drawn?
My birthday here was good. My students, teachers and host family gave me a wonderful day full of thought and care. My counterpart wrote and read a beautiful poem, my advisory students performed several dances and wrote me a song, some fourth year students gave me several pieces of shell art while others made me one of the best desserts of my life, and the teachers threw me a party where they gave me a massive basket of fruit. Then my host family had a feast to celebrate the joint birthday of both my host mom and I. it was perfect.
It got me thinking about my most memorable birthdays.
One of these was a surprise weekend at Peak n Peak with Katie, Abbe, Elissa, Nick and Nathan. We had been at a show at the Hang Out in Edinboro just like every weekend back then. Afterwards Katie, Abbe and Elissa were supposed to sleep over at my house but instead my dad drove us to the Peak. We spent the weekend snowboarding and hanging out in the condo. Everything about it was perfect.
Another great birthday was when my friends transformed Katie’s house into Africa complete with trees, snakes in the trees, lion king music and “African” food (I remember there were carrot sticks and I think worms in dirt). Again, everything about it was perfect.
Then there was my birthday in South Africa with my host family. It was mine and Heather’s last night with them and they bought a feast worth of food. KFC chicken, multiple watermelons, chocolate and anything else imaginable. That night we had to say goodbye to them and stay at Cornerstone College before leaving early the next morning for our journey to Petermeritzburg. I think we were three hours late at getting to the school, but it was wonderful to spend that last night with them. The entire family came with us to the school to say goodbye. Again, everything was perfect.
And, finally, there was my birthday Junior year of college. My first and last birthday in California. In the morning I went to the temple with Matt and Audie to meditate, I came home and took a nap and then my roommates were throwing me a “surprise” party I got the invitation to. It was a wonderful party. So many amazing people and so much good food. It was my 21’st birthday but knowing my dislike of alcohol everyone brought sparkling juices and pop instead. The best part was a book they made filled with comments from my friends in both California and Pennsylvania. We then went to Kristi’s apartment and had a dance party. It was perfect.
I’m blessed to have such incredible people in my life all around the world.
