Lessons Learned from Villages Around the World

As many of you know, I used to travel, A LOT!  I have been to South America, India, Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia and all over Central America and the Caribbean.  I wrote meticulous diaries whilst traveling and I like to share some of those diary entries with you here on the blog.  This one is from when I was recently in Brazil.  I was traveling in the Amazon.  I spent a full two weeks going down the river on a boat from Leticia, Colombia, stopping here and there on the way.  I have fond memories of one particular Amazon village that I stopped at.  We were supposed to be stopping there for just a few hours, but due to mechanical problems with the boat, we ended up spending two nights there.  This village was full of wooden houses, gardens of fruit plants, a few soccer fields and a few shacks that acted as little stores or the school. 

The village was unique in that it was one of the few smaller Amazon villages in which I saw a mix of Indigenous peoples and Europeans.  The other villages I had visited in the Amazon were made up of indigenous people.  I was later told that those villages were made up of tribes while the village we were in was a “community” village, made up of a mixture of different groups.   In the Tribal villages, many of the people looked like something straight out of National Geographic.  The majority of them were wearing very little to no clothing at all.  Many also had their faces painted, usually with a rustic red color.  A couple of them had no electricity or phones. 

The one thing all of the Amazon villages, whether tribal or community, had in common was a sense of poverty.  Now I had traveled throughout Asia and Latin America and I have seen my fair share of villages.  And unfortunately, many of these villages had one thing in common, Poverty.

But one thing I always noticed in all of these villages was that, no matter how poor the people and villages were, the kids were always playing and had a big smile on their faces.  It was no different in this Amazon Village.  The kids had a strong sense of community pride as well. I noticed many of the kids going around and picking up trash in the streets. 

And there was a bonding between father and son, mother and daughter.  Many of the fathers took their kids out to hunt for food in the in the morning, before sunrise. The little girls worked side-by-side with their mothers, whether it was washing, cleaning or preparing food.  They always did it together.  And they did it with a smile on their faces. 

The kids still had a lot of playtime.  And when they played, they had a great time.  I was lucky enough to be included in this playtime.  We played soccer, tag, hide-n-seek and a few other games that I still don’t know the name of, but were fun to play. 

I was greeted all over the village with smiles.  Everyone, adults to kids, always had time to smile to the foreigner who was wandering around in their village. Then I started thinking about these kids and the kids back home in the states.  Kids there always seem to be complaining to their parents about having too much work to do, or of doing chores around the house, or too much homework.  All they want to do is sit around and play video games.  Kids in America really do not know how good they have it. They take everything for granted and always want more. I really wish every Western kid could spend a summer in a village somewhere in the world.  I know I am planning on taking my kids to Africa or South America in a couple of years.  We will spend a month in a small village.  I hope they learn to appreciate things and not take everything for granted. 

After all of my travels, I noticed that I have become bitter and angry when I hear someone living in a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house with 5 TV’s in it complaining about something that really is nothing.  “OH, my internet is down.”  or “The storm is messing with the TV signal.”.  I hear that and I just want to slap them and make them see what I have seen.  Trust me, I have tried to explain what I have seen and felt to people, but the majority of them just don’t get it. 

Things that we take for granted would mean the world to someone else. So next time you complain about something, think about that little boy who needs to wake up at 4am to go hunting with his dad to eat that day.