In Someone Else´s Ojotas

Posted by gabriellegorder on August 29, 2010 · 3 Comments 

How many times have you seen commercials or public announcements encouraging viewers like you to sponsor a child-in-need?
Probably hundreds.
The heartrending images of malnourished children dressed in dirty clothes walking through the streets of some far off shantytown, tug at the heartstrings if you pay close attention.
“I should sponsor a child,” we say to ourselves.
Although we have good intentions, more often than not we fail to write down the phone number, we decide to do it tomorrow or we simply forget about our potential Good Samaritan act.
Every time the commercial replays we become more desensitized to the images and we are able to emotionally detach ourselves.
To middle class Americans, the images seem so foreign that it is hard to conceptualize what we see on the television. We see it, our brain processes the information, but somehow the information is rarely digested. Rather we continue to pop the potato chips into our mouths, change the channel or press the mute button until our TV program resumes.
“Surely these images are exaggerated,” we say to ourselves.  “There are poor people in the U.S. too,” we say.
How often have you said to yourself, “What if that was my child or what if that was me?”
While traveling to Machu Picchu, I had a surreal experience that couldn’t have sent me a clearer message had it been scripted for television.
I was traveling by local collective minibus, when a young peasant woman squeezed into the little remaining space on the floor with her three children.
The woman, probably about my age, was unmistakably from a rural Andean community. She wore a brown bowler cap, faded sweater, a think woolen skirt and leg warmers. Her ojotas, rubber sandals worn in the corn and potato fields, permitted me to see the dirt caked onto her feet and under her toenails. The women from the puna, or the communities higher up on the mountains, live hard lives and are often discriminated against.
She carried a baby boy in the keparaina on her back and a baby girl in her arms. An older child sat beside her on a large bag of corn kernels.
A grouchy cusqueña woman told her there was no room for her. I offered the young mother my seat. She appeared shocked and shyly refused. I insisted and sat on the floor. The grouchy woman decided there was room for me between her and the peasant woman, so I sat in-between the two women. I looked at the baby girl on her lap. Her cheeks were raw and scabbed. She had a sinus infection and dried mucus covered her nose.
“What if that had been me?” I thought.
The little girl looked up at me. We locked eyes. Then I watched as she reached out her tiny hand and wrapped her cold fingers around mine.
The mother looked at me. She spoke little Spanish and I spoke hardly any Quechua. But we didn’t need many words to communicate. “What’s her name,” I asked in Quechua.
The mother smiled, “Gabriela” she said. “And her twin brother is Gabriel”.
A wave of emotion enveloped me.  My eyes welled up with tears.
“My name is Gabrielle too!” I replied.
The woman smiled and began to laugh. “So many Gabriels in one minibus!” she said in Spanish.
I tried to avoid eye contact with the child and continue talking to her mother but I couldn’t avert the child’s beautiful eyes.
The chance meeting with Gabriela and her mother allowed me to internalize and identify with the poverty surrounding me.
How many times do children in developed countries, fortunate enough to be born into middle class families take for granted how blessed they are?
In order to truly understand poverty, Americans need to learn to relate with others on a human basis and imagine how their life would be had they been born into different circumstances. Forgive me for the cliche, but they need to learn how to put themselves in someone else’s shoes,  or in this case, someone else’s ojotas.

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