Edith Wharton
"But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments" (Wharton, 122).
For this post, I really just wanted to write and express my initial feelings about this one quote that stood out to me as if it were three dimensional on the page.
I spent some time- a week actually, just about a month ago in Mexico. I was blessed with the opportunity to experience "Serving Christ in the World" with the Youth in Mission program of the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. We stayed in Cuernavaca, a town in Morelos about an hour and a half away from Mexico City. One of the days we were there, we were sent out to experience the indigenous village of Cuentepec. All twenty-something of us boarded a huge tourist bus and set out to drive the hills and valleys of Morelos, Mexico. Once we entered the village, we realized that our bus was barely going to fit through the narrow paths in the town. Our bus nearly scraped the sides of the buildings that lined the streets and we nearly ran over a zoo of animals- goats, random horses galloping around the town, several hundred dogs and cats, and a coop of chickens. Once we arrived at the home of the family (families) that we were going to stay with for the day, we climbed down off our high American horses to walk on the street covered in various animal feces and through the broken gate to the courtyard. I can hardly call it a courtyard, it was merely an open space invested with puppies, chickens, and children running and playing in the dirt. At first, we were separated into two groups- a tortilla making group, and the pottery making group; I was assigned to making tortillas. My group followed Gabi, one of the mothers of the home into a cement hut covered where a few were already gathered over a large metal plate, heated by old corn husks and wood scraps set to fire. We undoubtedly were being made fun of by the women who were teaching us to make tortillas by rounding the dough into a perfect ball, flattening the dough with a press into a perfectly shaped tortilla, and gently laying the fragile dough onto the metal plate. The tricky part was when we had to use the tips of our fingers to flip the tortilla onto its other side. The ends of my fingers are calloused even now from burning my fingers over and over in hopes of making the perfect tortilla. What we then realized, after wasting dough on many sub-par tortillas, was that this process of making tortillas, and eventually beans, was a daily chore for Gabi and the others. Our "day excursion" was merely reality to them, and while it doesn't seem all that bad, what we fail to realize is that tortillas and beans is the only nutrition available in their living conditions, and that the outcome of making hundreds of pots and clay ornaments and selling them in artisan markets elicits less than minimum wage in Mexico, which is a disaster in itself at sixty pesos- five US dollars per day.
This personal view of the poverty in Mexico is rare, unless you have had to opportunity to experience it first hand. What most of us in the United States see are statistics, numbers, an "abstract conception of poverty", say, the fact that 46.2% of the Mexican population live in poverty, or that 1,900,000 children in Mexico city are homeless, or that half of the water in Mexico is too polluted to drink and the other half they do drink makes Americans sick and is infested with E. coli and bacteria we wouldn't dare consider touching in the United States. These are simple statistics and in no way care to address the individuals who have fallen "victims to fate" (Wharton, 122).
In The House of Mirth, Lily makes the realization that these people are not so much unlike her, "that the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions from pain- that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike here own, with eyes meant to look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love" (Wharton, 122). She sees beyond the statistics, the mass of people, to see the individuals that are made in the same way, with eyes for gladness, lips for love, and a heart for humanity.
Gabi is the woman on the top left, the woman in white also showed us how to make tortillas and the two seated made pottery with the other group.
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