This past Thanksgiving, I ate all three of my meals alone. It was the first time that I spent the fourth Thursday of November without my family. There were no dulcet candied yams blanketed in melted marshmallows and nor was there cylindrically shaped cranberry sauce. Instead, in my Thanksgiving this year, food-coma-inducing turkey was replaced with a couple fried eggs cooked with as much butter as egg-whites. Stuffing came in the form of a hefty helping of black beans. And of course, no Guatemalan supper would be complete without a six-inch stack of hearty corn tortillas to balance out the meal.
For the past two and a half months I have been living in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala and volunteer-teaching English to kids from the outskirts of the city. Having spent the majority of my life in our quiet chunk of suburbia, I’ve experienced culture shock to the max. Everything here feels different. Everything. I look absolutely nothing like most people here and I’ve suddenly gone from being of average height to being a giant. Something as simple as walking down the street has left my senses overloaded. There’s unmistakable smell of burning garbage diffusing from a “house” made of corrugated tin and a few two-by-fours holding it up. Dust kicked up automobiles and their black, unfiltered exhaust mix in the air before settling and leaving their stale flavor on my tongue. My ankles are always rolling in new directions as they tread over the treacherously unpredictable sidewalks and streets. The syllables that enter my ears are all foreign from my native tongue, and my brain has to work overtime to process these new sounds and translate them into words, thoughts and feelings. Most of all, however, I’m overwhelmed by what I see. There are the elderly indigenous women with their tanned and leathered skin carrying giant baskets of vegetables for sale on their heads trying to make a survival wage. Stray dogs and the homeless share the sidewalks as a bedroom. And worst of all, if I walk through the European-styled Central Park, I’m offered shoe shines and cigarettes by boys no more than ten years old during school hours.
With the clinking of my fork and the slurping of my coffee being the only noise at the table, this year Thanksgiving was uncomfortably quiet. Usually, Thanksgiving in my house is filled with the din of shouting matches darting across the table combined with the ravenous sloshing of a face-stuffing session. However, this year, in this unexpected silence, my brain was the only companion I had to talk to. At dinner, I thought about what I’d be doing if I was at home: probably struggling to stay awake on my couch with my belly inflated to twice its normal size. I couldn’t help but wonder what my students would think if they saw the overabundance of food: the plates of turkey, the casseroles, the mashed potatoes, the cookies and pies, and so on.
From there, I thought about what they would think if they saw how life in Colonia was every day. We’re able to drink tap water and rest assured that our stomachs won’t be pumped full of diarrhea-causing amoebas. What would they say if they saw how much we wasted leaving the water running doing dishes or brushing our teeth? We have yards and parks with grass, playgrounds, fields, and space. How confused would the kids be when they saw that almost no one was outside?
Then I thought about what made me so different from these kids that I was blessed to be born into a family that could send me to quality private schools, that could afford a house with insulation, central air and heating, and that earned enough money to sign me up for Little League and buy me whatever the newest Nintendo system was. Were we somehow naturally superior? After seeing how hard my Guatemalan host mom works – ten hours a day, five or six days a week doing basically everything at the El Nahual Community Center where I volunteer – there’s no way that I could believe that. The only conclusion I could reach was that somehow, when I came into this world, I did so with the winning lottery ticket in hand. From that day, I would be blessed with a loving family and a comfortable, trauma-free childhood.
As I sat there, experiencing Thanksgiving as if it was just any other day, I realized how much I really had to be grateful for. I gave thanks that my parents never struggled so much to put food on the table that they made me beg for money on the streets. I gave thanks that I was taught the importance of an education and that I’ve been able to experience of having one. I gave thanks for hot water, for being able to throw toilet paper into the toilet, for clean air, for traffic laws, for growing up in an environment that told me I could do whatever I wanted to in life. I hoped that I’d never forget how lucky I’ve been and never forget to appreciate everything I’ve been given by my birth. Mostly, I prayed that I’d treat every day – every miniscule, seemingly insignificant moment – as if it were an occasion to give thanks.
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