Aspen
This time of year I usually come down with a bad case of spring fever. I’m sick again this year, but with an unaccustomed illness. I’m afflicted with culture shock.
I recently returned from a 10-day trip to the Mexican town of Ignacio, in the state of Chihuahua. It’s a poor agricultural town of about 500 residents, dirt streets and adobe brick houses, surviving what has thus far been a decade-old drought. Eighteen adults accompanied our children’s Aspen Middle School sixth-grade class there on a service- based experiential education trip.
The expedition is the brainchild of teacher Peter Westcott, who has been preparing this class for two years. He has led classes to this impoverished region twice before. Our mission includes delivering dozens of old computers along with boxes of school supplies, clothes and kitchenware to these gracious people. We provide labor and materials in constructing bookshelves, setting up kitchens and repairing roofs at the primitive buildings that serve as schools. Our kids get to know the Mexican children, visit their homes, paint murals on bare walls, visit local businesses monetarily less successful than the car washes, wreath sales and silent auctions they orchestrated to raise money for this trip, and listen to lectures from 14-year-old girls working in the nearby Toyota factory for 50 cents a day.
These people have needs and problems, but we are taken by how happy they appear to be. Because of them, the desolate land and dusty town are charming. It was not what I expected to find. We provided them with many things, but perhaps the biggest impact we had was making friendships, showing that someone cares.
Back home, the trip is having an effect on me. I’m cleaning the garage and have a lot of time to think. Where do I begin?
Perhaps for the first time in my life, I’m shocked that I have five pairs of skis in the rack. Both of my bikes are hanging from the ceiling, patiently waiting for the next sunny days. There are golf clubs, tennis rackets and camping gear galore.
I glance at the kids’ toys. There are eight soccer balls and four basketballs for three kids. I recall the young children at La Escuela Primeria Cinco de Mayo. I had numerous opportunities to watch them from the roof I was patching. They played with a hard plastic, under-inflated, yellow ball. It didn’t matter if it was basketball, futbol or kickball, it was always that same ball.
We live at the end of a cul de sac on a hill, and all neighborhood balls end up in our yard eventually. They are worth so little that they are rarely retrieved and I am too indifferent to attempt returning them, so they sit in my garage.
I sort through my tools, some of them employed only once or twice. There’s an old bread maker on the shelf, like new. It’s amazing how much stuff we accumulate without even being cognizant of it.
I am a consumer. I am part of a culture that has to give and receive stuff to prove that we love, feel loved, and even love ourselves. I am addicted to accumulating things. It fills spare time that I complain about not having enough of. I doubt we are any happier than the impoverished citizens of Ignacio Allende.
I feel guilty today. It’s a strange kind of guilt, though. I’m fretting about having too much. Yet, I know that if all of this stuff wasn’t cluttering my existence, it’s a stretch to believe that I would give all of the dollars saved to those less fortunate. Most of it would likely end up in a 401(k) plan for an early retirement or be blown on sushi dinners.
Most of this angst I feel is because the impressions from Ignacio Allende are fresh. With time, the complexities involved with simplifying my life will distract me to inaction. The trip will fade from a poignant lesson to a romantic memory, only a theory for living a different way. I’ll soon get used to my lifestyle and be back to normal again.
That’s too bad.
Roger Marolt (roger@maroltllp.com) is a lifelong Aspen resident who often wonders why.
