I find myself nearly every day asking myself why I am so
lucky. So many wonderful people who have
influenced my life including my family, my wife, friends and mentors have
guided me to be who I am today. So much
time, energy, love, and other resources have been invested in me. Many times I feel I don’t deserve all I have
received. Why was I so blessed? Most people had to work a whole lot harder
and longer to earn what I’ve been given.
I feel like this now, especially since I’ve been in Peace Corps and seeing what my village
faces on an everyday struggle. With
these thoughts bring feelings of guilt.
But at the same time I feel that just since I have been come to find
such blessings, I shouldn't feel guilty. So what does one do?
For example, I was given a chance to a different country
(Benin) to attend/work at an international conference to collaborate with the
West African Trade Hub and the Global Shea Alliance. The trip was very comfortable and I got to
see whole different part of Africa all expenses paid. Now I was asked, as acting Vice President of
the Peace Corps Ghana Food Security Action Committee, to fly to The Gambia (the
country completely within Senegal) expenses paid, with a stopover in
Casablanca, Morocco. I’ll fly back via a
stopover in Liberia, both times will be long enough to go out and see the area
a bit. Sounds kinda touristy,
right? The food, hotel, and travel
are/were all excellent. My fellow
Volunteers, including my wife, are back in Ghana with little to no chance to
travel around and experience everything I get to. Hence, there is a lot of playful resentment,
and probably a lot of real resentment to those of us that are so lucky.
The people in my village, who of course truly are the reason
for Peace Corps, don’t get to come to these meetings. A choice few are asked to come to meetings in
Ghana on some kinds of new technical trainings the Volunteers may lead other
villages to learn a new trade with their Volunteer. For example, a good friend of mine who is the
leader of the Kulfuo rabbit rearing group and is very interested in putting our
beehives to use is meeting me in Kumasi to go to a beekeeping training in
mid-July. Sometimes when I come back
from these trainings, some few people in the village may get sour when I didn’t
buy them something expensive for them when I return. Their rationale is that if I have enough
money to go, I must have enough to give them.
In a way, it’s hard to blame them since people from the village who
leave and come back from a big city usually have a relatively lot of
money.
So how do I relieve the guilt from my blessings? The best I can think of is to make the best
of these gifts and treat them more as ‘investments’. These trips aren’t just trips. I’m acting as a representative of my Peace
Corps country, and my home country as well. When it boils down to it, all of you that are
reading this blog paid for my trip. I
owe it to you, to the Volunteers who could also benefit from what I’m learning,
and to the people in my village for starters.
I hope that if I take my blessings and help them make work or life
better for others, then the investment won’t be in vain.
It takes me back to the pew as I was growing up at Good
Shepherd Lutheran. I had always heard
that we were “saved by Grace through Faith”.
In other words, Heaven is a gift freely given by just believing in God
and His son Jesus’ good works. I’m not a
wordsmith, and maybe there’s a little lost in translation from my 7th
grade confirmation class, but I think it applies here. So we are all given Heaven for free,
essentially. The greatest gift you can
receive. How do I make that investment
worth it? I think the answer is to not
to take this life for granted, work hard, and make life better for other life
on this Earth in some way before we leave it.
I keep thinking of a movie I saw and a simple concept. When given something, the best things
wouldn’t be to pay it back. The better
way would be to pay it forward. In other
words, the best gift you can give to a person that gives you something is to
help 2 other people in some way or another.
That way your help, or you could call investment, literally doubles at
every additional level. 1 becomes 2, 2
becomes 4, 4 becomes 8, and so on. So to
return to the present, I think the best way I can make this trip worthwhile, I
need to bring back skills, ideas, and motivation to pass on to other Volunteers
and see to it to the best of my abilities that they share it on to the
motivated people in their villages.
Hopefully those people then acquire some skills to improve their food security
conditions and teach their peers in the village for years to come.
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