One experience, sitting with some our group, in the home of a young mother of two solidified my thinking about the poor both before and on this trip. Her husband was employed at a neighborhood market. Don’t imagine your town’s Hy-Vee, picture a man working at a local Farmer’s market – unloading a wagon or pick-up, carrying produce to someone’s car. And don’t imagine for a second that he gets the $5 an hour your grocery carrier gets.

The home is in a squatter’s neighborhood. Abandoned land taken over for living space. I could make a similar home if I were 12 years old, and had access to a junkyard for supplies to create a tree fort. But I must give the husband and the woman’s brother credit for creating a structure much more sound than I could have made. There is one room. Within it is a bed, a small table, a bookshelf with a camping cook stove on it. There are shelves, with clothes and a few pictures and decorations on the walls. The walls have either been written on by the children or were found that way, or both. There is a t.v. Everyone in Mexico has electricity we are told, and almost everyone has a television. The government operates the broadcaster(s) in Mexico so I assume programming plays a propaganda role, as well as a pacifying (entertaining) one. The floor is dirt. She tells us the roof leaks when it rains. I wonder how they all sleep well in this one bed altogether.

She and the children are dressed nicely, their faces and clothes are clean. Mom definitely takes pride in what she has, she loves her children, and she’s pleased to have guests. She tells our group that she does hope her children can stay in school and someday make a better life for themselves.

I wonder how it is that she has so little when I have so much, and I know the factual answers to that question. I think of the song by Chris Rice: “How did I Find Myself in a Better Place.” I wonder how it is that I can be so content with a world where so much is easily acquired by me, and so little is within the realm of possibility for this woman and her family. I am convinced that until I (and others like me) am willing to live with less it will be impossible for this family to have more. It may be that eventually the U.S. middle class will have its comforts ripped away if they and the upper class of the world are not willing to share more of the resource pie. It does not seem possible to raise everyone to our standard of living. The world could not sustain it. We who consume and waste so much must choose to live with less.

You know, my grandmother who passed away at the age of 98 this past year – she could have lived in a home only a shade nicer than the one I sat in that day. My grandmother did live in homes much closer to that form than the one I am in now. Amazing that two generations later I have come to take so much for granted. Even more that I have been so blind, no – unwilling to see, the cost of my comfort, the impropriety.

The other image? It was encountering a portion of the millions of people in Mexico who have no place to go to work. I saw the 70% of the population who sells balloons, and gum, and candy, and tacos, or shoe shines, or begs, on the street. Even their labor is not cheap enough it seems (at a $5 per DAY minimum wage). Their farmland sold when prices were so low they could not afford to stay where they might have at least raised the food for their own families to eat. The free market works well as long as you have something to sell, if you are looking to make a profit. What if you are only trying to survive, you have no money and you only want to grow food to feed your family? There is more to tell that I am not qualified to adequately explain. Just don’t accept all the rhetoric that tells you what is good for business (and good for the country) if it is really only corporations who reap the profits and own the politicians.

In the U.S. we’ve been losing small farms and small farmers for years, but the workforce was able to absorb their children. How many more factories and industries can move to other countries (with cheap, mistreated labor) before the U.S. begins to look more like Mexico?

Next: The Church in Mexico