Happiness and Poverty

“Buenos Dias!” Surprised, I looked up to see the Mexican lady standing next to me on the crowded bus smiling at me.  “De donde viene?” she asked me, Where are you from? “Los Estados Unidos,” I replied.

In fact, I had come from BYU in Provo, Utah, and was living in Mexico City for just a couple of months with a school study abroad group. Just 19, I was very, very homesick.

We lived in the LDS sponsored boarding high school campus, Benemerito de Las Americas (see the attached photo), and had an American professor and American friends, but still everything seemed so different.  I yearned for my comfortable home, for my friends who all spoke English, for food that was not primarily bean-based. I wanted to be able to carry on a conversation without feeling that I only knew about 10 words.

My new friend on the bus was patient though, and we continued our conversation, hindered by my bad Spanish and helped considerably be her wide, welcoming smile.

One thing that was especially foreign to me was the barrio surrounding the school. Covering the hill just behind the campus (and below the giant B) was a hodgepodge of tiny homes. We were not allowed to venture into that neighborhood. One time my much braver friend got me to sneak out to have lunch at a cantina down the street: litter strewed the lane, the building was little more than a shack, with corrugated steel for walls and ceiling and daylight coming through the cracks. In the mornings we heard the chickens crowing; on weekends fast-paced ranchero music blared day and night.

We shared a bus stop with the barrio, and my new friend’s home was there. I was on my way to tour the beautiful Basilica of Guadalupe. She was likely headed for the open air market, to shop or perhaps to sell.

As the bus bumped and swayed along the windy road, we continue to try to communicate. At one point, the kind woman asked, “So are you happy in the United States?” I’m sure I replied in the affirmative. But my new friend just grinned, “No, you cannot be happy in the U.S. To be happy you must move to Mexico. This is the place to be happy!”

I laughed, not having words to respond to that. But as I considered her smiling, kind face, and looked down at her well-behaved and cheerful children, I saw they were truly happy.  We reached the Basilica stop, waved our farewells, and I lost track of the good woman.

But I have never lost the impact of that conversation. Before, I guess I pitied the people that lived in poverty on the hillside. But in that short conversation, those people became—well, people. Like me. People who were happy.

Now I’m not saying that it’s good to live where there is not clean water or plentiful food or good medical care. I am not saying that those of us with means should not work to eradicate third world poverty. I’m just saying we need to be careful to see those who live in poverty as people like ourselves. And to realize they love their homes and can be as happy as we are, perhaps more happy.

Some twenty-five years later, I was on a Caribbean cruise with my elderly parents and brother and sisters. At each port, we would engage a van and a driver to show us around the island. On one island, we stopped to get some Cokes at a tiny shop in a small village at the top of a mountain.

From the shop, as we drank our cool drinks, we could see the river below us, and in the river women washing their clothes on the rocks while their children splashed and giggled in the water beside them.

The women laughed and talked as they worked. And then, the clothes clean, they gathered their children, hoisted  plastic tubs of wet laundry on their heads, and started up the winding path to their homes. As they walked they sang.