In Their Shoes
There are many days in your life when you go through a routine: you get up, stumble through your morning, and get off to work, etc. Friday was not one of those days. I am here in Dominican Republic for the fourth year of Hero Holiday, and yet again, my heart has been touched and my understanding has been challenged. This year I am again taking groups of students out to the local garbage dump, where about 75 people, who are now my friends, work and spend their day trying to eek out a living by gathering the food, collecting the bottles for money, and even finding shoes and clothes. They make less than a dollar a day, and many of them are single parents, supporting many hungry children. It is in this place that we have discovered many profound lessons: we have seen the pain of poverty, felt the hurt of injustice, and experienced the anger that comes when you see your friends hurting and exploited.
As our truck pulled up, my anxious Hero Holidayers’ weren’t quite sure what to expect. We were coming out to help the workers collect bottles so that they can generate more income, but would they accept us? Would we offend them? Would we help them or get in their way? In my mind were different questions: Would it still be the same people there? And if they were, I couldn’t decide whether to just be happy to see them again, or sad that this is where they still were, and in the world in which we find ourselves the answers are not so clear.
This garbage dump is a harsh take on reality at the best of times, and in that place, I met new faces and reunited with familiar ones, and chose to just be glad to be among them and do what I could with what I had. Some people are here because they can’t even survive in Haiti-they literally have nothing but what they are wearing, and to them, they can’t understand why people like us would want to take the time to come to people like them.
But, as I watched these incredible Canadian youth that came with me that day, I was once again in awe of the beauty of compassion and solidarity. They eagerly approached the people and asked them if they could help them collect bottles, and began to spread out through the garbage dump. Through the haze and heat I could see them: side by side with the people, Nikes beside unmatched and torn shoes, gloved hands beside worn and scarred hands, eager smile reaching out to shy, bashful smile…and it was a thing of beauty.
As we later talked about the experience, there were tears and laughter as we recalled how this day helped to shift our focus and cause us to see fulfillment in a different light: the feeling of collecting enough bottles to help a single mom double her income that day, the exhilaration of being able to communicate with someone despite the language barrier, and most of all, the understanding that comes from walking in someone else’s shoes.