The Poor and the Rich

Photo: Lindsey Frye

Lindsey Frye is a member of Laurel Street Mennonite Church in Lancaster, PA. She is currently living in Chiapas, Mexico with her husband Chris, and daughters Ramona and Ruthie. She has a Master of Arts from Bethany Theological Seminary, and is working as an Ecumenism Promoter for an MCC partner organization, The Institute for Intercultural Studies. This blog was originally posted on her personal blog.

A few months ago, I had a conversation in the countryside that keeps coming back to me. The president of the community garden group that I work with was showing me around his land. He said, “we need money buy three things; coffee, sugar and soap. The rest is all here, we grow it. We’re more independent than city folks, because they have to depend on what we bring in from the countryside. Here, we grow whatever we want.” His thoughts continue to challenge me, flipping upside down the more popular belief that the “poor campesinos” are the ones needing saving. I was telling this story to someone in Mexico City, and he pushed back by saying, “Of course he has to say that, he has no choice, so he’s making the best of his situation.”

These thoughts swirled in my head as we visited a friend in Tenejapa, a small indigenous village, and a brother in the family asked me, “How do you see things? Are we poor here? Are you rich in America?” I went with my gut reaction, telling him I think there are different kinds of wealth and poverty. There are more material resources in the U.S. but there are fewer social connections. There is more work in the U.S. but we also suffer from working too hard. It depends what kind of wealth and poverty you want to deal with. He went on to talk about friends who had crossed the boarder and came back with stories of cheap cars, getting paid overtime, and all the food that gets wasted.

This was one of the more difficult conversations I’ve had since coming here, even though in some ways, it was so simple. On one hand, I am the only one in the conversation who gets to choose freely what kind of wealth and poverty I want in my life. Everyone else has to risk their lives just for the chance (and it is very much a chance) to earn more, to opt for material wealth. On the other hand, this family has something we in the U.S. lost over 200 years ago. If I’d had more time with him, I could have told him the story I heard a few months ago. The story of the Dakota people in Minnesota. There is actual government documentation stating that the way the U.S. government would take over their land was to give them loans; they brought guns and jewellery and spices. Then, once the amount owed was too great to conceive of paying back, the army came and displaced thousands of people. (listen to the full story here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/479/little-war-on-the-prairie). There were many eery parallels between this story and what his happening right now in Southern Mexico. Only here, it is not too late for indigenous people who are fighting to keep their collective lands.

Recently, I heard two different people from the U.S. on the same day who don’t even know each other (one I’ve known for years, one I had just met here) mention the same dream for their lives. They want to own land with a group of people. Land that can mostly make them self-sufficient, with some private home space and some community space. They might do something to make a little cash on the side, but mostly they would work the land.

The scenario they were envisioning looks a lot like the space I was sitting in when I had the conversation in Tenejapa. One side of the hill was filled with chickens and fruit trees (one sister-in-law loves chickens, Alberto loves fruit trees). The other side was filled with flowers, the passion of the other sister-in-law. Small houses were plopped in the middle of each expansive space.

Will we at some point in the U.S. return to this dream that was once ours? In the meantime, I am doing what I can to listen to and to hold sacred space for the dreams of those around me, both near and far away.