Plastic Promises

By Joel McKerrow

The dust billowed out of the small grave, stinging my eyes, as we scooped the dirt back onto the coffin we had just placed in the shallow hole. My legs buckled underneath me and I almost fell down as the reality of the situation struck me. It was our second day in Thailand and we had just arrived at a small orphanage (The Bamboo School) on the border of Thailand and Burma. A lady had arrived an hour before us who had come across the border from Burma with a sick baby who had unfortunately died in her arms before she arrived. It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body and now I was pouring dirt back onto the coffin we had just carried up the small dirt path and placed in the shallow grave we had just dug. The reality of death and the rawness of life hit me directly in the face as I held back the tears pouring dirt onto the casket before me.
    
The lady who runs this orphanage, New Zealander Momo Cat, shared afterwards that they had buried about five children over the last few months in this grave-site. The people being buried and the kids at the orphanage are of the Karen tribe who are a people group being annihilated by the Burmese government. The kids at the Bamboo school had managed to escape from this oppression and come across the border after many of them having seen their villages totally wiped out by the army. However when they get to Thailand the government doesn’t want them as citizens and so they have no human rights and no where to go. Momo has taken kids in over the last 5 years and now has a family of about 70 kids living in bamboo huts with her on the border.

After staying in Thailand for two weeks the team I was with spent two weeks in Sudan, Africa and a month in Uganda, Africa. Sudan, over the last few years, has seen literally millions of people both killed and displaced from their homes due to war, causing mass starvation and disease. And Uganda, on top of experiencing very similar devastation, has been wiped out by the aids epidemic which has killed millions and left millions of children without parents. In both these places poverty is simply a reality that is almost impossible to break from. Death, disease and starvation are just a normal, everyday part of life for these people. Whilst in the west we go on living in a wonderful, middle-class, ignorance to the plight of the majority of our world.

When you come back from a trip such as this and are confronted with the juxtaposition of the reality of life and death in the third world with the fake reality that is sold to us by the media in the west it is impossible to settle back into normal existence. It’s like living in the matrix with a fake world of bliss and glamour pulled down over your eyes hiding you from the reality of real life. And all it takes is a short time outside this fake environment to realise that all is not as blissful as you once thought.

We in the west get so sucked into buying the latest and greatest products, giving into the lie that we will be missing out on something huge, or that we won’t be accepted by our friends if we don’t have them. We get distracted from truly living by all the ‘stuff’ that we collect and the fake world that marketing experts of huge companies and the media have created. For indeed the media, which is influenced primarily by big business’s trying to make more money, tells us that we can have all the happiness in the world by buying certain products. Yet Australia, though it has one of the highest economic quality of life positions in the world, also has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The simple fact is we have more than enough materially, yet depression is on the rise all the more and still the media coaxes us to buy more. It certainly doesn’t take a genius to realise that something needs to change, both for our sake and the sake of those in the third world.

As I lived amongst some of the poorest of the poor for two months meeting people who had nothing materially yet were filled with more joy than I have seen in most westerners my life was shattered. What I experienced on my trip to Thailand and Africa, as we went from one devastated place to another, was simply a huge blindfold being taken from my eyes. As we helped out in orphanages, taught English to kids, ran medical clinics, taught health education, built buildings, cleaned wounds, cleaned out pit toilets, built relationships, heard stories of real life and got involved in the lives of these people I realised that this is what life is meant to be about. This is what brings joy and happiness to ones life- it is simply to seek to bring joy and happiness to the lives of others.

If this is the case for both you and me, then we need to be asking ourselves some questions. What is it that the media is actually telling us? Does this take us into a fake reality where life is consumed with having the biggest and best for ourselves? Is there a way that we can break out from the plastic promises that we are sold and instead try to better the lives of other people around us and the lives of the hundreds of millions around the world living in poverty? 

For as Nelson Mandela once said, "To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."

If you are interested in going on a trip that will certainly challenge you and show you life at its most authentic then please contact me through www.jem.org.au