You have at least one mirror in your house right? I mean, you can probably recall someone holding a mirror up to you at a super young age, or maybe you can't remember it but you know it happened. You've always known what you look like, you can pick yourself out of a photo without even thinking, right? Of course you can, everyone knows what they look like…. right?
Wrong, this past week I stayed with a family in the barrios, well actually it was a few miles out of the barrios. No water, no electricity, unheard of to us Americans. We die when the power goes out for one night or we stress when we don't have WIFI. But the lack of water and electricity isn't what initially broke me. That was hard and yes, I will go into that in my next blog but I want you to know what penetrated my heart deeper than anything has this whole trip: It was when I took a photo of my new family and my sister Maria had to point out to the two youngest siblings- "That's you, that's you." She was pointing them out because they had no idea what they looked like. Children, the age or 2-19 and even the parents not really being aware of their personal appearance.
I guess I don't' get that, I don't know what it would be like to not even have a general idea of what I look like. To stare at a picture, see the other people in it and narrow it down to the last person I didn't recognize and realize, oh that's me. Maybe that doesn't seem sad to you, maybe that doesn't even strike you as a big deal but for me it was like a knife piercing my heart. Being so poor, having nothing, and not even being able to identify myself in a physical form.
