From Where I Sit...

Some things in life are all about perspective.  The longer I spend in Swaziland, the more I realize how vastly different my worldview is than my friends here.  I can't fathom what it's like to go more than a day without eating, to not have meat more than maybe once a week at the most, to (at best) live in a cement house, to not have plumbing or electricity (I choose to go camping & go without these things, so it doesn't count).  I grew up in a culture where we went shopping as things went out of style or season, not because they went threadbare & we NEEDED new clothes.  I get frustrated when things go missing at our ministry center, but I can't be too quick to judge because I haven't grown up in a scarcity culture (I've heard that children growing up with this type of mindset often steal or hoard food, even after being adopted into families with plenty).  I have grown up understanding the concept of a savings account & stretching things to make them last.  But today I was reminded again of how vastly different my perspective is on money, possessions, & economics,  having grown up as a middle-income kid in suburban/rural America.
One of our ministry partners recently received a pair of shorts from the US with a price tag still hanging on them...for $9.99.  I cringed as I heard some Swazis start laughing, not knowing at first what was going on.  From where I was sitting, I could hear small conversations, but also see his face as I realized the commotion was about the price of the shorts, not the fact that they still had the price tag on them.  In my mind, I was picturing the clearance or sale rack at a huge store & thinking how excited I would be to get a pair of shorts for only $9.99 & that those shorts were a great deal!  But then I realized what they were really talking about...they started asking me how much those shorts would be in Emalangeni (Swazi currency) and I said 75 Emalangeni...they all began laughing again & the shorts soon earned the nickname "fancy pants".  While my first reaction was that the shorts were on the cheaper end of the spectrum, here they were on the expensive end of the spectrum. 
But, for a Swazi, they would have been 6% of a well-employed person's monthly income...for a person making $7 an hour in the US, that would make the shorts about $67. 
I take for granted that I can eat bread (a loaf costs about a dollar, but most families in this area can't afford it), that I could bake bread if I wanted (I have a stove/oven while most of the people I know here in Swaziland cook in a kettle outside over a fire ALL THE TIME), I could toast the bread if I wanted (I have electricity & a toaster, while most of my Swazi friends live without electricity and all of them live without plumbing), and I could even butter the bread if I wanted (refrigerators need electricity & usually you use silverware or a knife to butter bread....again things which most don't have).  Rice is a luxury here that most people can't afford.  I can't begin to wrap my head around it, let alone try to imagine the type of worldview that people growing up here have.
I knew I would be dealing with the cultural gap, language gap, gender gap (because of gender roles), and the economic gap, but I'm barely beginning to scratch the surface at how broad those gaps really are & am continuing to realize how I will never truly understand what it's like to walk a mile (or kilometer) in my Swazi friends' shoes (or bare feet).