Anna, I so appreciate how you consistently boil complex issues down to the bone. How you are unflinching in looking at the suffering white folks routinely cause, and any part you play. I mean, we could say (I could say) that this arena is filled with complex issues that are hard to fix. Ideally tho, finding ways to travel & support locals without causing harm seems like the hardest part of all of this to me.
In my early twenties I met a friend at a Club Med in Oaxaca, Mexico. I knew it was a bad idea but I went. I will never forget riding the (chartered, air-conditioned) bus of guests from the airport to the resort: the cardboard shanties of hard-working parents; the lack of running water, sanitation and electricity, a passenger (& a teacher) remarking that if only there was a mall between the airport and the resort "these poor people could have good jobs, nice homes & not live in the jungle."
Each time I travel out of the US I wonder how much damage I'm causing and if I'm doing more harm by trying to do less harm. In January, my husband and I plan on attending his daughter's wedding in Mexico; should we extend our stay? Where and how? These are, of course, rhetorical questions for us to think and act upon...Ick
Yuck...
Anna, I so appreciate how you consistently boil complex issues down to the bone. How you are unflinching in looking at the suffering white folks routinely cause, and any part you play. I mean, we could say (I could say) that this arena is filled with complex issues that are hard to fix. Ideally tho, finding ways to travel & support locals without causing harm seems like the hardest part of all of this to me.
In my early twenties I met a friend at a Club Med in Oaxaca, Mexico. I knew it was a bad idea but I went. I will never forget riding the (chartered, air-conditioned) bus of guests from the airport to the resort: the cardboard shanties of hard-working parents; the lack of running water, sanitation and electricity, a passenger (& a teacher) remarking that if only there was a mall between the airport and the resort "these poor people could have good jobs, nice homes & not live in the jungle."
Each time I travel out of the US I wonder how much damage I'm causing and if I'm doing more harm by trying to do less harm. In January, my husband and I plan on attending his daughter's wedding in Mexico; should we extend our stay? Where and how? These are, of course, rhetorical questions for us to think and act upon...Ick