I wrote this for English class.

We are all living in poverty. We are either eating meals that lack protein causing our hair to turn orange and our stomachs to protrude, or we are oblivious to the riches of family life and hanging our heads in shame. It is hard to decide which is more painful. As children, we are either laughing and singing while playing soccer on heaps of rotting, steaming garbage with balls made of wadded up plastic bags and goals fashioned from dried bamboo, or we stare blankly at a flickering T.V. screen. It is hard to decide which is bleaker.

I walk down a small village road in Mikundezi II. It is uneven and composed of rubble. I walk through the busiest market on the shores of Nkhata Bay on Lake Malawi. I walk through the Super Stop and Shop on Tilden Place between Flatbush and Bedford in Brooklyn. All are filled with rotting vegetables. All are filled with fish that smells rank. All are populated by old, tired souls carrying their burdens like yoked oxen. In Nkhata Bay, dirty tables proudly display tiny cichlids that were caught last Sunday, next to black patties made from river flies. In Malawi, I will buy a bundle of kale, and the farmer will smile, proudly tying the greens that he himself cultivated into a bundle and put them in a bag. In Flatbush, my kale has already wilted by the time I have made my way to the front of the long, dreary checkout line. The cashier will shove it into a shopping bag, carelessly throwing in cans, crushing it.

When I am officially greeted in Barjomot, the tiny village that is laid out like a small patchwork blanket thrown over the Western side of Mount Hanang in Tanzania, I am given a handful of blessed grasses. I am fed mountains of flavorless, pasty ugali. I am handed cups of sour, spoiled, lumpy milk. This is a delicacy? But when I sit down in a cold mud hut, shivering, slowly sipping rancid milk while doing everything in my power not to cringe, I have never felt so warm. These villagers, these Africans, are the kindest, most generous souls I have ever known. I am sure of this, yet we do not even speak the same language. I will speak in broken Swahili and that alone is enough. They are sharing their limited meals and their huge suffering families with me. I feel as though I am able to catch a glimpse of the riches of their lives through the stories that I construct by looking around me. The stories are of their hard work and endless struggles, of their families and of their lives; lives that are covered in the red dust that this village was built upon. When I arrive home, after five weeks of day-long bus rides on unpaved roads, I feel as though my home is gone, or less important. These tall buildings and wide endless highways seem alien. I walk into a grocery store and am overwhelmed by my options. I walk down Flatbush Avenue at the end of summer and no one smiles. No one flinches. They are too inextricably tangled in the poverty of their own lives. I am looking for the sincerity and authenticity that was so consistent in the humans I met on the other side of the world. I cannot find it. When I arrive home, I am fed a huge steak. We are poor. We have nothing.