“Back at home, we have a machine that cleans your clothing for you. How do you know when it’s done? Well, you hear a BEEP. Yeah, and we have another machine to dry your clothes.” We could hear the girl giggle incredulously as Nick offered this explanation for laundry in North America. At the same time, we could hear one of the students singing a Christmas Medley of Jingle Bells and Silent Night as we woke up to another typical day in tropical heat.
When you’ve been in Bina Hill or any isolated community in a developing country long enough, you find it incredible that this world can exist concurrently with the sphere that you just left. You wonder: How could this be? How can you have thirty different flavours of cereal at Loblaw’s and none here because there isn’t even any milk? How can people complain about slightly bruised oranges at the local market while people here have virtually no source of citrus and it’s a wonder that they don’t develop scurvy? People in Canada have numerous concerns about the healthcare system, yet people here have zero access to healthcare in rural areas and even in Lethem, there are no physicians in-house on the weekend. How is this possible? We can remember spending hundreds of dollars on textbooks for school and here, classes are taught on the blackboard alone and are dependent on the expertise of the inevitable foreign visiting teacher, who can realistically only teach a few very basic subjects for a limited time.
Even so, you catch yourself missing things from home like chocolate milk, movie theatres, and sushi. All of our stomachs gurgled when we watched a movie on the laptop that featured a Ben and Jerry’s. You vow that you will never ever take these things for granted again, knowing that you will, but hoping that you will remember this important lesson.
Funnily enough, Nick replied to the girl after she completed what had become an uproarious laugh over the washing machine description, “Well, you should come see it one day.” She replied, "Yes. I would very much like to visit your country some day." When faced with this type of conversation on cultural exchange and despite knowing better, you can’t help but think, “Yes, yes! Come to Canada, we can take you to Raptors Game. You can get almost any type of fruit no matter what time of year. There are streetcars for the public to use. There's a Tim Horton's every other block to serve you coffee and donuts practically whenever you want. You’d love it!”
