Who is suffering?

There is a doña in my neighborhood whom I walk by almost every day. Almost every day, this elderly woman is doing laundry, not an easy task with the semi-automatic washers here in the DR. Since she washes for an entire household, she puts load after load into the machine, bends over to manually rinse it in big bowls of water, and then hangs it up to dry. Her body shows the signs of a lifetime of work as a housewife  – a lifetime of peeling plantains, standing over a hot stove in 90-degree heat, sweeping and mopping, washing dishes and clothes – so many chores that she hardly gets  a rest in the day, being the first up to prepare breakfast and the last to bed after cleaning up the dishes. She stays at home while the young people of the house and the men go out to socialize. Oftentimes she makes me think about how hard the life of a poor woman is. She makes me think about how a lot of American seniors her age, basking in the afterglow of much easier lives, would be playing cards and shuffleboard in retirement communities at her age. But her spirit remains youthful. She loves to greet me, pronouncing my name kind of funny, with an accent on the last syllable of “Estefani.”

Sometimes when I walk by and she greets me I will catch myself in a kind of reverie, lost in my thoughts about what projects I need to be working on or the tasks I need to do in the day, and then I remember to notice the world around me – the bluish water that runs down a little rivulet into the river from her washing, the sun shining on the palm and mango trees, the bright color of her wood-and-zinc house, and the beautiful Samana breeze. I smile back at her genuinely, and she makes a comment about how pretty I am. She feels no jealousy, but gets the same pleasure out of looking at me that I do out of stepping into a deep shadow on a hot day.

I have been reading some books on spirituality, mainly the practice of mindfulness and living in the present. I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Peace Is Every Step“, part of a book on meditation called “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” “The Te of Piglet” and now “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. I’ve also been practicing yoga and listening to podcasts by Gil Fronsdal, of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. They have helped me understand in a more profound way what is easy to see living in this country. It’s hard to summarize two years of experience – or up to now, a year and seven months – but one of the overarching themes has clearly been how much happier Dominicans are than Americans. I think the main reason for this, besides the fact that they have more of a community, that their culture is communal and more homogenous, and that they are more religious, is that they live in the present and accept what is. They know they are poor, but they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how things could have turned out differently for them, or about the injustice of the fact that they are poor. Essentially, because they are poor, their happiness depends less on material things, and therefore, they are happier more of the time.

In the United States and other developed places, our wealth has given us power to control the situations and factors that affect our lives. If we had a long day, we can go out to the bar or have a nice dinner. If our house is dingy and small, we can move elsewhere or make repairs. If we get sick, we can go to the doctor. But we have gotten used to having control, and that makes us unhappier when situations don’t go our way. Traffic jams enrage us. Political situations disgust us. Even the inevitabilities of disease and death seem unfair. We look at where we are currently and we make a mental list of all the things that are right and wrong, and we strategize to change the things that bother us so that in the future we will have a clear, untarnished happiness, in contrast to the flawed feeling we have now. This is the type of preoccupation that also makes us better at improving our lives than Dominicans. We think about the future, and so we set goals for our educations, our finances, our lives. We worry about what might happen and so we take precautions against it. But the result is that we spend a lot of our moments worrying and trying to correct what seems to be going badly.

One thing I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh, who learned it from the Buddha, is that all people suffer. Buddha put it like this: “Life is suffering.” In the Western world, we usually have a rosier picture, and in some ways refuse to believe it is true. We recognize that our lives are rich with positive experiences and privilege. But we don’t see how much we still suffer despite this, and we don’t see the fact that terrible things happen randomly no matter how much money or power you have. In fact, I think that a lot of Westerners suffer more than people like Negra, the doña nicknamed for the color of her skin. In much of the developing world, people live in extreme poverty, struggling to survive under the oppression of terrible disease, unbearable living conditions, hunger, and violence. This, too, is suffering, but suffering is ultimately unquantifiable and incomparable because it is so human. For the developing world that has its basic needs met, like the DR, people seem to live on a middle ground where they have the material things they truly need but are not as attached to the belief that they can get whatever they want and control any situation in their life, as we do in the US.

The practice of mindfulness teaches that your happiness does not depend on external factors, but rather your response to them. You can never control everything that happens  – nonsmokers get cancer, too – and so ultimately what matters is your response. Part of this is learning acceptance of reality and the situation you find yourself in, and learning that acceptance is not the same as approval. Acceptance means not struggling mentally against reality. The doña I walk by is an example of this. I can walk by applying feminist theory to her life, but she in the end is the one smiling with her arms up to the elbows in soapy water, her back bent over the machine.

When you have the developed world mentality meet the developing world mentality, as happens in Peace Corps and other development work, you often find yourself thinking that it’s people like me, rather than her, who know what’s best. We look at their society and imagine how much better things would be if they lived their lives more like us, planning and scheming and thinking critically. But then you simply observe your frustration and anger and compare it to their simple contentedness, and you wonder why you are here under the pretext of helping them. Maybe the most important lesson of Peace Corps is the realization that if you open your mind enough, it is them who are helping you.