Somewhere in between shopping, gorging themselves silly on turkey and stuffing, watching parades and football, and getting quality time with their extended families, most Americans use Thanksgiving to reflect at least a little on what they are grateful for in their lives.
Although there are many things we are always grateful for in life, spending the past couple of months in Cambodia and Laos, two of the world’s poorest countries, has focused our minds on some of the basics:
- We are grateful that we haven’t lived through a war or seen our friends and family killed.
- We are grateful that even the poorest people in our country generally have clean water to drink, electricity, and roads to their homes.
- We are grateful that we have never had to be truly hungry or wonder how to feed our families enough to survive.
- We are grateful for the advanced medical care that has saved our lives many times.
- We are grateful for the glasses that let Melissa see (very few young people have glasses here).
- We are grateful for our country’s free, and largely pretty decent, education system.
- We are grateful that the kids we love can be kids and not have to work.
- We are grateful for easy access to birth control.
- We are grateful that we don’t have to wash our clothes in a river or haul firewood on our heads.
- We are grateful that even our most difficult jobs have not involved back-breaking farm labor or building roads by hand, stone by stone.
- We are grateful that in our country, girls get basically the same opportunities as boys.
- We are grateful that we can say whatever we want about our nation’s political leaders without fear of punishment.
That said, the other important thing that we’ve seen here is how happy people can be with so little. Knowing the levels of poverty in Cambodia and Laos, one kind of expects to see pained and downtrodden people. Although we’ve seen a few, that hasn’t been the norm at all. Everywhere we’ve been, people seem basically happy and smiling, living their lives, doing their jobs, caring for their families, improving their skills, being content with the most basic things in life, and enjoying fun times with family and friends (and whatever electronics they have).
