We decided to hold a feeding program for the street kids as one of our last events. There were about sixty of them that showed up to hang out with us and to enjoy some biscuits and milk. They ranged between 7 or 8 to about 20 years old. They are all boys that were high off of sniffing glue. Sniffing glue was a means for survival. It eased their hunger pangs. One of the boy’s foot had been run over by a car and another boy had pains in his abdoman. Most of them didn’t have shoes and wore rags. They were very rowdy, but of course they didn’t mess with me, the Chinese- apparently everyone here thinks Chinese are great fighters. They kept asking me if I knew Jet Lee and they kept asking me to teach them Kung Fu.
There weren’t any girls that showed up -the assumption was that they had probably been taken off the streets for the sex-trading industry. These sights were not uncommon as I’ve witnessed this in the Asian countries that we had been in before. I did begin to think about how privileged America was though. I thought about how I had worked at Job Corps. Even though many of the students came from broken backgrounds and some were under the influence of drugs and alcohol, Job Corps was a program that provided them with an opportunity to become self-sufficient through drug and alcohol programs and job training. Even with the United States at it’s very worst, things are far worst in third world countries with the child begging rings, teenage prostitutes, and the rampant spread of HIV/AIDS. In the U.S. we have the means and resources to create programs fro social welfare and social justice. As I’ve noticed in countries such as Thailand and Cambodia, they gain money through sex-tourism. The very things that degrade their people are used as means to earn money. However, you really need to think about it, is it worth the extra money to subject others into slavery and torture because in the end, if you look at who you are becoming, you can either be the hero or the monster. Getting that money should not be the end result, it what are you going to do with that money you’ve been given.
