Farm Camps - Mexico
To begin, our recent trip to San Quitin Mexico was an incredible success! All of us at World Abundance and Grand Capital, working together with some amazing people, created abundance for many children and families who live on the farm camps in that area.
The families we helped live in extremely poor conditions and struggle to survive daily life. As many as 35 people (25 children) occupy an 1800-square-foot house made of make-shift walls and dirt floors. They have no running water or electricity, and very little food. Their lack of money comes from the fact that the local farms they have been working have not been offering work due to an early frost that wiped out some of the crops.
For those of you who adopted a child, your gifts were met with wide eyes and smiling faces. Many thanks for the thoughts and intentions you focused toward Mexico. We gave the gifts to the children individually, and told them who the gifts came from. We then asked many of them what their dreams were. Their answers were similar to children from any other part of the world. Some wanted to play soccer, one young woman wanted to be a doctor, another boy a teacher, and so on. These children are not yet aware of any limitations in their lives. Their innocence sees only a world of amazing opportunities. Their visions were inspiring to hear.
For this trip, we brought clothing, food and toys. In the future, World Abundance will play a part in helping their dreams coming true.
Secondly, I’d like to acknowledge Raymond, Carlos, Mike Hernandez and the churches that have consistently served these people for the past nine years. It’s inspiring to see how much happiness can be created by sharing a small amount of the enormous wealth we have. By simply sharing what would end up in our local landfill, our old possessions bring on new life for those that have so little. Our clothes provide warmth for cold winters and shoes for bare feet. The notion of “one man’s trash is another man’s the treasure” brings on a whole new perspective.
Mahatma Gandhi has been a hero of mine for a long time, and I’m taken with his perspective on finding oneself.
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
While I’ve always believed in the principle of this quote, I know for certain I’ve never felt it more powerfully than during this trip.
While being in the presence of these people in Mexico, who appear to have so little, I discovered they aren’t poor at all. Rather they’re a happy people who are wealthy in family, culture and the manner in which they appreciate things I’ve taken for granted all my life. Spending a weekend with them makes my own problems seem not only insignificant, but down right laughable. I can only imagine telling the two adorable twins how stressed I am about the trivial challenges I face as I live in Orange County when they haven’t eaten in two days.
However, these people do have challenges not all that different from those we face in the U.S.—most of which deal with how they view the world around them and the limitations they feel.
They’re farmers. Many of them left their homes to work for corporate farms, earning money doing what they could do for themselves. When the corporate farms lay them off, they forget they can farm for themselves. They’re over-leveraged in debt and have no money because the corporate farms don’t employ them.
Not 50 yards from these farmers’ homes are fields of green, full of food and abundance as far as the eye can see. Yet it goes untouched, untilled and unharvested. These farmers could undoubtedly grow their own food and sell the extra to others. Yet they go hungry. All it would take to break them out of their situation is a shift in understanding, some organization and a boost of capital.
This trip made it very clear to me how big a difference we can permanently make harnessing the wealth and knowledge of the United States.
This trip has also created the possibility that in the near future, World Abundance will reach out and create self-sustaining communities for people just like these who live in farm camps—communities allowing people to own their own farms, grow their own food, provide education and live in the warmth and safety of a clean home. It takes very little to create these communities and with your continued support and commitment to creating value in the world, we can begin to create long-standing abundance by assisting them to live sufficiently for themselves.
It was definitely a life-defining trip in which I discovered myself and what’s possible in the world through being in the service of others. For this lesson alone, I’m incredibly grateful.
Joshua Tree