Christmas Day 2016. It’s now been a year and several months since I moved from Alaska and began my journey and new life in South America. During that time I traveled around nine countries, including four I had never visited before. I observed and I learned from all the places I visited and all the people I met. I learned to speak more Spanish and Portuguese, and made many new friends. I lived and worked on environmental and indigenous justice projects in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil and in the Amazon region of Peru.
What is this road I have chosen and why did I choose it? Like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I am haunted by ghosts of the past, present and future. About a decade ago, after living through the most difficult period of my life, I felt a veil was lifted, or my eyes opened to that which was always before me but I failed to see. Now along with my faith, I have this relentless desire to make the best use of my remaining years. For the preservation of life on earth, for all those masses of people who are being oppressed for the benefit of a few wealthy individuals and wealthy countries such as the US, for the survival and well-being of future generations, including my grandson. All this through the grace of God, for as it is said “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
I left the country once before, in 2007 and 2008, but knew then that I would have to return because I needed to earn more income. But when I left again eight years later, I knew this time it was probably for good. There was no turning back. If I was ever going to do this I felt I couldn’t wait any longer, given my age and the physical demands of the life I was about to undertake. So it was now or never.
I was also committing to a much simpler, much lower budget way of life. I lacked enough funds to retire in the US, and would lose the “marketability” to resume a career in the US corporate world the longer I lived and worked away from that world. Then there are the health risks and end of life issues, which are hard to predict. If I lived to a very old age, I may not be able to travel to and from the US at all in my last years.
I had good work, good friends and relative comfort and security where I was living in Alaska. Since my time of living and working in Latin America in 2007 and 2008, I had a strong desire to return and to continue the kind of work I was doing in those years. Nonetheless it was hard to leave my country of origin knowing that this move would likely be permanent. I had many conflicting emotions and signs of stress during the transition period. But the deciding factor was the conviction that this was where God was leading me. I believe this is what I was made for and am called to do before I die.
About the ghosts. The ghost of the past relates to the corporate sin I have inherited as a white middle class US citizen. The higher relative wealth and prosperity of my country, my ancestors, and therefore my own wealth and prosperity, were largely a result of the exploitation and oppression of native and African-descent people, a result of stealing land and of betraying promises. We owe a huge debt to the indigenous people of this continent. For injustices perpetrated against them on lands occupied by the US during the past four centuries. For injustices perpetrated in Latin America, by predatory US-based companies, the CIA and the US Army School of the Americas (“School of the Assassins”), within the past century.
The ghost of the present has to do with all the ongoing cases of violence, land grabs, environmental destruction and contamination levied against rural people and wild places, especially in the so-called third world. These are some of the greatest needs of our time, largely hidden from the view of those in countries like the US who could do something to help.
We need to defend the health and well-being of indigenous and other poor people, to protect all forms of life in the forests and other natural places that remain, to preserve the beauty of traditional cultures, their languages and their ancient knowledge. The current ecological and humanitarian crisis is like what the rise of Hitler meant to an earlier generation. We all need to do what we can to stop it, and some of us have the freedom and capacity to do more. I think this fight for the survival of life on earth could be a higher duty than any military service of the past.
The ghost of the future is the looming global environmental collapse. A combination of climate change, peak oil, unsustainable population levels, extreme wealth inequality and the concentration of economic power in a small number of giant transnational corporations. This is already having devastating impacts in certain areas of the world and is likely to have much greater effects on everyone within a generation or two.
I am drawn to Latin America by my love for its beauty, by my great desire to protect it, and because it is where I believe I can be most effective as I try to repay my debts to this continent’s original people, try to address current needs and try to help change course, at least in a small corner of the planet, away from the precipice to which we are headed. The lower cost of living in this part of the world and my ability to speak the language allowed me to move there and live with only a fraction of the savings I would need to retire in the US.
It is now the second time I have found myself at the end of a year and several months of living and working in Latin America. I took a leap of faith when I chose this new life. Equipped with some useful skills, but mostly with just a wholehearted desire to do the best I can to help in the remaining years of my life. I had a general idea of how I would start out on this road, but now as I look ahead I can’t see past the next bend. Only God knows where it will lead next.