A Hard Lesson to Learn

[xfpower]

Heey guys!

Just new on this forum. I don't how this normally work so i was guessing to just open topic. My apologie if not

All the first I just wanted to report that my grammer isn't that great (from Holland)

So I wanna share an experience.

As a little boy (11) I went with my family to Thailand and it was seriously the best vacation ever, tough, I saw something I would never ever forget and I remembred this experience as the day of yesterday. It was the best experience of my life and at the same time the worst one, ever

We went to the real slums that were surrounded with walls. Before the wall there where people living 'normal' lives, 'good' lives. Behind the wall there was an inmense poverty I cound't possibly understand. People where dying, starving to death and the smells where truly horrible. So we went behind the walls with a big bag of candy to give to the children. We walked into the slums, not far away because it is just to dangerous, not lifethreatning dangerous, but mindthreatning dangerous. Allright, so we shared our candy and gave it to the local children.

The things that we saw where so inmense strange I am unable to write it down. After the experience it hit me straight in the face, the feeling was simply inhuman. What we saw was a complete world were people were happy in a sense, enjoyed life as such and filled with some kind of 'love', oh man, filled with.., and we came with a bag full of power, and inmense power..

So wat is happend behind the walls. I shall continue...

We gave candy to the childeren and there was a strange look on there faced (we completly misinterpeted them) There was one boy who stole the big bag of candy right out of my hands and runned away. Suddenly there where a group of other children who runned after him and they grapped the little boy. Right before our eyes there happend something truly terrible, truly horror *I am shaking and crying right now*.. They grapped the boy and there hitting him straight in his face, kicking him on every part of his body. You can't possible understand what it feels like to see blood splashing around from a boy who has an age of 5 or 6 years old. From that moment everything went black. I don't know how we came out of that place, just pitchblack

So this was an experience of a lifetime.

What is the moral I've learned from this experience? Wel I am definately not a person who is gonna say that there are rules in living (you've to make them yourself) but what I've learned is one thing. I don't ever, never ever touch any form of culture whatoever anymore. IMO everything we touch with 'our' western civilised hands wil instantly result in death and destruction. There are some things happening on our planet we can't possibly understand and it is not up to us to try and make a diffrence, it is up to them. With help?

Tough

There is a movie scene that describe it perfectly in every word, every sentence, every prase. It gives me the cold shivers in every nerve in my body. It is just pure perfect.

It is a scene from the movie 'Apocalypse Now (Redux) 1979'



If you have any thought or feedback I would be more than happy

Light trough living

Xfpower

[wuliheron]

Unfortunately your experience isn't new and it is always best to approach extreme situations like poverty or extremely different cultures with caution. However, your story reminds me of the origin of Grameen Bank. A few college students in Bangladesh went into the slums and spent the day asking the locals what kind of help they could use. At one point two groups of people came to them and, because they were outsiders, asked them to mediate a dispute over money.

They spend hours arguing over the money and finally the college students asked how much money was involved. When the crowd told them twenty dollars the students practically threw the money at them just to get rid of them. On another day the people returned and paid them their money back, only to have another group ask them to mediate a dispute over money. That twenty dollars is still in circulation to this day and has grown into Grameen Bank which is worth some 1.5 billion dollars.

Its a nonprofit bank that people work for instead of paying interest on loans and their goal is to eliminate that kind of destitute poverty worldwide within fifty years. For such people a loan of a few hundred dollars is enough to start a business that can support them for life. Almost all their loans are to women who tend to be much better with spending the money then men and they say after all these years they have never had a single person default on a loan. Some of the people receiving loans from them have even become millionaires and made large donations back to the bank.

[BadgerJelly]

I have the same opinion of the western world.

hose kids in the slum are there because humans are ignorant to what they themselves really are. Its all just miscommunication nothing else.

[CanadysPeak]

Unfortunately your experience isn't new and it is always best to approach extreme situations like poverty or extremely different cultures with caution. However, your story reminds me of the origin of Grameen Bank. A few college students in Bangladesh went into the slums and spent the day asking the locals what kind of help they could use. At one point two groups of people came to them and, because they were outsiders, asked them to mediate a dispute over money.

They spend hours arguing over the money and finally the college students asked how much money was involved. When the crowd told them twenty dollars the students practically threw the money at them just to get rid of them. On another day the people returned and paid them their money back, only to have another group ask them to mediate a dispute over money. That twenty dollars is still in circulation to this day and has grown into Grameen Bank which is worth some 1.5 billion dollars.

Its a nonprofit bank that people work for instead of paying interest on loans and their goal is to eliminate that kind of destitute poverty worldwide within fifty years. For such people a loan of a few hundred dollars is enough to start a business that can support them for life. Almost all their loans are to women who tend to be much better with spending the money then men and they say after all these years they have never had a single person default on a loan. Some of the people receiving loans from them have even become millionaires and made large donations back to the bank.

Grameen's skirts are not that clean. They have fairly serious delinquency rates (up to 19 %), but they use somewhat disingenous labelling to drop the default rate below 10 %. They have also been known to use some muscle to collect.

http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2010/0 ... t-snag.php

[wuliheron]

Grameen's skirts are not that clean. They have fairly serious delinquency rates (up to 19 %), but they use somewhat disingenous labelling to drop the default rate below 10 %. They have also been known to use some muscle to collect.

http://blogs.cgdev.org/open_book/2010/0 ... t-snag.php

Too bad. It looks like they've run into serious problems in the last few years. We'll have to wait and see how it all works out, but it still doesn't detract from the obvious growth and need for such institutions.