A man,\u00a0faded army issue pants, wool coat,\u00a0rope belt which wraps too far around his too thin waist, shovel, missing front tooth, standing in a dirt field with a blank stare at the foreigner riding by on a bicycle and gear costing much more than his yearly wage.\u00a0 But he doesn’t know that, all he knows is that just over 30 years ago foreigners wern’t allowed into his country.\u00a0 He knows that growing up during the cultural revolution he was told to eat his rice because there were American’s who were starving.\u00a0 He knows that somehow things have changed but he isn’t sure of the scope.\u00a0 Left in the dark and far behind not 100 miles to the north a place exists called Beijing which within the year will host an event on the world stage.\u00a0 Not too far to the south exists a place called Shanghai, a place\u00a0more foreign to him than to millions of Americans.\u00a0 But he knows his son moved there, along with countless millions of others\u00a0to the boom towns of post Deng Xioping’s economic freedom movement.\u00a0 He knows that his son sends money home from his window washing job, he sends home the\u00a0equivilent of 40 US dollars a month,\u00a0much more than what he had\u00a0ever been able to make growing corn, cabbage, and carrots.\u00a0 It would not be too much to say that his son\u00a0has a direct window to view\u00a0the change occurring in this country at a hecticly and mind spinning pace.\u00a0 He may get a chance to share this with\u00a0his father once a year when he returns home on\u00a0an over crowded train for the new year celebration.\u00a0\u00a0His son sends home a\u00a0lot of money, to this man\u00a0my plane ticket to the country, my bicycle, my video camera, hard drive, and camping\u00a0equipment dosn’t exist, it can’t exist, or one would starve.\u00a0\u00a0Back in the United States I am poor, jobless, and missing out on building my 401k, paying off a mortgage on a house and car, and ruining the statistic of unemployment rates for my college.\u00a0 Should I feel guilty for taking advantage of\u00a0a situation, an unfair and unbalanced coincidence that I am able to travel, document, and see things that make our world ours.\u00a0\u00a0I struggle with the thought\u00a0that I make money in the U.S.\u00a0then spend it on\u00a0a lifestyle a fraction of the price for the same goods, while people here work day in and day out to make ends meet.\u00a0 I have put myself in a unique situation.\u00a0 No other generation in the history of human kind has been able to travel and see the world the way mine has.\u00a0 I purposely have\u00a0no children or current career that I had to tear myself away from.\u00a0 The ability and freedom to explore has exponentially risen with the advent of\u00a0better transportation and communication.\u00a0 Would I then\u00a0also feel guilty for not exploring these options?\u00a0 I find a way to cope with this is by doing exactly what our group means to do, a way to share with friends, family, and anyone unable to take benefit from travel like myself.\u00a0 We live in a highly globalized world which will only become more so.\u00a0 Not only can this man working the fields in Hebei province China not understand me but I can most certainly not understand him.\u00a0 But we can begin to build bridges for the future.\u00a0 Not only for major corporations investing money in third world countries and the boom cities foregin to most residents in China, Americans, and a vast amount of their own inhabitants.\u00a0 But we can try to understand the true\u00a0people that make up the world we live in, along with exploring who we are ourselves\u00a0in the process.\u00a0\u00a0No we can not all quit our jobs and tour the world, it would then surly fall apart.\u00a0 But we can step back ponder the man in the dirt field the same way he ponders us.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man,\u00a0faded army issue pants, wool coat,\u00a0rope belt which wraps too far around his too thin waist, shovel, missing front tooth, standing in a dirt field with a blank stare at the foreigner riding by on a bicycle and gear costing much more than his yearly wage.\u00a0 But he doesn’t know that, all he knows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adams-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/0708.fueledbyrice.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}