J. Thomas Rogers: Walking Away From The Amazon

22 January 2011

Photo: TravelPod - The Slums of Belen

Today when the rich and famous become so, it is now wonderfully common for them to venture into charitable work. Some advocate. Some give. Some volunteer themselves. You can notice this limelit generosity in Angelina's adoptions, Oprah's schools, Bono's latest crusade, or any number of less conspicuous efforts to give back.

What a fantastic dream: to make it big and still remember those who never will.

Though I’ve never been rich or famous, it has been normal for me to volunteer and contribute to charitable causes since my teens. As common as that is for people today, it began painfully for me.

I was fifteen years old when I first traveled to the Amazon in South America. Before I could take a boat and see the jungles, I had to pass through the city of Iquitos.

“Why did I wear sandals?” I wondered as I stepped through the muddy garbage of a Belen, a slum in Iquitos.

A Peruvian Child And His Bike
CC licensed photo courtesy: amazoncares.org I cringed as my foot slipped from the sandal into the sludge. The brackish sewer water pooled into canals as it drained from the city directly into Belen and into the Amazon river.

While I shook my foot to rid it of the filth, a group of children were splashing and playing in a ditch nearby.

I locked eyes with a boy around five years old. No doubt he was confused by the sight of a “gringo” in his neighborhood.

A moment later he winced with pain. Broken glass beneath the surface had cut his foot. The boy washed off the blood, in the same vile water, and resumed his play.

My emotions hemorrhaged as I kept moving forward on the path.

I don’t have a bandage…what good would it do for him in that water? Why must they live in this cursed place?

I felt powerless to help and ashamed of my own ease of lifestyle.

The thatched roofs on the huts I passed were lined with vultures. I counted more than fifty of their dark forms eying us. Something aroused their interest and half of them took to flight, blackening the sky above and casting shadows to earth as I walked away.

More than a decade later, that memory still haunts and goads me. It makes me appreciate anyone, celebrity or not, who does what they can to help others. That early experience carved my heart to become the wrong shape for a material world. It doesn't fit anymore.

So, I am indebted to that child treading on the shard. Now I, like many, don't have dreams of fame or fortune. I just want the ability to respond. Whether I respond with words, deeds or whatever I have left in my wallet, I never want to walk away again.