Happy Esther Day, everybody!
This post has a very specific purpose, so I'll try and keep it short, but for those of you who don't know, Esther Earl was a really amazing person who died of cancer when she was sixteen. Partly because I never actually knew Esther and partly because this post is meant to be for school, I don't think I can explain Esther Day well enough and in few enough words to keep it from dominating the post, and I certainly can't do it as well as this vlogbrothers video and the rest of the playlist it's been added to. Hank doesn't explain Esther Day until about two minutes in, but I think the entire video is very important, so I urge you to watch all of it. (It's three minutes and thirty-eight seconds long; I think you can handle it.) In short, Esther Day - August third - is a day to tell your friends and family and everybody who's important to you that you love them, and not just assume that they know. Last year, my friends and I held a party, but this year, circumstances wouldn't allow it. So I'm spreading the word this way, because the internet it powerful, and maybe somebody will read this who doesn't already know about it. Let's hope, I guess.
Right, so, to the school part of this post. I stumbled upon my first artifact for The Distance Between Us this morning! It's a newspaper article. (I am so original.) I found it in my actual physical newspaper, but that's a little harder to link to, so I have it online here. In it, Roxana Orellana talks about her recent trip to Honduras, the country she grew up in, but no longer recognizes. Like Reyna Grande, Orellana's mother moved to the United States and promised to come back for her children once she got settled. Five years later, her mother returned for her. Honduras was poor then, but not life-threatening. After Orellana moved to the United States, crime in Honduras increased dramatically, crimes such as murder happening regularly in broad daylight. "It’s different now, a place that forces kids to make adult decisions and trek in terrifying conditions hoping for better. The violence of drug traffickers and gangs has poisoned the culture, leaving wreckage that sometimes seems beyond repair."
In The Distance Between Us, Reyna returns to her hometown of Iguala, Mexico during her senior year of high school. The government has privatized the railroad since she left, and trains no longer come there. As a result, Iguala has plummeted even deeper into poverty. Like Roxana Orellana, Reyna goes to stay with her maternal grandmother, and she finds it hard to ignore the poverty that surrounds her, while as a child, it was all she knew. (At this same point in the book, I find it hard to ignore what a shallow, two-faced monster her older sister has become, while it's all that Reyna ever knew, but I figure that's a post for another day.)
In my last post, I ranted about how horrible and depressing The Distance Between Us was. I actually finished it yesterday though, and it had the happy ending it so desperately needed. And it occurs to me that those first three hundred pages of unbelievable misfortune made the last twelve pages of hope so much better. Because honestly, we would never care that Reyna graduated from college if we hadn't seen everything that had stood in her way, and we wouldn't care that she'd put her family back together if we hadn't seen everything that had torn it apart. To likely misquote Batman Begins (because that's just my style), "it takes dramatic examples to pull these people out of their apathy." As a fifteen-year-old white girl in a middle-class family, living full time in Park City, Utah, a resort town and one of the nicest cities in America, I find it is really fucking easy to spend all my time on the internet and connected with the world, and yet remain blind to all that goes on in it.
That said, I think I'm gonna read the newspaper more often. Ignorance is bliss if there's a spider in your bedroom, but when I look at the world at large, I think I'd like to know the true state of it. Maybe then I'll know how to do something of value and help it.
-Allie H-S
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