How Gratitude Shapes much more Amazing Life
Old writing — written in February 2018.
D-3 weeks to get everything done with KKN (Community Service), I had been punched by many hard truths here.
The first week was not easy for me to get adapted to everything, luckily alhamdulillah everyone in my team was kind and had a great sense of humor as well as our host parent who were always understanding our lacks (especially my lacks of being so poor at cooking hahahaha).
The area was still on the same island as my hometown and the capital city of Indonesia, but the socio-economic gap is just jaw-dropping. Most of the people in the village did not really speak Bahasa Indonesia as they spoke in Javanese with very strong dialect. One night, our host-father and I had casual talks about how he worked as a carpenter, he had told me a lot of things and I could only understand approximately 50% of the talks and some of my questions were not answered by him — we basically did not understand what each others said.
The next morning, one of my friends said to me, “Semalem aku tak paham kau ngomong apa sama Bapak hahahaha.”
(red: I could not understand what you talked to the host-father last night)
The other day, my friend and I cleaned the yard as ton of leaves falling due to the hard rain the night before (red: not ton of course, but you know what I mean). We just threw them over the cliff surrounding our house and our host-father said,
“Wah mbak itu dikumpulin daun nya sekilo bisa dijual 1.500 rupiah.”
(red: [if you keep them] the leaves can be sold for 15cents per kilo).
How money as small as 15cents was valued significantly.
The other night, I had a talk with the host-mother and she told me how difficult it was for them to send their children to get a formal education. There was only one elementary school in the village and they needed extra money to send their children to high school. She was very pessimistic about being able to send her sons to university. As much as I told her about scholarships and many of my friends who are coming from the same background as hers, plus about my own parents who both of them were coming from a farmer family. However, it still looked grey for her to see her sons get to higher education.
Our team consisted of seven students; five boys and two girls (including me). This girl friend, N, she was just super amazing. She practices the Deen well, she is the best at cooking and doing the household, and happy plus laughing most of the time. She was kind a happy-go-lucky. I had been learning soooo much from her.
One afternoon, I asked her about how she managed to maintain gratitude.
Her answer was actually common that we have to always look at people behind us in terms of Dunya (worldly matters) and look at people above us in terms of Deen (religious matters). Until her next statement in Bahasa managed to kick myself:
“That is why I always enjoy and feel glad to be in such a condition, in the village, with all the people behind in terms of Dunya. This helps me so much to be grateful.”
Meanwhile my heart and head always craved going back home, she was enjoying and feeling glad to be here. To the extent I could always feel her sincere happiness which somehow radiated to her surroundings, including me.
