Living On One Dollar Documentary

1. After viewing this documentary, identify what you discovered to be most profound and give your reasoning why.

I found that despite the lack of money and financial security the families love for each other and the sense of community in Pena Blanca to be most profound. These people have to choose between educating and feeding their children while here our choices are where we want to go to school and what we want to eat. Education is taken for granted here and treated as more of a norm than a privilege. Despite of these hard choices you can still see the love within the families there. They have to put their children to work just to get by yet, they still have this amazing love for each other. Not only within the families but within the community they’ve built a support system to help each other live better lives. It always amazes me that within these impoverished communities they have nothing yet, are so willing to give to help someone else. The lack of unselfishness shown in Pena Blanca but also seen in Tanzania, Cambodia and Nicaragua has never ceased to amaze me- how people with so little, give so much.

2. Would you be able to survive in these conditions? Why or why not?

Personally, I think that I would be able to survive like Zach and Chris did for 2 months or 3 months, but not permanently. That being said, I have even more respect for the people of Pena Blanca that have no choice but live that way. It would be immensely eye-opening to live on a dollar a day as an experiment as Chris and Zach did. No matter how submerged you become in helping the people while you’re there you still get to go back to the hotel and have dinner every night and breakfast every morning but to completely understand you have to live exactly as they do, on one dollar a day.

  

3. What do you believe would be the most challenging part of living in poverty?

The most challenging part of living in poverty would be having to choose between the things that are necessary to survive and things that may be important. For example, many families in Pena Blanca have to choose between feeding their children and sending them to school. For people like Rosa, school was something she dreamed of but in order to survive wasn’t an option. Having to put your child to work over going to school just to barely get by would be extremely hard and something that unfortunately, many people living in poverty have to do. I think this would be most challenging because in your heart you would know your child should be going to school but it just isn’t an option if you want to survive. Most of the people have to chose survival over their dreams which would be incredibly hard to know that your dreams are so far from reach.

4. Compare and contrast your values with those of the Guatemalans you watched in the documentary.

My values on family would be most similar to the Guatemalans because for me family come before anything else and for the Guatemalans they choose to help their families over becoming educated or not doing things they want in order to do the things they need to survive. Family comes first is the most similar value between myself and the Guatemalans in the documentary. For most of the people in Guatemala going to school is their dream and a privilege to them. I am at fault for taking school for granted and sometimes dreading it rather than appreciating the opportunity I have to be educated and have a shot at achieving my dreams. I’ve learned from the documentary and all my previous service trips that school isn’t always an option and to not take it for granted but rather appreciate it and use it to follow my dreams and take the opportunity a lot of people aren’t even given.

5. How will you apply what you learned from this documentary into your own service trip?

I can take what I’ve learned from this documentary and use it to better sympathize with the people we help and what they go through. It inspires me to put even more effort into helping at the schools because it is a privilege for those kids and they are so honored to be there that they deserve 110% of my efforts to help them learn. The documentary gave me some insight as to what it’s like to live below the poverty line and that can be applied to my service trip by giving me a better understanding of what exactly it means to live below the poverty line and put that much more effort into putting some light and love into the people we help.