Stepping off the curb
White Sands in New Mexico. Photo credit: @carrie_borden via Unsplash
When I was 16 years old and living close to the US-Mexican border in New Mexico, I went with a group of volunteers to Ciudad Juarez to distribute polio vaccines. This week someone asked me when I had “stepped off the curb.” I think that trip might have been it.
To contextualize a little, I had traveled to New Mexico from Denmark as a Rotary exchange student some months before. Everything about New Mexico was foreign to me: the arid landscape, the simultaneous infantilizing and sexualizing of adolescents, the overt presence of religion in everyday life, the policing of social contracts. It was strange and terrifying, and for my first few months I had been so miserable that my initial host family — I later learned — had thought of sending me home.
By the time I went to Ciudad Juarez, I had partially assimilated. But that trip was something else. Up until that moment, I had never witnessed abject poverty.
There is, of course, income inequality in Denmark (more so now than 40 years ago), though of a completely different ilk. In the Denmark I grew up in, poverty meant cramped living quarters, social housing, and longer walking distance to public transportation. In the Ciudad Juarez we visited, only the privileged even had a roof. I am not trying to idealize the Danish social contract, and certainly not as it has evolved since then, with exacerbated class distinctions and the resulting differences in morbidity, ill health, and depression.
What I am trying to say is that, at 16, I was deeply shook by what I saw in the slums of Ciudad Juarez. I recall deep discomfort with my own privilege and worth, and uncertainty on where to go from there. Given the injustice of the situation, how should I proceed?
I suspect this is the origin of my “stepping off the curb,” meaning when I started to see the space I occupy in the world as something less than natural. There is nothing heroic in this. It took me years to meander to where I am now. And still, I am work in progress. But it is a point of departure.
What is yours?
