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The statistics are telling.  Nearly a third of Nicaraguan adults are illiterate. Forty-five percent are living on less than $1 a day.  Only 29% of children finish primary school. Most have to drop out of school to look for work to help feed their families.  More than 1 million children under the age of 5 die each year from diarrhea and other diseases they contract from drinking unclean water.

And while these statistics do a great job painting the kinds of issues people there face, until you’ve seen it with your own eyes, it’s easy to forget.  And even then, months after a visit there, it’s still gets easier to push it out of your memory — at least temporarily.

But one story still sticks out to me, one that is engrained in my brain forever and — though it doesn’t detail the mass poverty or the problems with the education system there — it sums the battles people face to feed and clothe their families, and it highlights the contrasting differences between Nicaragua and the states.  This is a story that humbles me and one with which I still feel sharp pangs of guilt, even though I did nothing wrong.

We first visited Nicaragua in October 2009.  We went with another lady from our church — Miss Jackie — to tour the area, visit local communities and see how feasible it would be to take a team from our church to spend a week or so there.  Our friends, Stephanie and Joel (and now their newest little one, Nico) live in Los Cedros, right outside the ministry with which they work called Globe International, Nicaragua.  On the second-to-last day we were there, we stopped at small roadside convenience store.  Actually, convenience store isn’t really the term — it was more like a roadside stand, big enough for the store owner behind the counter and a small room he keeps his stored goods. It sold various candies, rotten fruit (complete with maggots and fruit flies — the smell still nauseates me), a few batteries and other random items.  But most importantly, at least for our agenda, it sold rubber shoes.  We noticed almost all the children we met all wore the same type of shoe and as tourists, we wanted to purchase a few pairs.

I’m not entirely sure what other people pay for these shoes, but we paid $3 a pair. Steph explained that they were very popular in Nicaragua because they were cheap and relatively durable.  Parents were able to buy them and then pass them along from kid to kid as hand-me-downs and they’d stay together for years.

This kid is wearing a pair

and so is he. the best part about the shoes is that when they get muddy, they're pretty easy to clean.

So, we asked for a few pairs.  Jackie paid for hers while I was trying to find a pair that would fit my small feet.  I tried pair after pair, but they were all too big.  Smiling, I told Steph that it was okay — I didn’t have to have any.  And as she translated, a panicked look came across the shop owner’s face.  “no, wait,” Steph translated. “I have more in the back.”

He spent the next few minutes in his back room while we chatted outside.  I think I apologized to our group for the hold up.  I wasn’t sure what was taking so long.

Finally, the shop owner came out with a size 6 — the size I needed — in a clear, wrapped bag. I gave him my $3 and we went about our business.  Later that evening when we arrived back at the ministry, I took a closer look at the shoes I had bought.  They had mud marks on them and indentations where someone else’s toes had been.  If this had happened at home, I would have been pretty upset. I did, after all, pay full price for what I thought was brand new shoes.  But instead, I felt this overwhelming sense of guilt. I just bought shoes off of someone else’s feet.  Someone was shoeless because of me, because the shop owner didn’t want to lose my $3.  I imagine him frantically in that back room, ordering his son or daughter or even wife to take off their shoes because some gringa wanted them.  And for me, I felt the unfairness of it all.  Why are so many Nicaraguans suffering and struggling to pay for the basic needs of survival when most of us have it so easy? To most people in the US, losing a $3 sale is nothing.  We wouldn’t even think twice of it.  Three dollars doesn’t even buy a gallon of gas. But this shop owner was so desperate to sell me a pair of shoes that he took the pair right off what I imagine to be his own family’s feet.  I know not everything in our country is peaches and cream — we have our issues, too, including poverty in our own county.  But it’s somehow different, somehow enormously different there.

I can only bring myself to wear those rubber shoes when I’m in Nicaragua.  I brought them with me when we took our first church group in 2010 and I’ll take them with me when we return in six weeks.  But I can’t bring myself to wear them here.  Something about wearing them in a place where $3 isn’t even considered “money” so much as “chump change” just doesn’t quite feel right to me.  I still struggle with global inequality, why I was born here and not there, why — even here — I was born into a privileged family who has encouraged me to become whoever or whatever I want, and why that isn’t an option for the majority of the world. But then I remind myself that isn’t about the haves and the have-nots, even though it’s extremely easy to see it that way. I”m not going to Nicaragua to play Santa Claus; I’m going to serve, to share the hope I have inside me, the same source of hope everyone can have.  I’m going to share God’s love for them through laughter during our clowning program, through the lunches we’ll prepare for them, through the Bible studies we’ll host, through the encouragement we’ll give and the encouragement we’ll receive, through our smiles and our hugs and our jokes and games, through prayers and worship songs, through sharing our culture and learning about theirs.  And through it all, I’ll re-learn what I’ve learned and observed before — that grace is enough, that at our deepest core, humanity is beautiful, that we are called to serve a higher power, and that sometimes it’s important to feel guilty over a $3 pair of rubber shoes.