Take to the Hills! Clothing the Sierra Madres

Patrick Randall

Description

The renowned FreewayBlogger, aka Patrick Randall, tells the story of one of his earliest decision to take direct action—he hears a report of poverty in Mexico, loads up his trusty old VW bus and hits the road with half a ton of clothes, no map, some good tunes and a sense of adventure.

The trip turns into an exploration in discovery, friendship and the power of acting on your beliefs in a tale of a journey that's part travelogue, part exhortation to take philanthropic risks, but all heart.

"Take to the Hills! Clothing the Sierra Madres" is the story of how a coincidence turned an English teacher into a modern-day Robin Hood: taking warm clothing from the rich and bringing them to the poorest, coldest people he could find. It shows how one person can make a difference in the lives of thousands and have the adventure of a lifetime doing it.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Homelessness
• Poverty

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 11 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780988724310
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Take to the Hills! Clothing the Sierra Madres
 
by
Patrick Randall

Copyright 2013 Patrick Randall,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by Kos Media LLC
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-0-9887-2431-0
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Take to the Hills! Clothing the Sierra Madres

Here's a moment that changed my life:
 
I was cleaning my apartment, standing in front of my closet with an armload of blankets and wondering what to do with them. A story came on the radio about a cholera epidemic in the Sierra Madre mountains. While the reporter talked about the poverty, cold and isolation of the villages, it occurred to me that the obvious thing to do was put the blankets in my car and drive them up to those villages. And, eventually, that’s what I did.
 
In fact, I spent the next three years collecting blankets, warm clothes, school and medical supplies, and delivering them to communities throughout the northwest Sierra Madres, reaching about forty different villages spread out across 5,000 square miles. When I was done I could look at a globe, put my finger down on one spot and say, “There, right there. The people who live in this place are at least slightly better off because of what I did.” It’s an amazing feeling, and not one that many get to experience. But it’s actually quite easy to do if you’ve got the time, and if you pick a relatively sparsely populated area.
 
If you want to directly alleviate human suffering here’s what to do: collect warm clothing, put them in a car and deliver them to people who are cold. Of course, the same formula works by bringing food to the hungry and medicine to the sick, but clothing is easier to obtain, lasts much longer and avoids complications of diet and allergies. Clothing also has the advantage of being highly condensable: even a small car can hold enough to help dozens of people, while a pickup truck can clothe well over a hundred.
 
While most charitable efforts require all kinds of planning, support, administration and infrastructure, collecting and delivering clothing does not. In fact, if you live in or near a large city, you can start right now. Go to your closet, pick out a large coat and a blanket or two, put them in your car, and go find someone who’s living on the street. It’s that easy.
 
Although doing it on a larger scale requires a bit more planning and travel, the basic elements are the same: take what you don’t need, put it in your car, and then go find someone who needs it. Apart from simply helping out others, there’s another payoff to this, and that’s the “going” and “finding” part—the journey itself. Rarely do those of us in a position to help find ourselves in the places where that help is needed. Finding those places and those people—getting out of your comfort zone—that’s where the real rewards take place.
 
When I was standing in front of my closet and listening to the radio, delivering the blankets wasn't my first thought. My first thought was simply trying to picture the villages up in those mountains— what they looked like and what life might be like up there. Frankly, I had no idea, so my mind flashed through stock footage of the Dust Bowl: high, dry prairie with shacks and tumbleweeds and the like. My next thoughts were about my life and what I was doing, and how utterly and entirely different my situation was from those in the Sierra Madre mountains. They were living in the Mexican outback dealing with poverty and cold, while I was living at the beach in San Diego, teaching English at San Diego State University. While they were fighting cholera, I was cleaning my apartment in order to avoid grading papers, standing there and holding a bunch of extra stuff, wondering what to do with it.
 
In a very real way it crystallized everything about life in the the first and third worlds: We spend our time dealing with our surpluses while they spend theirs coping with their lack. More than geographically, you couldn't get further from those villages than where I was standing.
 
That's when I started thinking about delivering the blankets, not so much in terms of a humanitarian gesture as much as just to wonder if I could I actually do it. There were roads, after all, that led from my apartment to Mexico, and then at least theoretically up into the mountains and those villages... If I decided that that's what I wanted to do, could I actually make it? I thought about my van, a '68 VW I'd bought three months before for $500 and after some consideration I put the odds at about 50/50.