[BWC]: UC Essay Prompt #2

When I was ten years old, I visited my grandfather for the very first time in southeast China. Due to the others passing away before my birth, he was the only grandparent I had left. I remember entering the rural village where he resided and being shocked at how differently the environment was compared to what I was used to. The lack of technology and his simplistic style of living was new to me, but what shocked me the most was that he was happy in this condition. During my visit, much of what I learned about his life was through my parents. It was difficult for me to communicate with him directly since he spoke a Chinese dialect that was only native to the surrounding village area. My interactions with my grandfather consisted mostly of smiles, hand gestures and using my parents as translators. As a family, we spent three days in the village and left aboard a train to catch our flight back to the States.

A week after the vacation, I remember my mother receiving a phone call during dinner. Suddenly, she started bursting into tears midway through the conversation, but I was ignorant to what was going on. Later on, I found out that my grandfather had passed away a few days ago in his home at the age of 89. Upon hearing the news of his death, I was not emotionally shocked nor devastated because I could not yet comprehend the significant role that he would play in my life in the future.

In the following years, I have realized the need to treasure the people and things around me because they could be gone at any moment. I came to regret the fact that I never got to know him better as a person. Through my maturation, the love for my grandfather grew and although we were separated by a language barrier, I recognized the love he had for me as a grandson. His death has taught me to become a less passive person, that I could not afford to take opportunities for granted, and to fight harder to achieve my goals.

Honestly, this experience is not one of my proudest moments. However, the tragedy of my grandfather's passing has proved to be one of the most enlightening and significant experiences in my life.

In the past, my academic performance was just an arbitrary way to compare myself to my peers. Fortunately, my grandfather's passing changed that by bringing meaning and depth into my life. Academic excellence is no longer a meaningless undertaking, but rather each experience is another opportunity to grow, each class is another opportunity to learn, and achieve something more substantial than a letter grade.

Essentially, one of the most tragic events in my lifetime taught me that I must take a more active role in achieving my dreams and aspirations. Not only did I take my family and education for granted, but my own potential as well. I feel internally indebted to my grandfather because he has enlightened me to never stick to the norm of being an average student. Instead, I must venture out into the world and discover the many possibilities that are available to me. I will forever carry the memory of my grandfather with me, along with the lessons of his passing to guide me to reach my potentials and goals.

Honestly, I love things like this. Last week I saw a video of people using liter bottles to light up their homes. I do not know if this is becoming a trend in the Philippines, but it certainly is innovative and effective as well. Not only does it show that people can make use of what they have and find ways to live off it, but it shows the kind of creativity and love for the community that thrives from these towns. Instead of focusing on corporate industries, or making money for the individual, people are getting together to help build better schools, or rebuild roofs. This goes back and relates to my poverty post, although America as a country is more financially secure than these other countries, they are still finding ways to help others, while we are having rising unemployment and a failing housing market. It really just goes to show that people certainly do appreciate things more when they only have the bare essentials. I think that if we got rid of a lot of the unnecessary distractions in our society, we would function better as a whole and produce innovative ideas such as these to help our community, and country. I really wish people were more willing to compromise and focus on the essential issues instead of everyone just worrying about the individual. It sort of makes me want to live in other place just to see how their society differs. We need to change our mindset of things before we try and change our structure.

[Re]: Poverty

But life in Biko seemed to me, in some non-material ways, to be much "wealthier" than the life I experience in Oakland for example. The village had a much stronger sense of shared community and connection to the natural world, as far as I could tell, than our big urban jungles do. It may sound corny, but I think there are forms of wealth which we in the "civilized" world tend to ignore or devalue, much to our own detriment. -Mr. Sutherland

I believe that since we are considered a first world country, our idea of poverty itself is much different than that of second and third-world countries. I mean, we have so many liberties and rights that we take for granted all too often, whereas people in other parts of the world are risking their lives for, hoping that future generations would have these "privileges" that we already posses. Just from the fact that we have everything so readily available to us, it has made our generation a very lazy one as a result. The term "first world problems" is often used to describe this phenomenon, frustrations and complaints are only experienced by privileged individuals in wealthy countries. It is typically used as a tongue-in-cheek comedic device to make light of trivial inconveniences. Things like "My phone charger is downstairs and I'm too lazy to get it." and "I click on my Facebook notifications, but they aren't going away." are common complaints. 


I believe that the reason that communities such as those in Biko are so banded together is due to the fact that they don't have much materialistically. They have a stronger sense of community because they are actually forced to interact with one other, instead we live through a wall of social networking and texting, creating a totaly different persona for ourselves and losing touch with our community and surroundings. In some ways, people like those in Biko are richer than us in my opinion. Such as their culture, and the way they treat each other are probably held in higher regards compared to what we experience in present day America. So really, get to know your neighbors, be involved with your community, pick up a physical book, and go play outside and exercise.