Tensions and difficulties with the YAV principle of "Living Simply" (Part 1)

Note: This is the first part of part two of a two part series of blog entries that have two parts. Part two of part one, which concerns the AIPRAL conference in Brazil, is coming soon!

I came into this year as a Young Adult Volunteer wanting to live simply. To get away from the silly preoccupations of materialistic American popular culture, and to learn to form real, genuine relationships with people. I was gladly willing to sacrifice things like internet access, TV and hot showers in order to have a “genuine,” year-long taste of how most of the world lives. I wanted to be in solidarity with the urban poor on Lima’s outskirts – a “place” (socially and geographically) that has a host of difficult problems that are unique from those of Peru’s impoverished rural provinces.

For my first two months in Peru, I did all of that fairly well. I was living in a modest home where I always took cold showers. If I wanted to use the internet, I had to walk down the street where I could pay an hourly rate (albeit a very, very small one – about 30 cents) to use a computer in an internet café. If I wanted to watch TV, I had to go upstairs from my room and join in whatever the other family members were watching in one of the bedrooms/living spaces with a TV. When my clothes were dirty, I either washed them by hand or paid my host sister or someone in the neighborhood to wash them for me. Overall, I spent a lot of time simply sitting and talking with the members of my host family. And when I needed time to myself, I read, wrote in my journal or just quietly prayed or reflected in my room.

But, as I discussed on my blog in December, there were some issues with my host family that posed risks to my physical and emotional well-being. Debbie and I, with the help of Hernando and Eduardo (two pastors who supervise my work with my church placements), decided these risks were unnecessary. We made the difficult decision to switch my host family.

My living situation with my new host family, where I’ve been for five months now, is very different from that of the first one. I now can take hot (or at least warm…) showers. I wash my clothes whenever I want in the washing machine. My laptop, which I originally brought to Peru so I could type blog entries offline and then save them to a flash memory drive before uploading them online quickly from an internet café, is now connected 24 hours a day to the (relatively) high speed internet connection in my bedroom. Also in my bedroom is a cable TV with a DVD player, which presents another option for occupying my time when I’m feeling anti-social and just want to “zone out” for awhile.

In other words, as far as technological comforts, I’m really not living too much more “simply” than I ever did in the United States of America. Sure, I don’t have a car, so I take public transportation or walk everywhere, and I dry my clean clothes on a line outside instead of in a machine – both of which are marked improvements in the “living simply” area – but that’s about it. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself spending far too much time mindlessly checking my email, watching you tube videos and online episodes of The Daily Show, checking people’s facebook profiles, and perusing the endless stream of constantly-updated weblogs and online news sources. And thanks to email, instant messaging and the ability of Skype to make ridiculously cheap international phone calls over the internet to US cell phones, I also spend a lot of time corresponding with friends and family (which maybe I shouldn’t mention, just in case you’re reading this and I haven’t kept in touch with you personally…). In fact, a few of my friends have discussed how “weird” it is that I keep in touch so well, since it’s usually impossibly difficult to maintain contact with people who are living simply on another continent.

And, from what I know of how other PC(USA) YAVs are living this year, my friends’ reactions are not unwarranted. My situation seems pretty unique. For most of them, time on the internet, when available, is utilized to maximum efficiency, because access is either rare, expensive or far away. Books are the other “hot commodity” besides the internet, because most YAVs don’t have the constant presence of TVs and computers to divert and entertain them. Finally, by now people have gotten pretty used to washing their clothes by hand, or else they’ve at least formed good relationships with the local people who wash their clothes for them.

However, just because it’s different doesn’t mean that every aspect of my living situation is “bad.” Keeping up with current events and world affairs is generally a “good thing,” in my opinion. And the opportunity to communicate regularly and personally with friends and family is something I’d rather not give up.

Moreover, I think the otherwise noble YAV principle of living simply creates some problematic unintended consequences. First and foremost, it becomes a bragging point. It’s easily romanticized. I think this is one of the reasons why the prospect of being a YAV was so appealing during my senior year of college. Taking a year off to help the poor is a “cool” thing to do. After coming back from Peru, I would be able to casually drop into conversations the fact that I survived (no, flourished!) during a year in which I rarely had internet access, took cold showers and had down-to-earth conversations with people instead of watching TV with them. I sacrificed technological and material comforts for the good of society and the good of the planet. Meanwhile, I was working as a VOLUNTEER – forgoing a year’s worth of wages – not to simply donate that money to the poor, but rather because I was living in solidarity and actually getting to know the poor (to borrow a line from Shane Claiborne).