On Friday night I saw the film "Motorcycle Diaries", the story of two friends making a year-long motorcycle journey through South America. The film captures the paradox between beauty and suffering that I experienced on my trip.
One of the characters (the young Che Guevera), a medical student from a wealthy family, is exposed to poverty and injustice for the first time. As he and his companion wrestle with numerous misadventures and the challenges of traveling across a continent with limited funds, they must also integrate visceral, life-changing realizations about the utter mistreating of many people for the financial benefit of a few. In one very moving seen, the young man swims across a river (the Amazon?) to a leper colony built separated from the hospital staff residences by the river. For me, it symbolized his defiance of a social system that separates the less desirable from the more desirable, the less whole from the more whole. He came close to drowning, but he reached the other side, and amidst my tears I wondered if I have the eyes and the courage to traverse the separating rivers in my life.
