Five days after I wrote an open letter to Gwyneth Paltrow challenging her comments about the difficulty of being a (multimillionaire) mother working on a film set as compared to moms with regular office jobs, I received the following e-mail from someone saying he was a refugee from the Congo.
His message was a genius parody of my own open letter, gently chiding me and reminding me that everything is a matter of perspective — one man’s woes are another man’s dreams.
While I do think there are many serious things that need to change in America so that working parents can receive more support, I am reminded that many people in the world would love to have our problems.
I asked the letter writer if we could publish his letter here, and he agreed, though he preferred to remain anonymous:
I recently came across your piece where you wrote an open letter to Gwyneth Paltrow regarding her remarks during an interview with E!
As a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, all I ever needed to do to get through a day at my birthplace was to tell myself “Thank God I don’t live in America, have an average paying job and the freedom to earn money to provide for my family” as I trek down the muddy 2-mile-long pathway at 5 a.m. (to avoid the crowd) to carry drinking water home from the single working water well in our community.
And I know my fellow townspeople felt the same way.
Whenever we leisurely stroll around the local scrap yard to look for discarded electronics with still-working removable parts, we would barely worry about the still active land mines that still go off once in a while when an unlucky child chooses to step on the wrong piece of earth. Because, after all, what is the loss of a limb or two when compared to those in a free country who have to deal with morning rush hour traffic and the worry of losing the 1500-square-foot heated and air-conditioned home’s roof over their heads? We preferred the mortgage-free metal plates and rotted wood pallet sheds that we stayed in.
Speaking of which, we have always felt extra-special when we do not have to worry ourselves with the unreasonable cost of first-class health care; we didn’t have health care. Phew!
And after a long day under the sun spent in the scrap yard, we are usually unspeakably grateful since we do not have to expend extra energy to prepare a meal for the family, since I’ve not found anything worthwhile for resale in the past week, which means I couldn’t buy any grain from the local militia, and tree bark generally doesn’t taste any better after boiling, anyway.
Yours,
A Congolese Refugee now Living in the US