Taking Life's Basics for Granted: A Personal Reflection

Why do we take the way we live for granted? If we sit back and look at all the things that we are fortunate enough to have, we realize how much we actually take for granted. It will amaze you once you look beyond the surface. I remember back in 2010 when I was just fourteen years old. My grandmother gave me the chance to travel with her to her birthplace Navojoa Sonora. Sonora is a state in Mexico which is where my mom’s side of the family lives. It’s sad to say but my mom’s side of the family is very poor. Once I finally got there I traveled for almost 19 hours. This is when I realized that we took even the simplest things for granted. Like electricity water and food. I stayed there for two weeks and let me tell you it made me appreciate my way of living a lot more than I did.
We don’t realize how important it is to have electricity because we are so used to

My Tia was lucky enough to have a friendly neighbor that let her use her water hose a few times a week. In Mexico you are considered wealthy if you have a washing machine. But of course my Tia did not have one. What she has is something called a pila. A pila is made out of cement and has three sections one section is like a tank that holds a lot of water and the other two sections are for washing your clothes by hand. My Tia would use her hose two to three times a week, to get fresh water for the pila. We used that water not just for laundry but also for washing dishes showering and anything else we needed. At home when you want to shower what do you do? Just turn the nozzle and wait for the water to get warm right? Well at my Tia’s it was a little more complex. We were only able to use no more than two buckets of water each. And if you want to take a hot shower you would have to take two buckets of water to the backyard, start a fire, and boil it. You have to make sure that those two buckets last through the entire shower. That’s much easier said than