Imagine a boy. A boy who has bandages on his head. A boy who has lost everything. A boy who, even with sadness around him, has a smile on face. My father met this boy while volunteering in Haiti after the earthquake. This boy had a smile on his face. Everytime my dad tells me about this boy, I still wonder how with all the destruction around him, the boy still smiles. This thought then led me to think, why we Americans get upset if something minimal is gone. I realized it is because we have materialistic items. We have everything.

There is also another part to this story. The people in Haiti had almost nothing after the earthquake. While my dad helped the doctors, the boy approached him. This boy was around six to seven years old. He was eating a banana. This boy offered my dad part of his banana. Imagine a six year old here in America. Would he/she offer the banana? No. This boy offered my dad the banana. He had nothing. He just lost everything. Yet, he was so willing to share what little he had, with a smile on his face. My dad said that might have been the most sincere and meaningful gesture he had ever witnessed.

I think that in America, we forget the little things. We are so consumed by everything around us, we tend to forget to look around and see the important things in life. Nowadays, all we seem to care for is the Internet. If we don’t have wifi, our world is ending.

However, looking back at the boy, he didn’t have any of that. The things that were the most important to him were his family, his friends, his life. This boy just survived an earthquake. He didn’t care that he lost everything. He didn’t care that he was hurt. He had the most important people around him, and that’s all that mattered.

If I were in that situation, trust me, I would not even have that kind of attitude. I would be so caught up on the materialistic things that I lost, I wouldn’t even notice that the people that actually mattered are still with me. It is hard. I wouldn’t be the only one thinking like this. I believe that a majority of people in our nation would do the same thing. We would worry about the little stuff, and forget the big picture.

That little boy taught me the most important lesson. The lesson of appreciation. He taught me that I have to appreciate the people around me, and the environment and life that I live in. I think that’s one of the negative consequences of living in America. We are raised in a higher standard of living, and we are capable of getting a lot of things. Like I repeatedly been saying, we people in America need to learn to open our eyes and look around. Materialistic items mean nothing, items with meaning and importance are priceless.

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse,”(Henry David Thoreau, Walden).