the cereal aisle

Yesterday I went grocery shopping to pick up a few things, which turned into me buying enough food to feed our family for most of the week. Grocery shopping is something that always seems to hit me after returning from another culture. The size of the stores themselves aside, I just get overwhelmed by the selection and endless supply of products I have to choose from here in Canada. As I stood in the cereal aisle I realized once again that I have access to so much. I mean for me it really doesn't matter if I buy a box of no name cereal that will cost me three dollars or if I go for the name brand version and pay eight dollars. At the end of the day, it's box of cereal. But having just come from a situation where the difference of five dollars is not just about what kind of cereal goes on the table, but about whether a child can buy books or a uniform which become the ticket to education, or whether parents can pay for child care so they can go out and find a job, or whether materials can be bought to cover that leaky roof that has forced a family to evacuate one room of their two room home, or whether there is cereal on the table at all, name brand or not, I realize it's not just ab box of cereal anymore. I continue to wrestle with the images of poverty that are ingrained in my head, and issues that surround them. But more so I think of the stories of the lives of the men, women and children for whom this is their present reality of life, with no hope of anything other than what they now know. And then there's me in the middle of the cereal aisle with a cart full of groceries fighting back tears not over a box of cereal, but over the ways that our world just often fails to makes sense.