Today I had the opportunity to do some professional shadowing of my cousin in-law who operates his own little business here in colorado. Its called Beeline, and as you may have guessed from the name, it is a pest control company. Now before you turn up your nose in disgust of some sketchy MLM company based in happy valley, know that this is different. It local and privately owned, and in fact, an awesome set up.
The day consisted of a bunch of different appointments to treat houses for bugs or mice. Im not really into bug killing, but the business side of it fascinated me. I picked my cousin in law's brain about everything from overhead costs to percentage of returns on yellow page adds, to basic business ethics and philosophy. He knows his stuff and gets the job done. He told me it wasn't so much the type of work he loved, as much as being able to be a true entrepreneur and grow his own business, and get to help people by solving a problem. As it turns out, he was a history major in college and so really, his degree has nothing to do with his profession but he is doing great. It kinda made me think like, "hey why don't I study something I actually love in college and take advantage to learn all I can?"
My favorite part of the day though was not the actual job, but the people we encountered. Some were just concerned parents who wanted the peace of mind of knowing that there would be no more spiders or whatever crawling around their house and kids. One guy, legit believed there were these tiny bugs infesting his house, but he could not see them but he itched all over....when he stepped outside, one of his co-workers came up to us and asked if we saw any signs of real bugs (we hadn't) and conspiratorially told us he had been at the house all week remodeling and had never received so much as a bite....in his opinion, the guy was crazy. We, of course could say nothing, but sprayed the house all the same and left in a hurry. Right after we both felt an itch but then it was gone....was it all in our heads?
Next we hit up an apartment complex in kinda a ghetto part of town, where we had to treat two apartments for the landlord. We went into the first one, and were greeted by a tall north african man, he showed us where the mouse hole was and we left some blocks and went to the next apartment. I was really looking foreword to this one because the landlord lady had told us that the women who lived here had come to the office the day before and was very upset that there were bed bugs and would not leave till something was done about it. The situation escalated to the point where the landlord had to call the cops and have the women removed from the office. Crazy intense? Defiantly. She had warned us to be careful and if we had a problem just leave. I had this "crazy" lady all pictured in my head as we knocked on the door. To my surprise, a very small african women answered our knock and showed us in. As my friend sprayed the bed and around the room, I thought I would try to talk to this lady because surly this could not have been the terror that had been hauled out of the office by the police yesterday, could she? I started by asking her where she was from. "Africa," she responded. Ok, I explained that I had had the opportunity to live there myself for a year, several years ago in Ghana, and asked her which part she was from? She told me she was from Somalia. She spoke pretty good english, so naturally my curiosity was peaked and I had to find out what had brought this women and her family to Arvada, all the way form Somalia. She explained that her husband had worked in the US embassy in Somalia and when things went south over there about ten years back, either the US government or the UN (it was somewhat unclear) had pulled them out and brought them to america. Good work america, right? They had lived in four different states since then, and now her husband worked as a cab driver. She explained that he also was attending night school at a local college to earn his degree in chemistry or something. I asked her if she preferred america to her native land or did she wish to return home to Somalia. Her answer shocked me. Without hesitating, she said she wished that she and her family could return to Somalia. The only issue (and not a small one mind you) was the government was a mess and was totally unstable (not to mention corrupt) and her two children would have no educational opportunities. She told me that if the government in Somalia were stable, she would go back there in a heart beat. Interesting. They are on welfare and the husband has a government loan to pay for his schooling. Not a bad deal if you ask me, but at the end of the day, its not home. Our conversation only lasted maybe ten mins but I blown away by her story. The client that I was told would be the most "crazy" turned out to be my favorite of the day. When my cousin in-law and I went back to the landlord, she kinda laughed and asked how it went with the "crazy" lady. We told her she was just wonderful to us. Go figure. Different perspective or what, just goes to show that there are always two sides to every story and by and large people will responded to situations generally they way they are treated. If you treat them like their best selves, they tend to bring that out of themselves. If you treat them like they are incompetent or stupid, it frustrates people. From what I can gather about the situation, its pretty remarkable that they are making a go of life in a foreign land, in a language they are not familiar with, and a culture which is altogether different from their own. Eye opening.
From there we went to a super nice area of town, and treated this massive house. The family was super nice and the house was beautiful. The contrast from out last visit was almost jarring. It reminded me of when we would fly out of Ghana, leaving the true third world, and land in London. It was hard to fathom that we were on the same planet. To me, the "first world" and the "third world" were truly two separate worlds with no overlap whatsoever. This is not to say that a nice house for your family is a bad thing, or am I making a commentary of our broken welfare program, but just an observations into the different walks of life that coexists a mer twenty mins from each other and rarely overlap. Is one better than the other? Some would say yes or no. For me, it depends. As my Somalian friend pointed out, with a bit of money in africa, you can live very well. Here in america, everything is expensive in comparison. A low grade apartment in a dodgy area in colorado, rivals some of the nicest housing in many parts of africa, yet I hardily ever met an unhappy or discontent Ghanaian. Why? In my humble opinion, it all boils down to expectations. In Ghana, if you have a job, aren't sick with malaria or AIDS, and have a loving family and food to eat that week, life could not be better. Here in america, we often take for granted these blessings and indeed come to expect them and feel shafted if poor health befalls us or we lose our employment, or the government seems to not be working so well. In africa, people are just happy to be alive and not really have the same media access that we do. They don't watch the ridiculous TV shows we are exposed to and don't feel the need to have a massive home and three flat screen TV's and a BMW parked in the garage (because all these things are what make someone happy, at least in the movies, right?). Honestly, they have all they need to be happy, as do we, yet the majority of the people I interacted with today, we not generally happy or content with their lives. We have so much, yet so little. I believe, the its the Africans who are truly rich.
I loved today. It was amazing to get to see all these different ways of living, all within little metro Denver. Walking though all those houses, can tell you a lot about the people who live there. It made me think about my own home and the pictures we hang on our walls, the general cleanliness and atmosphere. I talked about this with my cousin in-law and he told me how he had thought about that a lot and hoped that if anyone walked through his home, he hopped they would be able to tell that he was a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by the pictures of the Savior and things like Temples. I thought a lot about that. I hope people would be able to say the same about me, not just from my house or room, but how I try to follow Christ's perfect example in interacting with my family or strangers. Its a high standard to meet, but at the end of the day, weather we live in the "slums" or in a flashy part of town, how we choose to live and treat others, determines our happiness, not our circumstances. The beauty of that simple truth is that our personal happiness, by definition, fundamentally lies within our personal power control, if we choose to do so.
I never thought I could have learned or experienced so much, shadowing a pest control guy in a place like metro denver, but it just reaffirmed the fact that the more we think we are different from other people, the more we are fundamentally the same.
I feel the same way when I got to visit the sisters in my ward-- we have a large spectrum of economics, upbringing, culture, etc.
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