The Human Experience

Just finished watching the documentary The Human Experience (recommended by a friend who is going to work in an orphanage in Peru shown in the film in May, pretty cool right?) about two brothers searching for answers: Who am I? What is my purpose? Why am I here? What is the meaning of life?

In the film, Jeffrey and Clifford live as homeless people on the streets of New York for a week that ended up being the coldest of the year, work in an orphanage in Peru with abandoned, abused, sick, and disabled children, and live in a poor African community in an attempt to search for the answers to these overlying questions. Here's the trailer:

 

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal."  

Martin Luther King Jr.

As seen from this quote in this trailer, the documentary explores the idea of human suffering and destruction, but also the overpowering idea of hope. In a world where there is so much bad, we tend to overlook how much good their is. This goodness is seen in the people living in these "conditions of suffering," yet some of the children and people that the documentary shows are some of the happiest people ever. And just when I thought my desire to finally go Africa couldn't get any worse...

 

If my blog post didn't convince you, hopefully the fact that the film received 30 awards will... 

{Some of my favorite quotes from the film}

"I look at those memories. I look at those moments. Everyone lives differently. When you go somewhere out of your own comfort zone, out of your own realm, and you enter someone else's, that's learning." Jeffrey Azize

"Many young people do not have a meaning and purpose to their life. They're looking to say, does my life matter? Do I have a unique contribution to make... when you recognize that you have a real mission, an indispensable contribution to make, then you embrace life, you celebrate life in a completely different way." Anna Halpine, World Youth Alliance

"Where many, many young people today are saying, 'I need to experience in some sense that my life matters." The more mature person is not the person who has all the questions settled. No, the mature person is the person who enters ever more deeply, ever farther and farther and farther into the mystery and into the wonder." Anna Halpine, World Youth Alliance

"Even in the deepest suffering, there is significance. There is a meaningful process of positive possibilities. We have to recover the language of humanity. We cannot understand suffering without it... there's this struggle in life in every class of people... it's what we do with it that matters." Dr. William B. Hurlbut M.D.