¡Thank God I'm poor!

Don't get me wrong. I'm aware that I am part of the lucky minority, even when I have a debt to pay and a bank account that invites to an acrobatic balancing act.

I was born in a country in the shape of a golden cradle and now, although the cradle is not golden anymore, it still tries to carry me when my health fails.

My home now is in a developing country, with the twelfth largest economy in the world, where there is gold, but no cradles.

If I am hit by a car, I will better tuck me in asphalt because the person who dares to extend her hand to me know that she is probably also extending her money to pay the hospital bill and the prices are high (unlike products like tobacco, ridiculously cheap).

In Indonesia, my skin color chases me. It will be useless to scream that my country is bankrupt, I convinced myself that rice is my favorite food and walk half an hour to save 20 cents on public transportation comforts me. For many, I will always be family of Uncle $crooge.

What impress me the most are not the beggars, but the much-traveled ones, who should never go out of the touristic rails and who react like I am exaggerating when I say that I have no money for taxi. A well-educated person is not the one who has learned a lot, but the one who transformed what she learned into lessons.

Credits: FreeDigitalPhotos.net / arztsamui

¡Apart from that, be less rich or a new poor has been a treasure for me! ¡I see can a happier and more human person in the mirror!

¿How could I know the importance of a coin to a beggar before deciding to give 50 cents that I had saved for a candy, to him?

¿What kind of gym could offer me better emotion than seeing seven children running around me and trying to stop my way with the beauty of the world's most innocent joke when I was jogging in the middle of town?

¿How bored would have been traveling for five hours in a taxi instead of spending a day full of memorable adventures in a colorful bus that broke down and then stopped in several places to place goods on its top? ¡I was co-DJ for hours and I even shared some feelings of friendship, despite the language barrier!

¿If I had money for the taxi when I landed in Jakarta, I would never have known the man with the most delicious laugh in the world who helped me to find a bus!

Credits: FreeDigitalPhotos.net / Jennifer Ellison

¡How many friends I already have done just by walking, traveling by public transport or drinking coffee in the cheapest places in Jakarta! ¡It amazes me when other expatriates say they almost have no Indonesian friends. In fact, I never made a friend at Starbucks.

Every time an Indonesian realizes that not really all white people are wealthy and he extends me his hand, I can see the most beautiful generosity and friendship in his eyes.

¿What kind of fortune can buy such authenticity? ¿How much could cost see a guy who never saw me before offering me a ride in his motorcycle after I had dropped into a dirty river, knowing that he would face seven days of cleaning? ¿What money can buy pears and oranges that a friend offered me when she visited me in my home?

Indonesians are one of the most supportive and happiest people in the world, maybe because they don’t let fear of tomorrow controls their lives. Despite being forbidden to give money to beggars, most of Indonesian don’t care about the law and just say that their actions are an issue between them and God.

¡Once a friend told me that you only can give what you already have, but I refute it saying that it’s when you give what you don’t have that you become truly rich!