Unconditional Love of Parents: the Concept of Parental Sacrifice

Today I am here to talk about the sacrifices of our parents, more specifically the parents that have immigrated from their home to try to find a better life for themselves and ultimately a better life for you which in the future will give you more opportunity, security, and freedom. You might have heard your parents say this when they are lecturing you “I had to walk 10-20 miles to get to school”, “I had 2 jobs at the age of 15”, “Back home its 45 degrees and people are working in the fields and you are here complaining you need the AC turned on in 30 degree weather” most of us shrug this off and bring it up as a conversational point when talking to our friends, but have you ever stopped and really thought about what they are saying.

Well I did and one day I asked my dad about what he had to deal with and he told me this “I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, I washed my face, I did wudu and prayed. I then milked the cows, fed the goats, and chickens, did some field work with your grandfather, and at 5:30 I ate and got ready to go to school, I then got on my bike that your grandfather just bought and I was riding my bike when my tire got caught in something and I fell off my bike, when I got up I noticed that the whole right side of my arm was bleeding because I fell on top of barbed wire, it was to keep the animals in while they were grazing so they wouldn’t run onto the road, when I made it to school my teacher punished me by making me do something he called the chicken; it’s when you put your hands through your legs and hold on to your ears he made me do this for almost 1 hour, he did this because I was late to class, when I got home your grandfather was mad because now the uniform was ripped and money was tight so your grandmother just had to sow it up, but that didn’t help because the whole right side was ripped so we had to buy a new one and that cost a lot”, hell some of us even live right next to the school and we still get late to class, but you could say “I wasn’t the one that asked my parents to leave their homes so that they could come here”.

Well, you should understand that back then in the 70s and 80s in countries like Pakistan, India, and even in Bangladesh, there weren’t a lot of opportunities that there are now and still are in this country. In the 1970-80s a survey was done in India and the details were this, they used 2, 250 calories a day for food and other essential necessities to measure who was in poverty and who was just above the poverty line or doing better. The survey showed that 50% of urban dwellers and 40% of rural dwellers were in poverty and as the year turns to 1979 the rural poverty rate exceeded 50%. That was just talking about the essentials, not schooling, no splurging on anything, only the bare essentials, and still in those countries you have to pay to put your kids in school so as you can see it would be very hard for most families in those countries to afford food let alone schooling. Let’s not even get into how it was frowned upon for a woman to even step outside the house or leave and actually going to work and trying to get a job, even in most countries in Asia it is still looked down upon.

So when you hear these lectures from your parents you have heard already for the thousandth time or you hear them say “I had to walk 10-20 miles to get to school” just remember most of them left there family and friends at a young age to move to a country that they have only heard about, they had to face challenges of trying to get a job, a place to live, they had to make whole new friends, trying to learn a language, and usually did this with little to nothing to their name. It will be very hard to understand or think about the struggles they went through because they didn’t want us to experience those struggles, they did this for us, for you, so once and a while just ask them and try to understand the sacrifices they made.