Is this still the USA?

Luke and I went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in SD for Thanksgiving this year. We left at 3 pm Wednesday from Sioux City last week and drove about 7 hours straight. We stayed with Luke's uncle Rick. Rick is a missionary at the Res. He raises support year round to be there. He lives in a house, with a roommate, that is next to an abandoned Christian school. Altogether we had 20 people celebrating with us. That includes cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, grandparents, and parents. I wasn't sure if Luke and I would get our own room, or be able to share a bed, but we did. We slept on a blow-up mattress that was placed in one of the old school rooms. This abandoned school was a microcasm of the Pine Ridge Res. the way I see it. It was a well-intended organization that apparently received too little support, and/or money, to sustain itself. The whole school looked like at any day it could be started up again--everything was still stocked and ready to go. It's just that for some reason the school lost it's ownership. On Thanksgiving day for an hour Rick took us on a tour of the Res. I was reminded a lot of the missions trip I went on in college to the Rosebud Res. There was a really nice and new hospital and then really nice houses right behind it. This was a government funded hospital b/c part of the treaty the U.S. has with the Reservations is that they provide health care and money for LIFE! The nice houses belonged to the doctors from Brazil, or some other place where they have gotten education. We drove to the highschool where there were gates with barbed wire all around the school. There were playgrounds that had been set up by do-gooders from who knows where and they have all been graffitied and run down because there's no sense of ownership. They don't feel the need to take care of it because they didn't put in the time and effort needed to put it there. We drove through the drug selling part of town, the part where they sell the most alcohol of any place besides Omaha and Chicago, the place where homeless people stay; and all places were littered beyond belief. I honestly felt like I was driving through a different country. I struggled with what to do with this eye-opening experience especially on a day like Thanksgiving. I felt wierd about haivng so much to eat and so many things to do when I knew that right down the street there were Native Americans who may have not eaten in the last three days. What is the responsibility of the government? Are they really helping? What should we be doing? We had some really good conversations.

On Friday we went hiking in the Badlands. Dusty, and windy! It was fun though. The men and some of the girls climbed to the high plateau we were hiking towards. Gabe and Luke went up the hard way. At one point Luke was laying flat, bridging the gap between two cliffs. I had the pleasure of sitting a quarter mile away to watch the whole thing happen. This was comforting, but not so comforting when it looked like he might kill himself. We have two traditions that Luke and I look forward to every year: tackle football after the Thanksgiving meal, and the South Dakota hike the day after Thanksgiving. Both events were enjoyable again this year.