Lonliness

Loneliness is a man's worst poverty.--Mother Theresa

There is a significant difference between the migrant camps we visit. Sometimes I can only sum it up as a "feeling I get." I don't usually get this feeling at Paragon Camp where there is often a volleyball game going on in the evening or  the joyful sounds of children laughing and playing.

The feeling I am talking about today is loneliness. I experience this sense most in the camps that  are inhabited mostly by men--young men--boys actually. The lucky ones have each other to talk to, to share their experiences with, but for too many, there would seem to be overwhelming sense of loneliness. Again, I could be putting myself into their position and simply revealing how I would feel in their position.

When I experience this feeling I am reminded of the theme of loneliness in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. There is that one passage in which Lennie makes George constantly reassure him that they are not like all the other men in search of work during the Depression: 

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place....With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us." Chapter 1, pp. 13-14

While most would consider home to be a place, I wonder if it is more of a feeling, a state of mind.