Health- shkoyach! Thanks for asking so nicely. I would rather not answer that question since I do not want to give too much personal information online. I will just say that it was several years, and it was long enough to meet and get to know many people. Since I’m a single girl, I spent a lot of time in people’s houses and really getting to know them.
The people that I know in Lakewood are incredibly non-materialistic in addition to being very hard-working!!!! I always considered myself to be extremely non-materialistic, but I really don’t think that I could live the way they do. I certainly could not work as hard. I really don’t think that I could have done what these people do – gotten married at 19 or 20 to a guy who was planning to (and did) spend the rest of his life learning, and raised 10 or so kids while supporting the family nearly single-handedly and living on very little. The people that I know don’t go on vacations (unless you count a weekend by their parents during bein hazmanim).
One lady I know felt that two of her kids really needed to go to camp during the summer. These were her two teenage girls who work INCREDIBLY hard all year since she is a working mother with a bunch of kids, and she can’t afford any cleaning help. Since she felt that these 2 girls NEEDED to go to camp, she took on an extra job and made herself crazy working crazy-hard in order to be able to pay for it. She does not send any of her other girls to camp, and she is not sending her daughter to seminary in Eretz Yisrael. She is sending her to a very inexpensive seminary in the US even though it is COMPLETELY not the right school for her daughter and her daughter is not excited about it at all and would love to go to Eretz Yisrael and would gain a ton from it! This is despite all the pressure from yours truly to try to convince her to send her daughter to EY, because she says she simply can’t afford it!