There are many people for whom the rest of the world is abstract, like a theory. When discussing poverty in developing countries, it seems to them more like a sad dream than a reality experienced by human beings, like them, like their family or friends.
Oh yes, that would be tragic if people lived like that. That would be very sad.
It’s so far removed from a dirt-in-your-fingernails sort of reality that it can’t be imagined; or it exists in a different sort of universe, but not ours. Couldn’t be ours — look how comfy we have it.
But once you’re welcomed into a cinderblock home where you smell the wood stove filling the entire single-room home with smoke, and realize that the dirt where you stand doubles as a bed, there’s no going back. There’s no way to then remove this reality from your consciousness, even if it dwells in the background of your mind like a specter.
For me, as I settle into my comfy, air conditioned bed at night, the reality that I’ve seen and touched firsthand is always present somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain.
I saw kids in Thailand begging with nubs for arms and legs because they’d been amputated. Because kids with missing extremities make more money begging.
I’ve been inside homes in Guatemala where chickens roamed the same dirt floors as the family packed inside. Which sounds cute except when you think about the poop and pee and how it all turns to mud when it rains…every day.
And I’ve seen kids running and playing naked in Nigeria and India — more joyful than half of America.
So for me, these things — these people — are no longer a theory or an abstract meditation: What would it be like if people actually had to live like this?
Because they do. And I’ve seen them and talked to them and prayed with them, and their odors and crusted tears are as real to me as the keys I hit to type this.
And I think this is one of the benefits of short-term missions trips. They get hated on a lot, but I would vouch for the experience of any of the teens I took on these trips. The Guatemalans we met are no longer pictures in a sad commercial to them — they’re real. And even if my students and I didn’t make any difference in the week we were there for the locals, it has shifted the perspective, the reality for my students.
Maybe you’re someone who needs to get out and touch the world. Maybe the idea of poverty and slums is nothing more than a bad dream your imagination conjures up when you see a sad movie or read National Geographic.
Maybe traveling with intention can cure you of this malady.
Even though I’m finishing my Master’s degree in the comfortable United States, I’m consistently aware of how good I have it, of how comfy I am — and how I hope that isn’t permanent.
And I encourage you to do the same. Escape comfort; not for the postmodern sake of ‘feeling alive’ or personal experience, but so that the suffering in the world outside of our borders becomes more real to you. So that the humans on the other side of the world who live in poverty become humans to you and not tragic fictional characters.
[And in the meantime, while I’m enjoying a comfortable existence in the USA–and I don’t say this to brag, but hopefully to inspire you to do the same–I am proud to say I support several missionaries I know personally who are in Asia and South America, caring for those very real people and being Jesus to them in the flesh. When we can’t be there in person, looking into the faces of these humans, we can at least give to people and organizations who are.]
e
Day 55 of 100 Days of Blog
0 comments on “How to care about the world”