Africa Journal #6 "offering"

Africa Journal #6

Sometimes I can’t see people for fear I’ll fall apart. The other day a man came to the window of my taxi/van and looked at me straight in the eyes and asked me for money. “Please”, he said. He asked for a trivial amount of money. The exchange rate here is some 2300 shillings to $1 USD. I don’t remember the amount, but I remember not having change and that being what I thought of first. I guess I could have given him 10,000, but somehow that felt hard, or “enabling”, or whatever else self-justifying reason I need. Change is the bane of using money here. Without a doubt this is a rich-American problem, but the ATM dispenses barely usable 50,000 shilling notes. Those are effectively worthless because the average boda boda, vendor, taxi conductor, whatever will have maybe 8,000 shillings, $3-ish, on them. As much as I hate to admit this, it is one of my biggest pet peeves in an effectively cash-only society. And yet what I am so annoyed by, ultimately, is poverty—something I personally know almost nothing about. Relative to my society’s standards I may have at least a conceptual understanding, and I have studied it more than most, but I know not an iota about the poverty the man in the window asking me for 75 cents knows about.

He extends his hand into the beat-up, anonymous Toyota Hiace to the mzungu who he knows has money. He is desperately poor and it would be foolish to not ask for money. Any of us would. His glazed-over eyes from a disease long since victorious against his immune system cannot so mask his humanity that I escape unharmed. I am always harmed. I am harmed because I, like most Americans, refuse to give him my money; money I did not earn, money I myself had asked for from others. What a detestable creature we have the potential to be. I ask you to please not protest, telling me “but your ministry is elsewhere, with those young boys, use the money for that!” This man is what those boys on the street, that minority who live to be in their 30’s, eventually become. No, this man is my ministry too. Sure the context was not opportune given that I was on a taxi to head to Kalule and I was with another and we had somewhere to be, but just because I would prefer a different context for meeting such a man it justifies my failure to temporarily meet his need? Did I really worry that he might buy banana beer with it? What was I concerned about? The faceless 13-or-so others in the taxi who do not know me, do not speak my language, or have what I have? Am I afraid that they will judge me, fit me into a stereotype? Is it that I have two false choices, one to be the greedy Westerner who hoards his money and the other to be a foolish Westerner who has come to the developing world with a naïve compassion so he can feel better about himself by letting others take minutely of his opulence? But in the back of my mind I am mindful of perceptions because as a white person on public transportation you’re a spectacle in this nearly homogonous (by U.S. standards) society. But do I really give a damn what they think? Doubtful. Am I even correct in what they may think? Also doubtful.

Poverty for me often causes patent self-obsession and self-awareness. It has to. Because as I walk down the street even my small backpack and its contents are worth more, materially, than most of what the average person in Uganda has. All around me are the people who daily face decisions I don’t face. What is more, is that behind those people, the not-quite-extremely poor if you will, are the widow and orphan and prostituted girl and person without legs—those in which poverty is not merely an inconvenience or a dream delayed, but a vicious, life-taking beast. In truth often times I wish I did not see them but I do see them. I see them because my heart leaps in my chest because I cannot, simply cannot, fit them into my reality. The overwhelming injustice tears at my understanding of reality and causes my paradigmatic mind to collapse again and again and I want to weep because though I’ve seen it all before, and as much as I try to not see, I still do.

If you’ve ever read a blog by a sojourner spending time in the developing world these observations eventually come to light. You eventually realize that your action or inaction is both powerful and woefully, infinitesimally small. That is because we naturally throw the one in with the whole. This is our fatal mistake, the default, and safe position of the heart. It says, “I cannot affect all so I conserve resources for more effective endeavors.” It is logic, pure and simple. It may even be reason. But I am not a whole, but a part. I believe this because I can be saved from myself and because of my own complicated “free will” (please, no tired reformed/Arminian theological debates), therefore making the individual something holy that God both recognizes/knows and offers agency. Because of that agency and singularity I “exist” and I can do both what is right and what is wrong. “The whole” is a construction whose only validity is found in Christ’s bride, the Church. That’s it. There is no other whole. As an individual and as a part of this holy mysterious whole, the Church, I am to see others as not manifestations of some whole that cannot be affected, but as a soul—a person with a context and will, a person with needs and dreams, a person I am infinitely responsible to. This person is the person who reached into my taxi window and asked for 75 cents. This is the person who got nothing from me but a pained look of guilt—which cannot produce love—and a slight shake of the head.

Yesterday I was in Kampala and I sat down with a man who is crippled and lives on the street off of charity and alms (I assume). His name was Francis. I wish I could have spoken to him more, but we eventually succumbed to the awkwardness of not sharing a common language. Yet the brief time with him was rich. His smile was infectious and I wondered, almost aloud, whether my life and faith could survive his socially and economically debilitating infirmity. He literally drags his lower torso and ineffectual legs on the ground, after all. I do not have the answer for myself, but I can say that I have rarely seen more joy than in the people who have the least. It is a categorical shift in perspective; I often wonder if a person growing up in affluence, such as myself, can ever achieve such blissful release. I have prayed for it, although halfheartedly. I am not glorifying pain and poverty, but if Christ is with the downtrodden, the outcast, and the poor in Spirit then surely He is somehow easier to find in the people Christ would have been with in the first place. I am forever wrestling with the reality that Christ spent his time with “sinners and prostitutes”. Do we do that? Do we know how? In truth it was a joy to be around Francis, for this man is a man like me. He has wants and dreams and though I do not know his and he does not know mine, we are not necessarily so different. He cannot exist as a spectacle to me, someone to merely muse on, but he must be a person to me; he must be someone to hope the best for, pray for, and love. Of course there are hundreds like him on the street. Most I will never meet, but hopefully in those brief moments in which an arm reaches for them they know that they are loved. I would not go so far as to say I “pointed him to Yesu”—the Luganda word for Jesus—but I hope that God can use my weakness and inability, and yes, “my” money to somehow bless this man.

Musing on such things is always a risk because at the end it always feels sentimental because in reality most of what I have cannot be simply given away. It is my experiences, beliefs, struggles, knowledge, and relationships that most shape who I am and what advantages, however meager, I may have in this life. My poverty then is of a different substance than this man’s but we are both poor. His material and opportunal poverty is the most striking and obvious, but poverty is fundamentally about relationship. I cannot speak to his relational poverty. I know that in a way this is where I am both most rich and most poor in my own life. It would take a long time and a new language to impart on others what I am trying to say, so I will not attempt. Perhaps only a person like myself could be so privileged to even think as I do, considering the language that I use to describe what I observe as if a scientist and not an agent in this world; perhaps he’s never had the opportunity, despite entire days spent as an unspoken to, invisible human, to consider the quandary that I perpetually consider. Perhaps he knows things and does not simultaneously doubt them. Perhaps he knows so much more about life, death, and truth than I. That I can believe.

Thanks for listening,

Dan