dread
02 May 2011 Leave a Comment
When you grow up in relative prosperity, a two-car garage, filled, and a family pet, poverty strikes you hard. Times were lean for my family sometimes during my childhood, but lean for middle class America is ultimate riches for shanty-town children. There’s a weight I’ve been carrying, a constant awareness of the injustice of poverty, especially the poverty that strikes whole communities of people. It’s unfathomable, and it’s bitter. It’s bitter to those who drink it with their contaminated water and recycled trash meals, and it’s bitter for those who, having, let the reality of injustice sit in their mouths for a while.
It makes me ache.
Because while there are things I can do, things we can do, to combat destitution, there is nothing I can do to eradicate it. The poverty I’m speaking of I’ve not even yet seen with my own eyes. Edwin has brought home pictures and stories from his recent prayer walks at the trash dump at Payatas. He told me today that there’s even a deeper level of poverty he’d never seen before. While some squatters (people who don’t own the land they live on) are still able to acquire cinder block building materials and make sturdy homes for themselves, there are poorer squatters at the dump. They build their houses out of whatever scraps of tin or board they can find. Edwin said they live in such deplorable conditions that their skin is full of pox marks from festering skin sores that never fully heal.
Their food is sold to them out of what is gathered from the garbage, and if they can’t actually afford the gas to cook it, they eat it “raw.” Edwin was told that doctors have warned these people they’re going to die from eating the refuse, but, he was told, they’d rather die with full stomachs, whether or not the food in their stomachs is what will kill them.
I just ate chocolate chips for my “something sweet” after dinner. I fed my boys a fresh dinner of fresh vegetables stir fried. All the while I’ve had the “untouchables” on my mind. For that’s really what they are, in this covert caste system that I’ve observed in the Philippines. Or perhaps they’re really more appropriately called the forgotten. To get to their trash dump home, several layers of society are crossed: first the upper class Fil-Invest homes; then the community of Veterans, a just-above-squatter community of the urban poor; then a squatter community of narrow cinder block-lined allies; and finally, the trash-heap dwellers.
And so, what do I do? There are the obvious answers: pray, help those who you can. But I still have this lingering heaviness in my gut. Why am I living in relative wealth while there are people living in such filth? Sometimes our actions get ourselves where we are, but sometimes we have nothing to do with getting where we are. I could do a sociological survey of poverty through history, and the sins of culture and country that lead to such overwhelming poverty. But that would only ease my intellect, and not my feeling.
Yet I’m afraid the feeling is only going to get worse. Edwin has lined up another prayer walk this coming Thursday. He wants me to go. I’ve been able to, honestly, hide behind Josiah to keep me from confronting this deep angst, but I have no excuse this Thursday, as Edwin thinks we can bring Josiah along. There’s a side of me that doesn’t want to go because I don’t want to come across as a gawker, but since we’ll be praying, and more specifically than I could do away from the site, I feel compelled to be there to pray. I want to be there to carry, even for a few minutes, their burden on my spiritual shoulders. To stand for those with whom I have nothing in common.
It’s a strange and difficult feeling, because we are here to serve the people of the Philippines. And yet, I do not want to go this deep into poverty, to face injustice that I can’t change. It’s a feeling of helplessness that could paralyze action. But I will do something. I will go, because the people at Payatas dump are loved by God. And we don’t know what He wants to do there.
