The first draft of that essay included more musings on poverty and humanitarian aid than the published version does. After conversing with several friends about the issues, I want to dig up those sections and share them here.
These passages contain few conclusions; they will probably raise more questions than they give answers. But, as a friend said to me tonight, "Thinking at the edge of your experience is glorious, isn't it?" I'm grateful for the chance to run up against the "I simply don't know" wall. I'm grateful for the luxury of thinking about lofty things. And I hope these thoughts can continue a conversation that will help us all better know how to give.
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Sometimes, we look at poverty and ask questions.
“Why is this allowed to happen?” “What can we do to fix it?” “How long will these people go on living like this?”
One of the attorneys at the law firm where I worked this summer is a mission-trip goer who described some of his experiences with the impoverished in Honduras on his blog. He frames the classic question, “Why does God permit extreme poverty?” effectively in part because he recognizes that his work, and all the humanitarian work done by Christians and governments, make up only a few straws in the haystack that would be needed to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate the world.
In October, the World Bank raised the global poverty line standard from $1.25/day to $1.90/day. Along with the announcement came the estimate that there are 900 million people living below this line.
In Guatemala, about a quarter of the 15 million fit that description, making do with less than $2/day.
In Guatemala, I had an electric fan and an indoor toilet. I lived on about $7/day.
In the U.S., if you have access to $16/day or less, you’re living below the poverty line.
Now, if the pictures didn’t make it clear, the numbers certainly did: On an economic Bell curve of the world’s population, we as Americans are not in the middle. We are the extreme, the minority, the weird ones. We are all the one percent.
Which is why, when I got back, I had a bit of a hard time adjusting.
I let my mom see how excited, and almost apprehensive, I was to drink water out of the kitchen sink the night I came home. You can’t do that in Guatemala. Not just because the water is contaminated, but because very few houses have kitchen sinks.
My aunt noticed that I no longer have a problem wearing clothes from Goodwill. My roommates appreciate that I’ll volunteer to kill spiders or crickets. My friends occasionally hear me cringe if I spend $10 on a meal, because that would buy lunch for a small family in Guatemala.
But, for the most part, I keep my observations about weird American luxuries to myself. (Nobody really wants to hear complaints about the stretch limo that shuttles students back and forth between campus and their apartment complex, or how much unnecessary free stuff Ball State gives out so people will go to its football games. And nobody really understands; I googled “poverty and survivor’s guilt” and all the articles that came up were by people adjusting to American wealth after living in American poverty, which is not the same thing.)
Besides, I know that if I talk about the poverty, my friends will stare with wide eyes and open mouths. They’ll experience a vague feeling of guilt and/or be inspired to donate to a worthy humanitarian organization. Which is fine; that’s what I felt and still sometimes feel when I think about poverty.
But I don’t want to be like one of those commercials for sponsorship of African children. My mission was so much more than that. And the people I met are so much more than sad faces on a TV screen. They’re people, living life, having families and jobs and successes and failures, being poor but for the most part making it just fine. They manage even without us bundling up a bunch of American greenbacks and shooting them down to Guatemala.
Of course, we do that, and it helps some. But I lived in poverty in Guatemala long enough to know that the Band-Aid, give-a-man-a-fish solutions are not going to cut it. I saw American-built schools sitting empty, missing all the evangelical teachers who’d started them and long since gone home. I watched boxes of secondhand toys get distributed among rural children, wiry barefoot beings used to climbing coconut trees and never taught to covet a plastic Transformer.
I’m not bitter about American attempts to spread the wealth; every bit helps and every effort is, I believe, blessed by God. But one of my mission’s lasting effects on me has been a desire to study macroeconomics. How Guatemala stayed so poor while America got so rich, for example, is still a mystery to me. And how corrupt governments manage to squander humanitarian aid while their own people are illiterate and starving is also a mystery.
In writing this, I hesitated to ask any of my friends from Guatemala about the poverty gap that exists between the U.S. and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. There’s not a convenient way to bring it up: “How do you feel about the fact that you’re way poorer than me?” They’re not lab animals meant to study, and I didn’t want to make anyone feel that way.
Finally, I contacted Felisa Ixcoy, who is not a member of my church but is the mom of one of my dear friends from an area called San MartÃn. Felisa was born in Guatemala but has lived in New York City for 11 years, where she works a variety of jobs illegally so she can send money back home to her family, which consists of a husband, two mentally disabled children, three other children, and two grandchildren she has never met.
“You’ve lived in both places,” I asked her. “How do you find peace despite knowing that life is so much harder in Guatemala?”
She was silent for a long time. Finally, her answer came.
“I’m sorry, sister,” she said. “I don’t know. I guess God works it all out in the end.”
I tried a follow-up question and got the same answer. God works it all out in the end.
I rarely asked the people in Guatemala questions like that while I was there, but when I did, they always gave me that same answer: God knows; God works it out.
I used to think they didn’t really consider the question, or maybe that they didn’t sufficiently understand the greatness of the wealth discrepancy between their home and the U.S. But Felisa understood both those things.
I was grateful for her answer because, for one of the first times, I trusted it.
You know, we can come to that conclusion as wealthy Americans, but I’m not sure if we ever believe ourselves when we do. It made me feel better as a missionary to blindly trust in faith that in the afterlife God would build these beautiful people mansions far more luxurious than the ones Bill Gates knows, if that stuff matters in heaven. But it always seemed too convenient to be true. When someone you know and trust who has lived both lifestyles comes to that same conclusion, believing it seems a little more permissible.
One thing I did figure out while in Guatemala is that God gives everybody trials. People in Guatemala may be poor, but they love their families and stick with them. We may have iPads and fast cars in the U.S., but we’re a lot more prone to be lonely or addicted to drugs.
I admit that when you’re looking at pictures of poverty, it’s hard to believe that it’s fair to compare loneliness with living in a tin house. But when you live there, and you sit with a family all gathered around the concrete boards that count as their table, laughing and joking and singing hymns, it’s easy to forget that the setting isn’t picturesque. You get used to being physically uncomfortable, and you don’t notice anymore.
Years before I served my mission, I read a quote from one of our church leaders, Ezra Taft Benson. He said:
I do know that it takes all kinds of missionaries to better the world. We will need humanitarian and spiritual and political efforts to accomplish any significant change in international poverty levels. But we need not discount the very people who live in poverty. They are not faces on a TV commercial; they are capable of making change. They are my friends, and I love them.
“Why is this allowed to happen?” “What can we do to fix it?” “How long will these people go on living like this?”
One of the attorneys at the law firm where I worked this summer is a mission-trip goer who described some of his experiences with the impoverished in Honduras on his blog. He frames the classic question, “Why does God permit extreme poverty?” effectively in part because he recognizes that his work, and all the humanitarian work done by Christians and governments, make up only a few straws in the haystack that would be needed to feed, clothe, shelter, and educate the world.
In October, the World Bank raised the global poverty line standard from $1.25/day to $1.90/day. Along with the announcement came the estimate that there are 900 million people living below this line.
In Guatemala, about a quarter of the 15 million fit that description, making do with less than $2/day.
In Guatemala, I had an electric fan and an indoor toilet. I lived on about $7/day.
In the U.S., if you have access to $16/day or less, you’re living below the poverty line.
Now, if the pictures didn’t make it clear, the numbers certainly did: On an economic Bell curve of the world’s population, we as Americans are not in the middle. We are the extreme, the minority, the weird ones. We are all the one percent.
Which is why, when I got back, I had a bit of a hard time adjusting.
I let my mom see how excited, and almost apprehensive, I was to drink water out of the kitchen sink the night I came home. You can’t do that in Guatemala. Not just because the water is contaminated, but because very few houses have kitchen sinks.
My aunt noticed that I no longer have a problem wearing clothes from Goodwill. My roommates appreciate that I’ll volunteer to kill spiders or crickets. My friends occasionally hear me cringe if I spend $10 on a meal, because that would buy lunch for a small family in Guatemala.
But, for the most part, I keep my observations about weird American luxuries to myself. (Nobody really wants to hear complaints about the stretch limo that shuttles students back and forth between campus and their apartment complex, or how much unnecessary free stuff Ball State gives out so people will go to its football games. And nobody really understands; I googled “poverty and survivor’s guilt” and all the articles that came up were by people adjusting to American wealth after living in American poverty, which is not the same thing.)
Besides, I know that if I talk about the poverty, my friends will stare with wide eyes and open mouths. They’ll experience a vague feeling of guilt and/or be inspired to donate to a worthy humanitarian organization. Which is fine; that’s what I felt and still sometimes feel when I think about poverty.
But I don’t want to be like one of those commercials for sponsorship of African children. My mission was so much more than that. And the people I met are so much more than sad faces on a TV screen. They’re people, living life, having families and jobs and successes and failures, being poor but for the most part making it just fine. They manage even without us bundling up a bunch of American greenbacks and shooting them down to Guatemala.
Of course, we do that, and it helps some. But I lived in poverty in Guatemala long enough to know that the Band-Aid, give-a-man-a-fish solutions are not going to cut it. I saw American-built schools sitting empty, missing all the evangelical teachers who’d started them and long since gone home. I watched boxes of secondhand toys get distributed among rural children, wiry barefoot beings used to climbing coconut trees and never taught to covet a plastic Transformer.
I’m not bitter about American attempts to spread the wealth; every bit helps and every effort is, I believe, blessed by God. But one of my mission’s lasting effects on me has been a desire to study macroeconomics. How Guatemala stayed so poor while America got so rich, for example, is still a mystery to me. And how corrupt governments manage to squander humanitarian aid while their own people are illiterate and starving is also a mystery.
---
In writing this, I hesitated to ask any of my friends from Guatemala about the poverty gap that exists between the U.S. and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. There’s not a convenient way to bring it up: “How do you feel about the fact that you’re way poorer than me?” They’re not lab animals meant to study, and I didn’t want to make anyone feel that way.
Finally, I contacted Felisa Ixcoy, who is not a member of my church but is the mom of one of my dear friends from an area called San MartÃn. Felisa was born in Guatemala but has lived in New York City for 11 years, where she works a variety of jobs illegally so she can send money back home to her family, which consists of a husband, two mentally disabled children, three other children, and two grandchildren she has never met.
“You’ve lived in both places,” I asked her. “How do you find peace despite knowing that life is so much harder in Guatemala?”
She was silent for a long time. Finally, her answer came.
“I’m sorry, sister,” she said. “I don’t know. I guess God works it all out in the end.”
I tried a follow-up question and got the same answer. God works it all out in the end.
---
I rarely asked the people in Guatemala questions like that while I was there, but when I did, they always gave me that same answer: God knows; God works it out.
I used to think they didn’t really consider the question, or maybe that they didn’t sufficiently understand the greatness of the wealth discrepancy between their home and the U.S. But Felisa understood both those things.
I was grateful for her answer because, for one of the first times, I trusted it.
You know, we can come to that conclusion as wealthy Americans, but I’m not sure if we ever believe ourselves when we do. It made me feel better as a missionary to blindly trust in faith that in the afterlife God would build these beautiful people mansions far more luxurious than the ones Bill Gates knows, if that stuff matters in heaven. But it always seemed too convenient to be true. When someone you know and trust who has lived both lifestyles comes to that same conclusion, believing it seems a little more permissible.
One thing I did figure out while in Guatemala is that God gives everybody trials. People in Guatemala may be poor, but they love their families and stick with them. We may have iPads and fast cars in the U.S., but we’re a lot more prone to be lonely or addicted to drugs.
I admit that when you’re looking at pictures of poverty, it’s hard to believe that it’s fair to compare loneliness with living in a tin house. But when you live there, and you sit with a family all gathered around the concrete boards that count as their table, laughing and joking and singing hymns, it’s easy to forget that the setting isn’t picturesque. You get used to being physically uncomfortable, and you don’t notice anymore.
Years before I served my mission, I read a quote from one of our church leaders, Ezra Taft Benson. He said:
“The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ takes the slums out of people, and then they take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature. ...I think this is why my church sends out long-term proselyting missionaries instead of just short-term humanitarian ones. God wants us to know that we are all equal in his sight and worthy of His love. He also wants us to share the gospel of Christ with everyone; He wants them to know how to live righteously and make better lives for themselves, their families, and eventually their nations. I don’t think God likes poverty, but he has allowed the vast majority of the population of the world throughout history live that way. Why he lets us Americans ride in limos and use air conditioning, I don’t know.
“Yes, Christ changes men, and changed men can change the world.”
I do know that it takes all kinds of missionaries to better the world. We will need humanitarian and spiritual and political efforts to accomplish any significant change in international poverty levels. But we need not discount the very people who live in poverty. They are not faces on a TV commercial; they are capable of making change. They are my friends, and I love them.
