What's the opposite of hungry?

I have an amazing language helper. He is only 19, but he is bright, knows what I want, is bold enough to correct me when I mess up and to explain what I'm doing wrong, is extremely patient, fixes not just my vocabulary but also my grammar, pronunciation, and handwriting, praises me honestly and warmly when I do something right, is insistent on staying until the end of our hour each day, and hasn't canceled a lesson once yet.

But this morning, Mohammed had the hardest time with one word. We were doing opposites, and were flying through them. Then we got to "hungry". Mohammed spent two minutes trying to come up with something that would be the opposite of “hungry”. He even asked a friend to help him. Finally, they had an answer. The opposite of "hungry", according to Mohammed and his friend, is "thirsty".

My language helper is very thin. He lives with his family in a tiny home with a dirt floor that floods when it rains. He has been working since the age of 10 so he could pay his own school fees after his father died. Still, I'm sure that he's experienced feelings other than hunger before. There has to have been some time when he was attending someone's wedding, or a guest at someone's house, or was treated at some festival, where he got to be "full" instead of "hungry". To say that he couldn't come up with the opposite of hungry because he had never experienced it would be a bit implausible.

Yet I believe there is meaning there. I spent the first 30+ years of my life without EVER being truly hungry for someone else's sake. In America we spend billions of dollars a year on diets because we eat too much. Some 25% of us are obese and just as many more are overweight, and that's even with eating disorders taking their toll. We try to invent plans that will allow us to maintain our figures while stuffing our stomachs. Fast food restaurants sell lunch meals that have twice as many calories as most third-world slum dwellers get in an entire day.

When I visited India in 2011, I experienced sacrificial hunger for the first time in my life. I ate less than I needed because every bite I took meant less food for someone who needed food a lot more than me. I had already lost weight earlier, but by the time I left India my weight hit 165 pounds, nearly 50 pounds below what it had been when I had left America a year earlier. Yet day after day I kept eating less food than I wanted. Because I could see the consequences.

In America, we don't see. We don't know people who don't know the opposite of "hungry". The closest many of us get to solidarity with their situation is using it to guilt-trip our kids into eating their vegetables. We pretend that our conspicuous over-consumption doesn't pull food off of their plates. We tell ourselves that Central American cattle farms supplying beef for Americans aren't built on the ruins of family farms, that Brazilian coffee plantations aren't constructed on top of land that poor villagers relied on for their livelihoods, that commercial fishing vessels supplying our sushi aren't destroying the livelihoods (and local protein supply) of small-scale fishermen, that laws passed to pad the pockets of our own wealthiest farmers haven't made the situation that much more difficult for farmers overseas. We pass federal laws stating that we will never give any foreign aid that might lead to competition with our own products, even for desperately poor countries for whom that product might be their only available cash crop. We don't ask questions about an economic system that encourages more, and more, and more consumption; more, and more, and more growth. We already consume at a rate the rest of the world will never match, because the sheer land area of the earth could never support such consumption for everyone else. We keep using our 20-25 acres (the area of land it takes to support an average American) without realizing that only leaves a small fraction of that on average for everyone else.

We can ignore such things because we don't have to see them. Because "full" is a much more familiar word than "hungry". Because we've built borders, both physical and psychological, that keep the poor far enough away from our lives and our hearts that we ensure they will never make a significant impact on our stomachs.

This isn't a guilt trip. I don't want you to send money to anyone, grasping for that typical guilt-absolver called "charity". I want you to know that I am BETTER off for knowing Mohammed, even though he forces me to think differently about what it means for me to be hungry and what it means for me to be full.

Get to know the hungry. Learn what it would mean to love them as much as you actually love yourself (in deed, not just in word). When you do, every spoonful of food will become that much more meaningful - both the ones that you still chose to eat, and the ones that you don't. Their world, even their words, are different from our own, but they are still our neighbors. And until we learn to make ourselves a part of their world again, we will not be able to know what it would mean to love our neighbors.

You will always have the poor with you

The boss yelled for a servant. When the servant came, he touched the boss's foot with his hand before asking what he was to do. The boss feigned embarrassment and told him not to, but the servant was clearly used to acting in this way.

The university department head walked through the school. When he passed an open door, every student in the room stood, looking apprehensive. The professor didn't even notice as he continued down the hallway.

My experience of power in relationships is different here. Where I grew up, most people would be horrified at such interactions. I've heard that there are places in America with similar power dynamics (wealthy white persons with black servants in the South, or wealthy bosses using migrant labor near the borders), but I've never lived in such situations. To me, the interactions appear alien.

But then I notice another thing about the culture. In this country, the rich and the poor are next to each other. Wealthy masters interact with their poor servants every day. The nicest condos usually have a slum full of dishwashers, janitors, and maids within sight. Due to the cheapness of labor, even those working in the highest-paying occupations will have coworkers who live in poverty. Due to the incredible urban crowding, many of the nicest homes are found within a stone's throw of a slum.

I hate seeing relationships where people are not treated as having the same inherent worth. I hate the attitude of submission that the poor have learned to take on, the way in which bosses sometimes don't even bother to know their servants' names, the relics of caste that permeate the culture.

And yet I know that these are all problems borne out of actual interaction. In America we've found a different way. In America, the rich and powerful don't worry about how they should interact with poor people, because they do everything possible to make sure they never have to. Gated communities are the ideal, most wealthy people won't have a poor neighborhood within miles, and they justify attempts to keep people away who don't meet their standards by saying they "bring down property values". They choose their neighborhoods for the "good schools", often defined by how few poor children attend them. Workplaces are specialized/segregated enough that most of the wealthy never interact with anyone in an impoverished position, unless they have them as a client. And the wealthiest doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, businessmen, etc. will never have impoverished clients.

And, at the greatest extreme, our cheapest labor is outsourced outside of our borders to other nations altogether, so we can get the benefits of paying extremely low wages and buying extremely cheap products while avoiding the costs of having such poor workers actually living in the same country as us.

I wonder how America's powerful would act if they interacted with poor persons on a regular basis. On the surface, it would probably look better than it does here, though at first the lack of familiarity might make the interaction extremely awkward. But isn't it rather significant that no one tries?

Comedic interlude - one such painful interaction:

I read about Jesus eating with sinners and "sinful women". I see him going into the homes of lepers and tax collectors. I hear him telling stories where publicans, Samaritans, and destitute widows are the heroes. I see how much time he spent with beggars, the disabled, those plagued by demons, those rejected by the religious leaders. I see him commanding his followers to invite the poor to feasts in their own homes, instead of inviting our rich friends (Luke 14:12-14). I see his disciples carry on the message, reaching out in love to foreigners, lame beggars, Samaritans, eunuchs, and even slaves. It is clear from the description of their community (Acts 2:43-47, Acts 4:32-37), as well as their letters (Romans 15:25-27, 2 Corinthians 8:1-9:15, Galatians 2:10, 1 John 3:17, and all of James, especially 2:1-9) that the poor and the marginalized were to have an honored place in the community where they were treated with equal worth. Jesus told his disciples that the poor would always be with them. And it was clear in the New Testament, and from historical documents up through the first 300 years of the church's existence, that that was true for a long time.

So where are the poor now? And where are we? Are the poor always with us? When they are, do we treat them the same way we treat our friends? And if they are not with us, or we do not treat them as good or even better than we treat our other friends, are we truly acting as his disciples?