This year's Moharram

Tonight is Moharram, and Rosey’s not feeling well and has already gone to sleep, and the entire slum is awake and engaged, and I feel too much energy in the place to just stay in my room.  So I go out, without much purpose in mind. 

I wander in a big circle around the slum.  A young boy with a bit of a mental problem is excited to see me and says hi.  An acquaintance of mine pulls me over and sits me down in a chair next to a huge caldron of chai on a fire.  He offers me some.  The boy sits across from me.  We make a bit of small talk, I appreciate the hospitality, and I get up again. 

I wander over to the vicinity of a home we used to stay in two years ago.  At a turn in the alley I am undecided about where to go next, and a woman I used to know sees me stall.  “Where are you going?”  “Uh, just wandering….looking at tazias,” I reply.  Tazias are the symbolic crafts that are being displayed on this night.  She says, “Oh, then come over here, there’s a tazia right here!”  She pulls me over in the direction of our old room.  We stop at the tiny gully right next to it, and I see that the tazia isn’t just in the alley or doorway like most of the others, but tucked back into a home I know.  “Go ahead,” she insists.  I reluctantly walk in.

Tucked back behind this tight dirt alleyway is one of the poorest families we’ve ever known.  I walk inside, and indeed a beautiful tazia is set up just inside their home.  The thin paper-and-sticks structure appears only slightly less substantial than the family’s own plastic-and-sticks residence.  A large number of children and a few adult women are sitting in front of it, praying.  They see me and invite me to sit down with them.  I politely excuse myself and try to turn back.  “No, no, I’m sorry, I don’t want to disturb your peace, see you again.”  They insist again, saying, “You must sit, auntie wants to speak to you.”  When I understand what they are saying, I notice that around the corner just out of my view, the matriarch of the family is sitting down.  I can’t deny her, and so I sit down in their midst.

We don’t know her well.  The one time Rose and I visited her home together, she broke down crying as she showed us her incredibly poor residence.  This time the tazia gives her more confidence as a host.  She welcomes me, asks me how I doing, asks where Rosey is and how she is doing.  The other women listen with rapt attention and toss in their questions too.  Many of the children listen to us, while others continue praying their night’s vigil.

I note that this is not going to be a short visit and get used to sitting there.  On one hand I feel uncomfortable to be an outsider in a place of prayer and a man in a place of women and children.  On the other hand, everyone is so peaceful and so incredibly respectful to me that I am put at ease.  One young women in particular engages most actively with me along with the matriarch.  Their questions run the gamat from my religious beliefs to what I cook in my home.  My statement that Rosey cooks the rotis while I cook the veggies elicits laughter and surprise. My statement that I follow Isa the Messiah and that we don't practice the same traditions elicits what appears to be respect.  Most of all, everyone wants to just to get to know me better and treat me well.

When I first sat down the women offered me some sweets that had been prepared specially for that night.  As time draws out, they begin offering me more and more – lentils…chicken curry…more sweets.  I refuse everything the first two times it is offered, but it becomes clear that they won’t be satisfied with my visit unless I have some of everything they have.  The young woman giving me the food, the same one who has been asking me questions, looks so proud of what she has to give and a huge smile never leaves her face.  I eat the treats they lay before me and contemplate, not for the first time, the amazing circumstance of this incredibly poor family in a plastic-and-sticks home in the mud serving and feeding me with all they have to give. 

I have come here to serve the poor, and once again I am struck by how deeply even the very very poor want to serve me.  I feel we’ve shared a sacred space tonight.

Triage in the Slum

For a couple months now I've been planning to write a blog post about "triage" in our service in the slum.

There are so many needs here, and so few people trying to help address these needs.  There's only so much two of us can do.  So we have to make hard choices, right?

For example, in the reading program that I run, who should I teach?  Some people already have decent resources at home, so I'm not going to spend my time teaching them, when I could be teaching poorer kids.  Some people are simply too far behind or too mentally slow or have too many other issues, so I'm not going to spend all my energy working with just one of them, when I could teach five other kids in the same amount of time.  And some people are just beyond the kind of help that we're able to give...and we just have to let that go.

Or, at least, that's how the post was supposed to write itself.


But as I continued to immerse myself in life here, my heart refused to move in that direction.

"Triage" might sound like a good idea.  Cutting off the best and the worst to focus on a few in the middle who can be the "most effective" recipients of service sounds like a good intellectual strategy.

But it doesn't feel at all like love.  It doesn't feel like Jesus.  It doesn't feel conducive to the deeper messages we want to embody about why we're here and what we're doing with our lives and what we think about our community and who we believe really matters.

So yeah, three of the girls I teach are mentally disabled, and yeah, they all are making progress very slowly, and yeah, I could get multiple other kids through the program in the same amount of time I'm spending on one of them.  One of the three will probably never really learn to read on her own.  But they love the time they spend with me, and I'll keep spending time with them, and I don't need to predict what will come out of that.

And yeah, half-a-dozen kids who come to me have already had better schooling and already know how to read.  But they really want to sit down and read with me.  And I'll keep welcoming them in as long as they keep being excited to come.

And yeah, "those families" sure do look like they're beyond any help.  The collective of issues they face are nothing that little neighborly interactions are likely to have any impact on.  But Rose will still keep going and reading with their kids, and I'll keep getting involved in the family conflicts, and we'll keep doing what seems right to do when it seems right to do it, and if everyone else in the slum is surprised that we spend any time with them at all...well, isn't that part of the point?

And yeah, that baby I saw is probably going to die anyway, and I don't even live in that slum.  But once I saw it, I can't really pretend that I don't feel responsible for it.  So I'm going to keep trying to do all that feels appropriate and helpful to do, and even if the baby does die, then God knows it died despite the fact that I tried, and not because I didn't.

I don't have a good answer to our time constraints or the problem of massive needs to fill with so few human resources to meet them.  But I don't have a good alternative to continuing to offer love to every one of the people in front of me, to whatever degree I'm able.  Jesus wasn't able to heal every person in Israel.  But whatever his pre-determined decisions were about how he planned to spend his time, he rarely seemed to turn anyone away either.