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?

Looking them in the eye

I'm sitting on my mattress writing an essay about child laborers. Three feet in front of me, an actual child laborer is coloring pictures on a piece of paper, likely her best intellectual stimulation in days. To my left, her little brother is hammering away at Rose's purse, fixing a strap that's been broken for months. He fixed the zipper on my laptop cover before that. In both instances we didn't ask him to do it, but he's in our room a lot and just noticed things that needed fixing.

We're taking advantage of the job skills of a 9-year-old child laborer.  He and his sister work at home making purses instead of going to school.  Is it a bad thing that we let him fix our things today, getting an advantage from skills that he learned in place of learning to read?  Or is it a good thing because we're giving him a chance to feel important and serve us in some way, making our relationship more even? Should we pay him for what he's doing? Or is it better to keep a give-and-take as part of our friendship, where we share our food and buy him notebooks and pencils to draw and color with, and he fixes our zippers and purse straps?

These are the questions we ask ourselves. I can buy breakfast from 13 and 14-year-old sisters who roll out pooris. Dinner could come from a 15-year-old who has been working all day to prepare fish for her mom's restaurant. I pass doors where young boys who should be in elementary school are weaving rugs and melting on shoe soles. Nearly every corner store will be manned by a preteen for at least part of the day. The garbage on the streets will be picked up by kids as young as three, to later be sorted for recyclables by kids of every age. And professional beggers start almost from birth, as infants are loaned to begging women to elicit sympathy until the kids are old enough to walk around and pull on shirts with pleading eyes.

Figuring out appropriate responses to child labor are some of the “big” questions we find ourselves dealing with here. Whether to give to a begging child, whether to buy clothes in part made by a 12-year-old, and what to say to parents who are barely surviving even with the help of their working children are difficult scenarios to work out answers to. But I'm glad that we can be asking those questions in a context where those who face the consequences of our choices are right in front of us. In much of the rest of the world, millions of people every day are buying cell phones assembled in Chinese factories, eating chocolates or coffee made with cocoa and coffee beans from African farms, buying clothes and toys produced in Southeast Asian sweatshops (made from cotton grown in central Asia), eating beef, sugar, and tobacco made on South American plantations, wearing jewelry with gold and diamonds from African mines, and in general taking advantage of cheap child labor across the world, without ever meeting one of the kids who helped get that product to them at such a cheap price.

Visiting the neighbors

Our neighbor Pappu to his wife: “Sometimes Jon gets 10 rupees of subsee/poori for breakfast!”

Wife, appearing shocked, “10 rupees for breakfast! Really?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I guess the food is cheap here for them?”

Rose, “Yeah.”

10 rupees is the equivalent of 18 cents. 10 rupees of subsee/poori buys 4 pooris, each made with a piece of dough the size of a plum, and about 10 ounces of delicious potatoes and chickpeas. While the subsee/poori man does good business in 5 rupee and 10 rupee increments, most people in our neighborhood are limited to tea and dry biscuits for breakfast. A typical budget for some families in the slum is only 100 rupees a day. Our current budget works out to around 400 rupees a day, not counting trips outside the city, language school, or and health insurance, and there are only 2 of us!

A candle on Christmas Eve

My candle had melted down to a two-inch tall mess, and a lot of the mess was on my fingers.  I thought it was too pathetic to give to anyone, but a young man took it from my hands.  He then bent down and handed the candle to a two-foot tall boy.  The boy's eyes lit up like you wouldn't believe.  He stood oblivious to everything around him, his whole face smiling, looking with wonder at the little flame in his little fingers.

As I looked down, my whole face smiling, I envisioned an out-of-body experience where I saw the scene from above.  Immediately above I only see myself, singing Silent Night, and a tiny boy in awe of his candle.  A little higher up and there are a hundred people standing together, nearly all poor, nearly all Muslim, standing in the cold with their little candles and singing (or just listening...mostly listening).  Higher up and you see the whole slum, tin houses and brick houses and tarp huts, desperately poor and regular poor mixed together, with a strange constellation of lights moving together about its alleyways.  Higher still and you see a city of three million people, lights on in some districts and blacked out in others, full of old money and new money and no money, where the most powerful people in the state live in gigantic houses and fancy condo complexes side-by-side with the poorest slums I've ever seen.  Higher still and you see the largest state in the world, two hundred million people and counting, one percent of whom are celebrating like we are celebrating that night.

I couldn't get any higher than that.  But back down on the ground, I looked at a little boy with a candle lighting up his face and wondered at it all.

Scenes from a new city

While two of my friends were talking to each other, I noticed a monkey sitting in our doorway, chilling. None of us had noticed, but he really didn't look like he was up to any mischief, or anything much at all.  That's the third time a monkey has come inside in the last two weeks. Some people think they're pests, but I'd rather live in a neighborhood with monkeys than one without.

Three days ago I passed a dead man on the side of the road. That was the second dead body I've walked by this week. I'm pretty sure that this one was a homeless man who'd died after going to sleep on the road. The other one was a train accident victim. After less than half a year in this country, I've seen several times more bodies than I'd seen in my entire life to this point.  

We were only in our potential new neighborhood for about two minutes before a woman invited us inside. Her 16-year-old daughter made chai while her 17-year-old son told us he was studying design. Their hospitality was so sweet. The bottom floor of the small two-room-home was decorated like other Muslim homes...but when the son showed us his room on top, it had a giant stitching of Jesus's crucifixion on one wall and of Sai Baba on the other wall. He told us he had made them himself, and if we gave him a picture he'd make one of us too. We were profoundly confused.

As we walked through the crowded market in front of our new neighborhood today, there were people who stood out from the crowd. A man whose arm ended in stumps sat cross-legged on a rug. Two boys, each with only one leg, held a blanket between them as they called out mirroring chants. A small widow with her face entirely covered lifted up her hands without a word. A blind man made his way through the crowd as his son led him. A child called out to passersby from the ground while his brother lay unresponsive in front of him, a small circle of blood leaking through the bandages that encircled his head. I don't want them to have to live this way. The more you learn about their lives, the worse you feel. But what do you do about it???

On Thursday I took a walk alongside the river to spend some time in nature. I saw five different species of frog. I saw more human excrement than most sewer workers see in a year. I photographed a dozen species of butterfly. I watched kids who should have been in early elementary school collecting trash to recycle. I was invited to sit for cups of chai by two different groups of guys, was fed two samosas, and had more friendly chats than I can remember.

It's a beautiful place. And if it doesn't make you want to cry on a daily basis, then you know you're starting to get numb again.

A Tale of Two Cities

We board a budget flight from India to Bangkok. It strikes me that our flight is full of single men. I take the time to count passengers – out of about 105 people on the flight, 66 are Indian men traveling alone or in all-male tour groups. Another dozen or so passengers are foreigners, and the rest of the passengers are Indian families, couples, and women.  Of the men (traveling without women) that dominate the flight, I am especially struck by a group of 15 middle-aged, middle-class Indian men who appear to be going to Bangkok on a tour together.

Bangkok is a “destination city”. That means that it is a destination for human trafficking. Women are brought from all over Thailand – and indeed, all over the world, especially southeast Asia, central Asia, eastern Europe, and Africa – in order to service men in Bangkok’s sex industry. But it could also be called a “destination city” for men. Sex tourists travel from all over the world in order to take advantage of these women. Approximately 60% of men who travel alone to Thailand will end up participating in the sex industry. It accounts for an estimated 3% of Thailand's GDP (about the same as what defense spending accounts for in America). I have the feeling that these all-male tour groups might ramp up those percentages.

......

I board a bus from Chiang Mai to Pha Yao. Across the aisle from me is a teenage girl, traveling back to Pha Yao alone. I see a number of other young women interspersed among the bus seats, also traveling alone. I can’t make assumptions about their travels – some of them certainly are students, commuting back from Chiang Mai to visit their families.

But I can’t help remembering that Pha Yao is famous as a “source city”. In the major cities of Thailand it is known to both traffickers and the NGOs that combat them as a major location to get young girls. When my in-laws took a tour of Thailand, even the tour guide openly told the group of the city's reputation as the place where beautiful young women are bought in order to be taken to the sex districts of Chiang Mai, Bangkok, and other "destination cities". And as I think of that, I can't help but wonder how many of the young women traveling alone back to Pha Yao had been away from home for that very reason.

......

I believe that knowledge is a good thing, and I'm glad I have it, and think I should share it. But sometimes, as I'm traveling to and from such cities and remembering such things, knowledge brings a lot of pain. Please pray for the girls, the johns, the pimps, the madames, the traffickers, their families and neighbors, and those who are working to help them find paths to a more fulfilling life.

Learning violence

I was laying down in my room a few hours ago when I heard a kid speaking in an intimidating manner.  Aggressive speech is not unusual, so I ignored it.  Seconds later, a neighbor kid called out for me twice.  I hurried over and found an older boy holding down my neighbor (who is around 7-8 years old) and trying to cover his mouth.  My neighbor looked quite distressed.  The older boy let go when he saw me and my neighbor ran off to his place.

The kids in our neighborhood can be really violent.  Boys fight a lot, often for play.  But just as often I'll see an older child hitting, pulling, or hurting a younger child, even a baby.  I try to say something whenever I can, which appears to have a little bit of shock value that stops them for now.  It's disturbing to realize how often it goes on.

They learn this at an early age.  Striking is a common punishment that parents inflict on children here, even very young ones.  And children are taught from an early age to strike something that hurts them.  For example, when a toddler runs into a chair and hurts himself, the parents will get him to hit the chair so he'll feel better.  Unsurprisingly, you will often see such young kids repeatedly striking their parents, other adults, and siblings - and they'll get away with it until they reach the age where the adults stop thinking it's cute and hit them back.  Once the kids get a little older, they use it as a tool to control younger kids who can't hit back.

The whole trend really bothers me.  It reminds me of studies in America which show that a huge number of child abusers were also abused as children.  If the only form of problem-solving you've ever been taught is physical violence, then physical violence is what you will express.  Especially if you've been taught that physical violence is what bigger, stronger authority figures use to get their way - then you'll be anxiously waiting until you're bigger and stronger enough to get your way as well.

Of course, it's not just parents that we learn this lesson from.  On an international level, bigger, stronger nations are just as keen to use violence and the threat of violence in order to get their way.  In fact, not only do they use violence as an important means of getting their way, they also keep reminding their citizens that they must keep the nation as militarily powerful as possible so that they can continue to get their way.  At the same time, they hope to keep other nations weaker.  Is it the slightest bit surprising that some of the weaker nations look at the biggest, strongest nations, those using violence to get their way, and yearn for the day when they can have the scariest weapons so that they can get their way too?

Commotion

There's a guy in our community who suffers from mental illness.  He sits near a storefront just a few feet from my friends' room.  When he's not doing well, he yells incoherently and makes motions with his head.  It looks like he's suffering.  At times my friend will sit next to him and try to talk.  He does not communicate back, but it does seem to calm him.  We had never seen anyone else try to communicate with him.  Someone cuts his hair on occasion though, and somehow he gets food.

A couple days ago there was a major festival in our community.  I decided to wander out and get some of the unique Eid food that was being sold.  While I was out among the crowds, I noticed a commotion, and then saw our mentally ill friend get up and run.  A gang of children chased him.  My heart sank.  From what I could tell, the children had crowded around him and were purposely taunting him.  I went after them to try to keep them away and give him a little peace, but he managed to outrun them and the children seemed to disperse.  I went back and got some food.

About the time I finished my food, I head a commotion again.  The man was standing on the top of the divider in the middle of the street, screaming in agony.  Children were once again following and taunting him.  I think some were throwing rocks.  I saw that some older youth were involved, and anger got the better of me.  I ran up to them and raised my voice in Hindi/Urdu.  "What are you doing?"  "Why?"

They stopped, looked confused, and tried to explain to me that the guy was crazy.  That didn't placate me.

"I know!"  "So?'  "Would God be happy with what you're doing right now?"  I continued expressing my upsetness at them, sometimes switching into English when my limited Hindi/Urdu vocabulary failed me.  The youth started to explain that they didn't speak English, to which I responded (in Hindi) that I knew they understood me anyway.  Still, they went off a little ways and brought back a guy I'd never seen before who spoke a little English.  He listened to them explain what they wanted to get across to me.

Then he turned to me, said, "They are illiterate fools," and walked away.

I don't know what to do for our mentally ill friend.  The resources to help him don't appear to exist here (heck, the resources to help people like him in America barely even exist).  The children who are taunting him truly don't know any better.  I should try to spend more time with him, but I'm not sure if that will do much, especially as limited as my language is.  I feel for him, a lot.  And I know that there are many others like him, with far more people around willing to taunt what they don't understand rather than there are people willing to stand by someone they love.

Changing the blog name

I haven't posted on this blog in a long time.  That's unfortunate, because I've had much to share and few people to talk to about it.  One step I'm going to take in a better direction is to change the name of the blog (something I've wanted to do for at least a year) and to redirect the purpose a little.

I'm changing the name of the blog to "Servant, Learner, Storyteller."  Too often people who are entering a new culture with the idea of "helping" the people try to come in as the leader, the teacher, and the judge.  That can lead to a negative reception among the people they're trying to help.  And even those who are receptive can then fall into a position of dependency, of continued reliance on the foreigner to lead them, teach them, and tell them what they're doing wrong.  We want our friends here to get the respect they deserve, we want to see something more sustainable happen among them, and so we want to try a different model.  Hence the name of the blog.

From now on the blog is going to focus on stories of our experiences (and eventually our service) here, with occasional lessons that I'm learning.  I am going to move most of my theological reflections and other thoughts to another blog.  I'll post the name and URL when I create it.

I should also note that I have no connection to the organization called "World Servants".  I found out that they use the same motto, but though I'm sure we got the idea from the same source, I hadn't even heard of them until I googled the motto just now.