These strange ashes

But these strange ashes, Lord, this nothingness,

This baffling sense of loss?

The last two days have been very difficult.  And again I'm at a loss for what to say.  The more of life I experience here the harder it is to write about any of it. I've thought about various explanations for that, but the most convincing one is the overwhelmingly depressing nature of the events I have to share.  If I had a couple “feel good” stories or at least some situation had turned out surprisingly well, then I'm sure there'd be something I'd want to write. But I'm not getting there. In the broad view almost nothing feels good, and every welcome surprise has only briefly delayed the inevitable heartbreak.

We knew this would be a tough place to live when we came. That's why we're here. But is it too much of a cliché to say that we didn't know it would be this tough? Every month brings more illness, more deaths, more violence, more affairs, more lost jobs and lost homes and sadness.

Did we happen to get a group of friends going through an especially difficult stretch of events? Or if we had a different group of friends, would we just be privy to a different set of heartbreak? I know it can't be this bad for everyone who lives in our slum. But we aren't even close to living with the poorest people in our slum, which is not even close to the poorest slum in the city, which is not even close to the poorest city in the country. And there are a lot of worse-off countries in the world. So while it might not be this bad for everyone, there are hundreds of millions (or billions) of people for who it is exactly this bad.

Which is what keeps me going. Because I know that they'll still be here, whether I'm here or not. And I love them. And out of love, I choose by whatever small degree to live with them and suffer with them, in the hope that we may some day together be able to take some of this suffering away. And I know that even if I lived somewhere else where I didn't have to know them, didn't have to suffer with them, I would still know they were here suffering. And to not be there with them is too much for my heart to take.

A story is told of Jesus and His disciples walking one day along a stony road. Jesus asked each of them to choose a stone to carry for Him. John, it is said, chose a large one while Peter chose the smallest. Jesus led them then to the top of a mountain and commanded that the stones be made bread. Each disciple, by this time tired and hungry, was allowed to eat the bread he held in his hand, but of course Peter's was not sufficient to satisfy his hunger. John gave him some of his.

Some time later Jesus again asked the disciples to pick up a stone to carry. This time Peter chose the largest of all. Taking them to a river, Jesus told them to cast the stones into the water. They did so, but looked at one another in bewilderment.

“For whom,” asked Jesus, “did you carry the stone?”

(quotes from Amy Carmichael and Elizabeth Elliot)

So my mother knows I'm okay...

I want to thank all the people who replied with prayers and concerns to my last blog post.

I want you to know that we're both doing okay. Some days certainly have been very hard, but the very difficult things going on in the lives of our friends aren't affecting us directly at the moment, except to the degree that we are concerned for them.

Please continue to pray for them, and for us as we try to discern the next steps to take forward as we partner together through the messy, messy life here.

Too much pain

There comes a time when you have so much to say that you can't say anything at all.  The last three weeks have included my four or five most difficult-to-deal-with days since I arrived in India.  And it isn't any one thing or any one family, but multiple (6?) long-simmering issues coming to a head involving the lives of every single one of the families we're closest too.  And, because we're their neighbors and we love them, we've become quite involved too.

I can't say more without giving an unfairly incomplete picture, and I can't say everything (or much of anything) without violating the confidence of my friends.  So I just want to ask that you pray for them and for us.  And pray for the ever-"justified" violence, the poverty created by a world enslaved to greed, and each of our own little personal sins that are helping to tear this world apart.  Pray that we can each reach closer to the center of God's Kingdom to release ourselves from power, wealth, and our lusts and learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.

The same fever is not the same fever: Part 2

A few days ago my good friend's relative rushed into the city with a severe case of dengue fever. My friend was already hosting one family who had come with a medical problem, but took this second family into his tiny slum home as well, then worked for several days to get them admittance and treatment at the local government hospital.

Facilities at public hospitals in India are poor, and after two days his condition had worsened. His platelet count fell below 50,000 and his hands and feet were heavily swollen. The doctors said that he needed platelets. But the hospital had no platelets to give.

So my friend rushed back to the slum and found five guys to take to the blood bank. He got them all to the hospital, along with his wife and 7-month-old son, who needed to be admitted for a severe urinary tract infection! Unfortunately, three of the guys who came with him did not have strong enough health to donate blood. The three who were accepted donated their blood, which then had the platelets removed.

Meanwhile, the three guys who couldn't donate took care of the sick man and my friend's wife and son, a necessity in a hospital so overcrowded that each patient will only rarely see a nurse, and won't be fed at all. One of those guys got the donated platelets from the blood bank when they were ready and brought a nurse over to administer them. Unfortunately, the nurse left immediately and a new nurse had to be found to switch out each bag. The whole process went too slowly and the last bag of platelets started going bad in the heat.

Tens of millions of people are infected by dengue fever every year. At least half a million cases are severe enough to require hospitalization, and tens of thousands of people die.  In the four days since my friend's wife brought her baby to the hospital, she's seen three babies in her room die of dengue.

In the movie Elysium, set 150 years in the future, the richest people on Earth have fled the planet and live in a massive satellite called “Elysium”, with huge houses, clean air, and leisurely lives. Advanced medical technology can fix any disease or injury. Citizenship is tightly controlled and a defense system keeps attempted immigrants out, killing many.   Back down on a polluted, overcrowded Earth, the poor of the world live under a robot-enforced police state, working under dangerous conditions to make products that enhance the lives of the rich in their space station. The masses on Earth access health care at overrun hospitals with technology that is decades behind. The rich on Elysium could provide them with better care, but choose not to, instead hoarding the resources for themselves. Many of the Earthlings who risk their lives to sneak onto Elysium are simply trying to get medical care for their children.

Some of the movie reviewers who saw Elysium thought it was an interesting commentary on what Earth might look like 150 years from now, as the rich continue to get richer while land and resources for everyone else continue to run out. Elysium's director had to correct them.

"Everybody wants to ask me lately about my predictions for the future," the director says.  "No, no, no.  This isn't science fiction.  This is today.  This is now."

We are already living on Elysium.

A day in the life of a 10-year-old child laborer

7am: School starts. Wake up as late as possible to wash your face, throw on your uniform, pack your snack, and get all your books and notebooks together. Doing these tasks inappropriately may lead to getting a beating at school.

1pm: School ends. You were nodding off a lot of the time anyway. Rush home for lunch and a tiny rest.

1:30pm: Arabic and Urdu lessons at the mosque start. Here you gain a religious education and the basics of 2 more languages to add to the Hindi and English you're learning at school.

5pm: Lessons at the mosque end. Go directly to the screen-printing shop, where a stable of young boys keeps the operation going.

7pm: Leave the screen-printing shop for your job assisting the local slum medical dispensary.

11pm: Shift at the dispensary finishes. For the 4 hours a day you give there, you receive 300 rupees (about $5) a month.  $5 a month.  You head right back to the screen-printing shop.

3am: Shift at the screen-printing shop finishes. For the 6 hours a day you give there, you will receive 50 rupees (about $1) a week. This wage holds for your first 3 years, which is your “apprenticeship”. (You actually learned the entire job in the first week.)

At the age of 10, you are earning almost $10/month for your family by working 10 hours a day. That works out to an hourly wage of a little more than 3 cents.

Age 13

After 3 years of this, you will quit school so you can work at the screen-printing shop 13 hours a day. Your apprenticeship ends and your pay as a screen-printer jumps to $1.50/day. Combined with a minor raise at the dispensary, you are now earning about $55 a month for your family. With 17 hours of work per day, that works out to almost 10 cents an hour. Due to the death of your father 3 years earlier, you are the primary breadwinner in your family.

Age 15

After several years, the dispensary pay climbs to $12/month, and the screen-printing shop slowly raises your wages until they reach $2.50 a day. Now you are earning $85/month, or about 17 cents an hour.

Age 16

At this age you are able to find more legitimate work at a local mall that pays $3.50/day for 10+ hours, 6 days a week. You now earn over 30 cents an hour, a wage that won't get you out of the slum but at least seems within the bounds of human decency. However, you will never get the chance to repeat the missed years of school. You will never make up for the childhood play that you lost. You may never recover from the health problems you picked up from sitting/standing/working for 18-20 hours a day during your growing years. And your family won't be any closer to ending the cycle of poverty that forced you into your child labor career in the first place.

This is not the story of every child laborer. Many do much easier work, for fewer hours. Others do much harder work for just as many hours. Not all have to start by age 10. Some start as early as 2 or 3. (As hard as that is to believe, yes, you can pick up trash and you can beg as early as age 2 or 3.) Obviously not everyone loses a father, but a surprisingly large number of people under these conditions lose their father or some other family member at an early age. Some children get paid a little more than this. Many get paid even less. Some are able to continue going to school. Many never go to school at all. And some eventually are able to work their way into even better jobs, where they can reasonably support a family outside the slum without their own kids having to work. But many will be stuck in the very same jobs they did as children for the rest of their lives, as will their own children.

There is nothing in our basti that bothers me as often as the cycle of child labor that I see on a daily basis. Lord, be with those kids. Lord, help me to find some way to address the issue and work together with them towards a more fulfilling life.

The same fever is not the same fever

Three weeks ago I had a fever. I started getting headaches, my skin was achy, I became very tired, and a crazy red rash spread all over my body from head to toe. It might have been a mild case of Dengue Fever, or it could have been any number of other viral infections. A little more than a week after the first symptoms, I was fine.

It wasn't until I got better that I realized how many other people in the slum were sick. My good friend's baby had a fever. So did his aunt. So did my language helper. All five people in the family we ate the feast with were sick. So were four members in another family we knew. So were all sorts of other people in the basti – one here, one there. Rose, gratefully, never got sick, nor did our landlord or their family, but almost everyone else we knew seemed to have at least one family member go down.

It was in the midst of this little epidemic that I realized how different my experience still is from the experience of my neighbors. For me, getting the funny rash/fever was a little bit of an adventure. I enjoyed trying to figure out what I had. I was somewhat uncomfortable, but not horribly so. I had to take it easy for a few days, but I don't have a lot of responsibilities anyway. When I went to endure a 2.5 hour liturgy near the tail end of the illness (at a church we have to walk 2 miles to get to), I made it a little bit of a personal contest to see if I could continue to stand up without passing out. I observed my symptoms closely, and was ready to go to a doctor the moment that anything extraordinary happened, but nothing occurred that forced me to take the fever very seriously.

It is not that way for my neighbors. For them, even the “mild” fever hits their health hard. They don't have the background of good rest and nutrition and exercise and easy living that I have, and so their bodies have far less leeway. They are really wiped out when a virus makes their body work that much harder. The adults get less work done. The kids miss school, some more than a week. Death is a real possibility for babies and young children and the elderly and those whose bodies are already wracked by other thing. In families where multiple members are sick, a lot of the normal life stops.

And these little epidemics are something that happens a lot in the basti.

I am reminded that no matter where I choose to live, or how I choose to live, for me it is a choice. I wasn't forced into this life, and I could leave it whenever I want. And no matter what possessions or connections I give up, I haven't given up my education, my stable and healthy upbringing, my foreign passport, my medical insurance, or my access via friends and family to as much money as I would ever need (no matter how little might be in my own bank account).

I hope, through this life, to know the poor better. I hope to have solidarity with them in some way, to understand their hopes and fears to a deeper degree than I could if I didn't live with them, to be able to form a community together that will benefit both of us.

But I am reminded that as much as I have solidarity with them, I will never be them. And because of that, they keep having to suffer in ways that I don't, even when we share the same fever.

Inviting those who can't pay you back

The tension was clear.

Our friends explained their dire financial situation. Their landlord, who is prejudiced against Muslims, had bumped their already inflated rent another 25% in an effort to get them to leave. They used everything they had to pay her, and now could not afford food. Their teenage daughter (who had just started school for the first time) had to be pulled out of school to help them rush to finish the next batch of the wallets they make. Until the wallets are finished and the father goes on a trip out-of-town to sell them, they will not have money. And to make matters worse, the entire family has been sick with fever.

Why was there tension? Because the family had a desperate financial need, and knew we had money, but didn't want to ask. They had already taken a very small loan (American equivalent $5) from us the previous month. Now they couldn't pay back that loan. They wouldn't ask us for money again under those circumstances. For our part, we don't want to increase their indebtedness to us, and are afraid we might mess up the relationship even more if we start giving them money as gifts. So we didn't offer, and they didn't ask.

These decisions tear us apart on a daily basis.

We couldn't leave it at that. So as a small gesture, we invited them over for lunch the next day. We made a huge feast (by our standards), the biggest we've ever made in our little slum home. Though our cooking left a little to be desired, some of it turned out okay, and we had a nice time together with good conversation. It didn't solve any of their issues, but they got a high-calorie meal at a time when those are few and far between, and we got to have a good time together that strengthened our friendship rather than making it more awkward.

I don't know what the long-term solution is. But for now, I felt that we were able to love them a little bit.

After our friends left, I remembered Luke 14:12-14.

He said also to the man who had invited him, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.”

Ironically, we had invited to our feast the very people who could not repay us. And I got an insight into Jesus's wisdom and love. A feast is something people share in together. It is not a soup kitchen or a food distribution. It brings the providers and the beneficiaries together, and as long as the host is gracious, can be a meal among equals even when the participants are not financially equal. It shows the trust and friendship involved in letting another person come into your home. It makes the experience about community, rather than about the provider or the beneficiary. A true feast shared together in a home adds dignity, rather than taking it away.

Jesus tells us that instead of inviting those who are already our friends or our relatives, those who are assumed to be in our own financial circles, we should invite into our homes those who cannot afford to have their own feasts. And from everything else that Jesus does and says, I have to believe this is done with the hope that those people will be added to those we consider our friends and family.

The Appeal of Nonviolence

Rose and I have been tutoring kids in our room.  In our first session one of the older kids hit her younger sister.  That behavior is usually acceptable in our neighborhood, but I wanted to model something different.  So I told the kids in Hindi, "In this room, there is no hitting."

During a later class, it happened again.  Rose had heard what I had said the first time, and again told the kids, "In this room, there is no hitting."  Saeed, an 8-year-old boy, piped up.

"This is a good room!  This is a beautiful room!"

Coptic Christians Respond in Love

Al-Jazeera Media Network

Cairo, Egypt

Abdul Sami was one of 581 men crushed by military forces during a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in Thursday. His wife, Najma Bano, is now a widow. To most Egyptians, Najma is a statistic, another woman widowed by the sectarian violence that has plagued Egypt. But Najma knows that she is more than a statistic to someone. And that someone is not who she expected.

“A woman came and introduced herself as Mariam George from St. Mina's Church,” Najma shared. “She told me that the church had heard of our loss and wanted to reach out. She told me that her own son had been killed two years ago. She was also distraught after losing her only child. But she wanted to use her experience to comfort me. I couldn't believe that she would care about me in this time. It has made all the difference in the world.”

Ms. George declined to be interviewed, but gave a short statement to our reporter. “Our Lord Jesus Christ tells us, 'Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.' Ever since I realized that He had comforted me, I have been able to comfort others who were suffering the same loss.”

Mohammed Saad shared a similar experience. “When the government killed my son, two men came from St. Mary's Church to offer condolences. They told me that they did not agree with the violent actions of the government and that they would help me seek redress if I wished. They also told me that St. Mary's would be there for me if we needed any assistance with the burial. We are a poor family. We could not have laid our son to rest properly without their help.”

What Mo. Saad saw later that day shocked him even more.

“When I bought the newspaper and saw the headline about the churches that had been destroyed, it made me sick. These people have been so compassionate to us. Everyone in the neighborhood has known their care at one time or another. Then I read the article and saw that St. Mary's was one of the churches that had been destroyed! And yet the very next day these Christians from that church were with me, offering me help!”

At that, Mo. Saad's eyes welled up and he was unable to continue.

A large contingency of Muslims is planning a counter-protest today to oppose the actions against the churches. Mohammed Salman of the Muslim Federation for Christian Rights explained, “We understand [the Muslim Brotherhood's] distress regarding the government's actions. It is a complex political situation, and will take some time to resolve. But by attacking the Christians, they have completely marginalized themselves. Who has ever heard of a Christian hurting anyone? Who has ever heard anything but kind words from these people?  The extreme elements of the Muslim Brotherhood have now lost all support. They will not be relevant again in Egyptian politics for a long time.”

Pope Tawadros gave a public address this morning at St. Mina's Cathedral. He spoke about Jesus's parable of the Samaritan's love for the Jew, and related it to the need for Muslims and Christians to care for one another in times of crisis. The Pope was unavailable for comment afterwards. 

A church representative was asked for the Coptic Church's response to the Muslim reaction to the church attacks. “We deeply appreciate the love and solidarity we have received from the Muslim community,” said Bishop Youssef. “Unfortunately, our servants and members are greatly burdened right now in taking care of the victims and families hurt by the government actions against the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as those affected by the attacks on our own churches. In the future when their needs have been met, we hope to meet with these Egyptian brothers and thank them.”

Bishop Youssef then left in a church vehicle. He was reportedly attending an emergency council of bishops to determine the strategy for providing a protective ring of Coptic volunteers to stand against military forces during future Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins.

This is a fictional article.

Basti Women and the po-po

Forty-five people came together from our slum to attend the protest. Over 40 of them were women, nearly half of those girls. Muslim, Hindu, Christian, in saris and salwars and burkas, from elementary school girls to the elderly, the whole spectrum was represented. They gathered in the city center, joined by 50-60 more women from other slums and a few middle-class NGO workers, and got ready to march on the police in protest over their negligence in a string of horrific rape cases in our city and across the country.

Before they even started marching, the most intense rainstorm of the year hit. Clothes and signs were drenched. The street filled in with deep puddles. But right in the middle of the heaviest rain, the women began their march.

They shouted slogans, held signs and banners, and blocked the street as they marched through them. Within twenty minutes, the police realized what was happening and freaked out. They ran ahead of the marchers and attempted to blockade the entire road just to prevent the marchers from reaching the central government buildings for the state.

Those police officers were a foot away from putting the last metal gate barrier in place when the women reached them. It was no match. The women grabbed the barrier and drove back the police, four officers stumbling backwards under the weight of the crowd. A second heavy barrier segment went crashing to the ground right next to me as the women hit it, and the throng surged through. The police retreated to headquarters as quickly as they could for reinforcements.

As the marchers approached the Parliament building, cameras appeared everywhere. A television crew waited at the gates of the building. When the women reached the gates, 40-50 officers were waiting there for them. The military were also called in...for what? Because the police were afraid of the women? Because they wanted to intimidate the women? Soon law-enforcement/military numbers were over 100, and matched the number of marchers 1-to-1.

Someone came in with portable amps and microphones, and the women began making their demands. Stricter laws for violence against women, new police procedures, heightened transparency and accountability for the police. The police/military formed a three-or-four-deep ring around the now small-looking group of protesters. But they continued to shout their slogans and make their demands with spirit. A dozen young teenage girls held up their banner for the cameras. Two young men with the Democratic Youth Federation helped lead the chants and made speeches alongside the female NGO workers and other women from the slums.

In short time a delegation of eight women was allowed inside to speak to the higher authorities. For about an hour, protesters outside continued to chant slogans and speak to the media. Eventually the delegates emerged, their petition given and their concerns heard, but no concrete ground given other than promises to continue the conversation the following day. What future action will come of this remains to be seen. But I can say with certainly that I have seen the women of the basti stand up for their rights against the authorities with a passion and belief in the righteousness of their cause that I couldn't have imagined before.

Attached below are a couple of photos from near the end of the rally, after the skies had cleared, most of the military had left, and the police had calmed down.