Month: February 2013

"Who is my neighbor?"

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Picture

water buffalo and laundry hanging out to dry… it’s another beautiful day on the riverbank.

 

          Traffic. Birds chirping. Neighbors’ voices through the walls. Sitar and drums blaring out from someone’s cell phone as they walk past our room playing music from the latest Hindi film. Cows mooing. People shooing cows away from their doors (“Hut! Hut!”). Children’s laughter. Hammers and saws at work in the woodshop across the alley. These are some of the sounds that greet us when we first open our eyes under the mosquito net in the morning. Our community is a noisy place, and the longer you lay in bed in the morning, the more sounds join the chorus. Sometimes we love all the noise, and other times it drives us crazy, but either way the cacophony reminds us that there’s a lot of life going on out there.

More and more life all the time, actually– this week, two new babies were born in our community. Yesterday afternoon, drummers came to pound out a beat in front of one family’s house; an excited crowd gathered in the alley around their door, and the new baby’s relatives took turns dancing in the middle. That night, the other family hosted a party and gave out dinner and sweets to celebrate new life. It seems that whatever is going on in people’s lives and families, whether deaths or births or weddings or arguments or celebrations or grief, it is usually shared with others.

In Luke chapter 10, Jesus is cross-examined by an “expert in the law” who wants to know what he must do to “enter into life.” Jesus’ reply is simply to direct the man back to the words he has already read hundreds of times in the law: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”; and, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The man had intended to engage Jesus in a theological debate, so he is disappointed with this straightforward response. Flustered, he searches for a way to make things more complicated—and to relieve himself of responsibility: “Who is my neighbor?” he asks.

This morning, for the first time, this man’s question struck us as odd. These days, waiting in line for the outhouse together, sharing laundry line space, talking at the doorway and through the walls, eating together, experiencing the rain and the power outages and the festivals together, there is no way that we could ever be confused about who our neighbors are. We often fail at loving our neighbors as ourselves (particularly the ones with whom we share the closest quarters!), but our lives are so intertwined with theirs that it would be impossible for us to ask who our neighbors are. This man’s question to Jesus reveals that he was probably living in such isolation from the people—and the needs—around him to the point that he could really look around without seeing any “neighbors”. Put enough walls and busyness between you and the people around you, and you will become oblivious to the demands and joys of neighbor-hood with other human beings!

As humans, we are dynamic rather than static beings, so learning to recognize our neighbors and become neighbors to other people is not a matter of static location somewhere on the continuum between solidarity with our neighbors and isolation from them. It is a question of movement—with each decision we make, about where to live, and how to live, we can move either toward greater solidarity with others, or greater isolation. There is no set expression of what this movement will look like for each individual, as we all begin in different places (and even living in a slum does not guarantee that we will consistently choose to move toward solidarity rather than toward isolation). But the movement is the important thing.

SOLIDARITY <—————————————————————-> ISOLATION

We are learning that Jesus calls us to live life in such a way that the question of, “Who is my neighbor?” becomes irrelevant because we are already living life alongside the diverse lot of strangers, enemies, and friends whom we have recognized and accepted as our neighbors.

Who is my neighbor?

Hungry rain

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It’s been a rainy week in our city. Some of the dirt alleyways have turned to treacherous mud, and the open sewage trench that runs in front of our door has overflowed its banks and drained down the slope to the poorest homes in our neighborhood, right next to the big sewage canal. A new family has moved into one of the other small rooms in our landlady’s house this month. Three small kids and another one on the way, they have little to furnish their room besides some blankets on the floor, and they cook over an open fire in the small courtyard where all thirteen of us (landlady’s family included) hang up our laundry to dry. This week there’s been very little laundry because of the rain, but as we realized a couple of days ago, there’s also been very little cooking for this new family either. One morning we realized on our way to the outhouse that they hadn’t made anything for breakfast and had them over for chai and bread in our room. But that was just one day—we eat breakfast every day, and they go without food so much of the time, rain or shine, because they often don’t have the money on hand to buy anything to cook.

This week I went to visit two young friends I had met at a women’s literacy class in our community. They’re sisters, aged fifteen and eleven, and their parents have both died over the last few years, so they live with two older brothers who work to support the family. When I arrived at their home, they offered me a piece of a samosa. In the course of the conversation afterwards, I learned that because of the rain their brothers hadn’t been able to work for the past couple of days, and so this one salty pastry split between the three of us was all they had for lunch! They were waiting for their brothers to come home that evening with enough money to buy something to cook for dinner. This was sobering enough, but then one of the girls took me over to her cousin’s house just a few alleys away and left before her relatives fed me more samosas, along with chai and sweets. It is frustrating that I was treated to this hospitality while just a few yards away the girls were going hungry. Upon reflection, the disturbing thought occurred to me that my friend may have intentionally taken me to her cousin’s house thinking that was the best way to treat her guest the hospitality she herself was unable to provide. It’s humbling (and yes, disturbing) to think that the poor are feeding me instead of feeding themselves.

A lot of people go hungry in our neighborhood on a regular basis. Especially with the rain interrupting so many people’s livelihoods recently, we’re coming into a deeper awareness of that. But the fact remains that in all kinds of weather, families are living on the edge and often skip meals. Stunted children and skinny babies are the most visible reminders of that. Living within a few meters of these families, we never go hungry and make our decisions about meals based on our tastes rather than on whether or not there is cash on hand to cook a meal.

Of course there are all the complexities of an unjust global system that has kept me and most other Americans well-fed for our entire lives at the cost of keeping others hungry—but my friend has done a compelling job of explaining all of that in his blog post (which I highly, highly recommend), so I won’t go into that here.

Right now, I’m living next door to hungry people, so there is this pressing question of how to genuinely love my neighbors when they are hungry and I am fed. What is in my power to do, and am I doing that? But actually, in this age of global food chains and international connectedness, I suppose that my question is no different from the question we should all be asking—because whether we live in Los Angeles, Houston, India, or anywhere else on earth, our neighbors are hungry while we are fed.