The wind is blowing

The hot season has begun–which means mangos, afternoon naps, kulfi (a kind of traditional Indian ice cream), and of course, sweltering heat. But we were surprised to learn a few days ago that the hot season in this part of India also involves occasional dust storms. I was home alone when the last one began: the relief of temporary cloud cover and the welcome, unexpected, light rain quickly turned more sinister as the wind picked up speed, thrashing trees around and beginning to lift old tires and plastic tarps off of our neighbors’ roofs. I stood in our doorway and watched as the whole landscape suddenly went red, as though we were on Mars. I shut the door against the sideways stream of rain and grit, but a few minutes later the mud-spitting wind actually lifted off a piece of our roof and carried it away! As soon as I saw daylight expanding overhead, I ran downstairs to take cover in our landlord’s room, thinking that the whole roof might be peeling back. When my husband and my presence of mind returned a couple of minutes later, we went back upstairs to salvage books, guitar, and clothes from getting soaked. I was offended after the storm when we started the work of trying to clean up the mess and a neighbor who came up to survey the damage started laughing–offended, that is, until I looked next door and realized that her roof had been split open, too! Everyone just took the storm in stride, and within a few hours most people had already climbed onto the roofs of their homes and repaired the damage. A couple of the bamboo and plastic shacks in the community would have to be rebuild from the ground up, but even this seemed to be casually accepted. The missing piece of our roof, it turned out, had flown into our neighbors’ courtyard behind us and cracked one of the boards of their wooden bed, and a couple of people had been struck by falling bricks from other houses, but fortunately no one had been killed. People here have learned to live with what they can’t control; they have a no-nonsense way of recovering from almost anything and getting on with life. When the temperature began its rapid ascent, we responded first by buying a matka, a traditional clay water pot which is just porous enough to allow water to slowly leak through and evaporate, keeping the water inside cool. For the first few days, we were dipping refreshingly cold water out of the matka and joking to our neighbors that it was a like a cheap fridge that didn’t even need electricity. Then the weather got a bit hotter and the water in the matka went warm. This week, temperatures have climbed high enough that by midday, our ceiling fan is churning down hot wind from our thin roof, and even with the windows and door open, we can sit in the shade and sweat through our clothes in a matter of minutes. Since temperatures reached 107 degrees fahrenheit a few days ago, we decided to opt for a “desert cooler” and spent yesterday afternoon rearranging our room to accommodate the new appliance: a big, aluminum box with a fan inside and a water pump to wet down panels of dried grass from which water will evaporate and be sucked into the blades to pump out a stream of cool air in whichever direction the cooler is facing. A.’s self-taught electrician skills came in handy for rigging up a way to wire the cooler into our existing electrical board and run wires across the ceiling so that the stream of slightly-damp, cool air blows directly across our bed at night. That gives me hope that I’ll be able to do more over the next couple of months than just laying around in a sweaty daze.

In spite of the mounting heat, there have been a couple of exciting things going on around here lately. The first sign of hope is that our widowed neighbor, whose husband died suddenly a couple of months back, has finally found a job! We had been helping her in a lengthy job search which had been fruitless and discouraging up until now, especially since she and her three young daughters had been struggling to eat even once a day throughout those long weeks. We were encouraged to see other poor neighbors generously sharing food with them even though there was very little to go around, but we also struggled to know our own role in helping without either creating unhealthy dependence or discouraging the rest of the community from being involved. The entire process was a cruel reminder: the poverty of the poor is often what keeps them poor; cyclical, exponential disadvantages piling on top of one another. It was hard to get our neighbor a job because she looked so poor. She looked so poor because she didn’t have a job. Wealthy prospective employers would look at her and say, “She looks too weak to do the work.” But she does harder work than cleaning floors when she’s wandering around the city on foot looking for work! I wanted to say. Or they would say, “You need to dress nicely if you’re going to work here. We like cleanliness.” But the reason that even her best suit is old and has holes in it is because she has been unemployed for two months, and she was living hand-to-mouth before that!

You aren’t very employable when you’re illiterate, slightly disabled, stand less than five-feet tall, and look obviously, desperately poor. But you also aren’t going to get any less malnourished and desperate-looking until you land a job. When I would talk and pray with her about the situation, she would tell me despairingly, “If only I had a job, then I wouldn’t be distressed anymore! Everything would be fine! God could give me a job. God just isn’t listening.”

Finally, one of the myriad connections we had tried to make for her finally came through, and she is now employed at the home of a compassionate middle-class woman who lives just a short distance away from our community and who has even bought a month’s supply of food to last the family until the first pay day.

The second recent development is so new and fragile that I hesitate to even mention it yet. We’ve met a woman who began a couple of weeks ago to create an interactive, and student-led curriculum for teaching literacy to adults and children who are fluent in Hindi but who can’t read–either due to their having never been afforded the opportunity to go to school, or due to their having been subjected to the experience of spending a few years in an Indian government school where teachers were absent more often than students, or where the teachers’ presence facilitated rote memorization and useless examinations without any learning whatsoever. I don’t have time to fully explain the blatant inadequacies of the Indian education system, and the corruption that prevents so many kids from being able to access what exists on paper as their basic right. But against that backdrop, this literacy curriculum is shockingly simple: it teaches the Hindi script phonetically rather than having students begin by memorize the names of each letter of the alphabet, it relies on simple pictures to connect letters with sounds, and it helps learners to immediately begin piecing sounds into words and words into sentences, so that instant gratification gives them confidence and propels them to continue learning. It’s also student-led, which means you barely need a teacher at all. A. and I, along with a couple of other friends, are helping out with the pilot project by trying the curriculum with some of our neighbors, and it’s been exciting to see the enthusiasm of kids and adults alike as they begin timidly and then experience unexpected success in starting to achieve something that has seemed unattainable for them for so long.

The woman behind this program is passionate and ambitious about ridding India of illiteracy, and has plans of using the curriculum on a large-scale. It remains to be seen how all of this will pan out, but for now we’re excited by the possibility of sitting down with even a few individuals in our community to guide them through the process, and then give them the chance to pass on their new-found skill to their kids, friends, relatives, and neighbors in the slum.

Easter

Picture

“The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” by Caravaggio

 

In my little corner of the world, I see a lot of suffering and death. I spend a lot more time contemplating the crucifixion and that silent Saturday when Jesus remained in the tomb than I ever used to in the West. It’s easier to believe in victory and new life when most of the people around you are doing well, and most of the stories you know turn out OK. It’s harder to keep faith in resurrection when most of the people around you aren’t doing OK; when they’re doing horrible things to each other and having horrible things done to them. Sometimes you lose track of the plot line when bad things happen one after another with no resolution and no catharsis, just banal disappointments that drip out like a leaky faucet.These days I often find myself walking through thin places between hope and despair, and the question is unresolved in my mind as to whether or not anything we do is worth it; whether all will be made well in the end. But there is room for all of that in faith—there has to be. Without that kind of desperation, what is the meaning of hope?

These last few days as I have contemplated the story of Jesus—his tragic death, his closest friends betraying and abandoning him, his anguished voice wondering aloud from the cross whether God is still with him in the midst of so much pain—something new has come into focus for me for the first time:

The resurrection was a surprise.

Everyone, everyone had given up on Jesus. His closest friends and followers whom he had literally spent years teaching and preparing for this moment. He had told them so many times that he would suffer and die, but that wouldn’t be the end, and they couldn’t grasp it. When he was tortured and killed by the state and the religious institution they were still fumbling around in the dark for what the kingdom meant and how it was possible that their fearless leader could have failed to accomplish his mission. He was dead and gone, and they thought it was over. The women mourned him and prepared spices to pay their last respects; the men returned to their fishing nets, disillusioned.

I think it was only their total despair which catalyzed such unbelievable joy when these disillusioned followers discovered Jesus alive, and it was this tangible experience of moving through death and loss to new life that made their faith so strong from that point onward. If they had confidently expected his triumphant return all along, then perhaps they wouldn’t have had a real sense of being delivered from any real danger or pain. Real suffering brings questions to the surface, and even to the lips of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So Jesus didn’t hold his friends’ doubt against them. Peter, poor Peter who had denied his best friend and teacher three times to save his own skin: Jesus cooks him breakfast on the beach, reinstates him, and entrusts him with the future of his movement (“On this rock I will build my church…”). There is resurrection in Peter’s own heart as Jesus forgives him and Peter learns to trust himself again. Later this former turncoat will be faithful to the point of death on a cross himself.

I often feel overwhelmed by the current state of the world, and I wonder how the kingdom can ever come. I find it hard to imagine history somehow rolling on from the present into heaven on earth. But I read this story and I realize that there is a place in the Easter narrative for the grief and confusion I so often feel. For Peter and the others, there was as little continuity between their experience of absolute loss on Friday and absolute joy on Sunday as there is between my current experience of the impoverished, suffering world as it is and the world as it will be when it is restored.

I am not lost. I am seeing Saturday. But Sunday morning will come, when I least expect it.

And it does come, even now—in those little signs of hope, tiny as mustard seeds, that spring up through the ground of despair. We see resurrection in our relationships when we offer forgiveness after conflict seems to have killed off affection and friendship, or when we creatively imagine new possibilities out of apparent failures. We catch a glimpse of the kingdom when we share a joyful meal with people of different languages, cultures, and religions, choosing to build community instead of walls. There is resurrection in my own heart when old wounds are bandaged and they heal. There is hope when we sow and sow and sow, and then one seed (maybe one in a hundred) bursts into life, we know not how.

I wrote last year about hope being a candle in the dark, never quite filling the room but never ceasing to burn either. Sometimes hope still feels like a lonely candle, but other times I get the sense that what I’m seeing is not just a small flame in the darkness, but rather slivers of a huge light behind everything that’s merely been painted over with black. Perhaps as we work to uncover more and more, we discover that the darkness, convincing as it may be, is what is surface-level and temporary, while the light is what is real and permanent and strong.

May we have the courage to suffer with Christ in the people around us.

May we have the faith to live in hope of new life,

the eyes to see it coming,

and the joy of helping to bring it into being.

May we practice resurrection in our lives.

There is no silver bullet.

I was sitting with my friend as she related to me her financial difficulties over the past week. Not that they had started this week, but the entire family falling ill at the same time hadn’t helped things. She said she was going to have to take change out of the little tin box in her store to buy vegetables for dinner. Just then, the Big Ma’am and three Big Sirs from World Vision arrived, to check how things were going with the store. My friend straightened and parted the curtain that separated her front room from the shop in her back doorway to go and meet them. I stood with her teenage daughters behind the curtain, invisible from the outside but able to see through the lightweight fabric. What I saw was that my friend was in presentation mode, stiff and formal. “How are things going with the store?” the Big Sirs asked. “Great,” she said. “Before we had problems with food, but now things are OK.”

“Call the child,” they said. They meant the youngest daughter, the sponsored child. The sponsored child raced across the room from where she had been standing with us behind the curtain and one of her older sisters began frantically trying to comb down her hair, put in a clip, make her presentable. My friend called the child’s name again, sounding irritated. It wasn’t that the visitors were showing any signs of being demanding or impatient; I couldn’t see their faces from where I was standing, but they might have even been smiling. It was just that my friend knew where she stood with them: they were the patrons, and their expectations must be met.

My friend called her daughter again. The older sister gave up trying to put in the hair clip and the little girl came running to the backdoor to stand next to her mother. I wondered if this group of four recognizes the effect their presence has on people. One of the Sirs took out his camera to take a photo of the two of them standing there, in front of the shop that World Vision had donated the initial stock for. “To provide this family with a much-needed livelihood,” I’m sure the letter will say when the photo arrives at the sponsor’s house in Australia.

“Smile!” the man said. Click.

A moment later they were gone. My friend returned and sat down wearily. “We were just talking about this,” I said. “You’re hardly making any profit from this store. You still don’t have enough money for food or medicine. Why didn’t you tell them that?”

Unse kyaa matlab hai? What do they care?” she said. Just then, a customer arrived. She pulled out the box where chewing tobacco was hidden away and handed a couple of packets to the man at her door. Understandably, World Vision has forbidden her from selling those addictive products in her store. Unfortunately, they’re just about the only thing in stock that she makes any money on. The other colored packages of cookies and candy and salty snacks have negligible profit margins. “The things they gave me don’t sell,” she said. “They should have just given me money and I would have bought things for the store myself.” Fair enough. But I find myself wondering whether even that modification would have made much difference. There are so many of these little doorway shops in our neighborhood that there’s hardly enough demand to warrant the supply. The fact that most people aren’t able to read or write and have no knowledge of accounting doesn’t increase the chances of entrepreneurial success, either.

I think again of the photo. That photo makes me angry, because that photo will be a lie. The family in the picture is still constantly worried about how to stay afloat financially, and they go into debt over basic healthcare and school fees. When I had a sponsored child on my fridge in college, I certainly assumed the smiling face looking back at me was out of the woods, so to speak, now that a big aid organization had intervened (that was a Compassion child, by the way, but a few years back in Thailand I also discovered sponsored children being withdrawn from the program and sent to the local temple to live as monks because their families still weren’t able to feed them). I understand the marketing of the whole thing, and how you raise more money by turning compassion into a canned feel-good experience that can be personalized to appeal to consumers. Just $30 a month, to change somebody’s life, supposedly. Heck, it’s a good deal.

But those kinds of bargains just don’t exist in the real world. And I would love to turn this little anecdote into a plug for building relationship with the poor instead of just throwing money at them—I do believe that money is the least of my neighbors’ problems, when you get right down to it—but this situation does not demonstrate any such neat and tidy moral. The fact is that I’ve known this family for about two years, and despite the fun times we’ve had together and the stories we’ve shared and the deep sense of connection we have with each other, all that relationship hasn’t had a measurable impact on their finances. At all. The stresses in their lives are essentially the same now as they were when we first met them. But for what it’s worth, they do tell me honestly about those problems. My friend has cried and laughed and even gotten angry and argued with me, which she would never do with a patron, a boss, a donor, or anyone she needed to impress or appease in order to keep the relationship in tact.

So perhaps I’m being too hard on the international aid groups, because I don’t have a cunning alternative to offer them. But as long as we’re going around not changing the world (because that is beyond us), we might as well get to know our neighbors and try to love them well. Change is slow and small, usually, and it doesn’t always come… but when it does, it nearly always comes through relationship.