Robbie Seay Band has a song, “Rescued Ones”, about how before God we are all the same. I like it, the raspy voice, the catchy tune…the words? “So we stand in line, with the poor and the blind.” It’s such a true image, because that is exactly what the poor and the blind do: they stand in line. They clamor at huge metal gates, in crowds, for the slim chance that it will open and they will slip through the crack and get work for the day. They stand in line for a bucket of water, for the doctor, for the drunk nurse who calls himself a doctor and who’s to question that? They form lines that snake their way in curves from the door, round the building, out across the courtyard and all the way back to hot, hours-in-the-sun hopelessness. They form thick, desperate crowds that move en masse against the bus door, the food truck, the chance. They form slow, sitting lines, silent, on wooden benches, looking straight ahead, flies on stone faces, tired, dusty and simply waiting.
It’s nice that the songwriter recognizes that before God he has no special status because he is rich or because his eyes work well for him. But does he really stand in line with the poor? With the blind? Does he sit on the street and hear feet all day and hold his hand up, aching, begging? Or does he stand in line the way you do at the mall, to take your picture with Santa? You may get hungry while you are waiting, so you eat a cookie. And while you are standing there, you know with absolute certainty that at the end of the line, you WILL see Santa. And does the songwriter think it’s normal, and therefore OK, for the poor and blind to stand in line? Does disability or poverty or the combination of the two somehow make it natural for you to stand in line? If we really—completely—believed that in God’s eyes we have no more right to anything than those who are poor or have a disability, could we possibly accept all this standing in line by the poor and the blind? Would it not outrage us?

Scandinavian Bus Terminal, Dar-es-Salaam, March 6, 2007

Sometimes we get on a bus or train or plane with a small rolling suitcase and cardboard box labeled Pampers Diapers or Canola Cooking Oil. This means that we had some bulky item (that Discovery toy for Johnny or giant vase from Aunt Marge) that just didn’t fit in a suitcase. We went to Walmart at midnight and got a cardboard box for packing. Here, if someone gets on a bus with a chic black handbag, a wheeling Samsonite and a box labeled Korie Cooking Oil, that box most likely contains just that: 24 bottles of oil. I admire the style—the slim, elegant young lady with her hair and heels and graces just so, slipping off the bus with a sack of rice and a bulky black plastic bag of carrots, the bright orange roots poking out through the thin plastic. It provides a contrast, somehow, to the panting, pink European, glistening with sweat in faded, crumpled cotton, lumbering under the weight of a backpack containing simply one person’s clothes and toiletries.