A snippet of tea conversation

We sat having tea and cassava during the morning break at school. One of the teachers went to the US, to New York, over the summer, for her son’s wedding. It was her first time abroad.

Apparently, they are like animals over there, like cattle. You wouldn’t know it from meeting Americans here. Here they can talk so loudly, you think they really like talking. But over there, they pass each other on the street without saying anything at all. No greetings, nothing. In fact, if they are standing right next to each other, waiting for a bus, they do not greet each other. One woman even scolded her child for talking to someone, yelling at her that if she doesn’t know that person she has no business going over and talking like that. Cows do that, just moving past each other, bumping into each other, but just moving on.

The teacher made gestures with her hands, like cattle, moving, and the other teachers shook their heads and laughed a little. It sounded just too outrageous to be true, but then again, when it comes to white people, we all know nothing is beyond belief.

The poor, those in need, and the truly needy.

I have never met a poor person who has trouble defining poverty. This seems to be a problem exclusively burdening the wealthy. Perhaps it is because God’s heart beats for the poor that even He, who is generally more knowledgeable and educated than the rest of us, feels no need to define ‘the needy’. This is, frankly, a little irritating. It’s hard to read much of the Bible without coming across the simple command—“give to the poor.” Sure, there is some complexity to it—we are apparently to give freely, and cheerfully, and not from pressure imposed by some fundraiser or church leader; yet at the same time our giving is an act of obedience, not something optional; and yet again it is a way to show our love, to prove that this love of ours is real; and again it seems to be a primary purpose of earning a living (“if you’re a thief, stop stealing and work, so you can earn a living and give to others in need”). All this complexity on the side of why and how we give, and not a single mention of how we should categorize the poor. Surely they must be categorized. You see, we see millions of poor people. The wealthier we are, the more there seems to be of them. There must be a way to sift out the ‘truly needy’ (you know, as opposed to the what? the ‘fake’ needy?). It is at this point, I think, that the Bible just plain fails us, and so we obviously need to look elsewhere for guidance, for something a little more intellectual and realistic. Poverty eradication, for example. There’s a pretty term, all medical sounding and everything. We just about eradicated polio, so why not poverty? We use words, lots of words, bookfuls of words. We even—I kid you not—print up T-shirts with “Say no to poverty.” It would be funny, except it’s true—real white cotton T-shirt with UN-blue writing. I can just see Jesus with it, a gnarled old man with a leper’s stump reaching out, begging, and Him, all wise and sophisticated, turning, smiling, and pointing to the slogan on his chest, reading for the poor illiterate non-self-reliant, not-yet-empowered poor person, “Say no to poverty”. I’m thinking all the poor people in the world should get together and throw a Nike slogan back at us: “Just do it.”

Now that I can see Jesus with, with his dusty feet and matted hair and faded shirt from the used-clothes marked, waving aside all the yahdeeyah of our words, and reminding us to maybe be fooled, maybe be taken advantage of, maybe never ever receive thanks or feel effective or see results, but still, just shut up and do it.