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World Vision Trip

Sri Lanka: Re-Entry

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Maybe it’s just the jet lag and sleep deprivation but whenever I have a quiet moment I find myself trying find answers to my own internal debate over what this trip to Sri Lanka means to me. After all, It’s not my first time seeing poverty but it’s the first time I’ve seen it as an adult with a career and children. It’s the first time that the eyes of my understanding have been fully opened to some realities of poverty that I would rather not have to think about such as exploitation, child endangerment, and perpetual hunger. When I was a child on the “mission field” I only understood as a child. Much of that innocence has now been lost.

It not easy being confronted with uncomfortable truths about poverty.  At some points I’ve almost convinced myself that the best course would be to think about happier things than hungry kids or hopeless parents. “Enough!” I tell myself, “You have your own problems to deal with.” Then having determined to harden my heart and rid my mind of such upsetting things, I immediately proceeded to  think about the heartbreak and undiscovered joy found in Sri Lanka that much more.

I pour my daughter her cereal and wonder if a boy I met went hungry this morning (as he often does) so that his little sister has enough to eat. I turn on my kitchen sink and marvel at running water clean enough to drink right from the tap and think of a family that has to buy its drinking water by the jug. I take out the garbage and think of how much food I throw away in a year simply because it’s more convenient than trying to save it and wonder how many children I could feed on the leftovers. I haven’t even been back to a grocery store yet. I’m not sure I’m ready to be reminded of our American eating habits just now.

It’s not that I fault anybody for living the Western-style life that we enjoy. I work hard for the few things I have. But now I know the names and faces of people who work much harder and have much less to show for it. That disparity may not be my fault but what I have seen cannot be unseen and I am now responsible for how I respond to what I know. Can I somehow improve the life of a child, a family, or a village? That question now perpetually follows my soul.

Perhaps these thoughts will end and I can put it completely out of my mind someday. I’ll care only a little. I’ll love only slightly. I’ll rebuild the walls around my heart and fiercely guard them against every uncomfortable thought and feeling. But trading away my compassion in hopes of comfort would seem to be poor bargain. What does it profit if I keep my heart safe but lose my humanity in the process?

I’m not sure exactly what my future holds now but I’m sure that my heart is now set on a different course that I’m sure my feet will soon follow. I hope that I’ve helped in some small way to let you all see what I’ve seen this week. And I hope your heart has been opened as mine has. If you haven’t yet checked out the child sponsorship program I’d ask you to set your fears aside and let your heart be open.

You cannot unsee the crying needs. I can’t imagine wanting to.

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World Vision Trip

Sri Lanka: A Tale of Two Fathers

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I worry. In fact I worry almost all the time. Of course I don’t call it “worry” that because it sound weak and needy so I call it “concern” or “caution” or “just thinking ahead” but the truth is that over the last few years I’ve let a lot of worry consume my soul. I worry about my job and the uncertainty of my future with pay cuts and layoffs as an ever-present threat in my industry. I worry about my children and how to raise them into healthy and happy and educated adults. I worry about where we will live, how we’ll pay our bills, and a thousand other unknowns that the future hold.

Today I traveled to the brand new work being founded in the village of Mundalkaduwa and I met another man who worries about most of the same things I do. Amila is only four years older than I am and like me he has a wife and two children. He works when he can find work but sometimes there isn’t any to find. He and his wife plan and fret over how to come up with enough money for their children’s education. He wonders what his future holds and whether his life will ever improve.

There is one major difference between Amila and myself. While I make about the median income for an American household, he worries about these things on an average wage of less than five dollars a day when he’s lucky enough to find work at all. To put that in some perspective, that means that it takes him almost six weeks to make as much money as I make on a normal day. Or put another way, I look to him like what a person who makes over two millions US dollars a year looks like to me. The disparity is staggering

Someone asks him through our interpreter what kind of work he does. He says he climbs the palm trees to pick coconuts. A glance as his feet shows the callouses and shaping of long hours spent clinging to the tops of swaying trees as they tower above the ground. We tell him he must be very strong to do this work and he smiles but when we ask him what other work he does when there are no coconuts he raises his hands wide. “Anything” the interpreter tells us. “He’ll do anything because he needs to feed his family.”

In the world of this kind of subsistence living there are no easy answers or quick fixes because Amila’s story can be repeated throughout this entire village and likely through surrounding villages as well. The issue is food security. Because the biggest worry of all whether or not you’ll have enough food to eat or if your family will starve. When your main focus is just getting enough rice to make it through a day there is no money to get an education or start a business or improve your life in any visible way. Until the food and clean water issues are settled, there is nothing else that matters more.

So how does child sponsorship help an family like this one? Here’s how it works:

When you give money to a sponsored child in the area we visited yesterday, those dollars are funneled into projects within the community that are selected by the community itself, and managed by community-based organizations. World Vision provides support, resources, and experience in advising these groups but they do the work themselves. This creates long-term sustainability in these projects since even after World Vision reaches the end of its project and leaves the area, the benefits continue to serve everyone.

So then the question becomes, if the money is going into community projects, then why are we talking about sponsoring individual children. The answer is quite simply that World Vision has found that connecting donors with individual children helps them see the benefits that their dollars are reaping. If you sponsored one of Amila’s children, for example, you’d receive regular updates on their schooling, their health, and what’s going on in their lives. This helps you realize the personal benefits of a broader program in a way that just wouldn’t be possible if you simply wrote a check to World Vision every month.

In the brand new Mundalama Area Development Program there is much work to be done so that parents and older siblings don’t go hungry at night so that the smallest children can eat. So that clean water is a universal expectation and not a luxury paid for with hard earned money. So that every child can go to school and dream that same kinds of great big beautiful dreams that we wish for our own children to dream.

So once again I’ll make my plea. Don’t be afraid to let you heart be open to the opportunities to help children through the child sponsorship program. At this writing I’m sitting here with tears in my own eyes as I think of the needs I have seen over the last few days and the potential to turn such profound sorrow into unimaginable rejoicing. Don’t fear to weep with me. Don’t shrink back from writing yourself into the story of a child’s life. There is such joy just ahead and I want you and I and the people of Sri Lanka to share in it together.

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World Vision Trip

Sri Lanka: In The Neighborhood

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Tonight I knelt on stony ground and watched people walk on fire. The crowd chanted in a religious fervor that approached a fever pitch almost as hot as the coals glowing on the ground and rushed forward to meet the fire walkers with such vigor that I actually feared for my own safety as the crushing weight pressed me back against the barriers where we were standing. All I could think was that my dad was right when warned me that Pentecostals sure do get crazy sometimes. (That last statement is a joke and is not intended to have any basis in reality. I do that sometimes.)

All joking aside, Hindu people present took great pride showing us their devotion and sacrifice giving us seats so close we could feel the heat of the coals on our faces. We’re told that the fire walk is the culmination of a vow to their gods wherein a person promises that if something they want comes to pass that they will return that honor to the gods by literally walking through fire. Earlier in the day we saw a man walk with shoes made of nails and a woman with both cheeks pierces through with a metal rod as a sign of the same type of sacrifice in response to a vow. It made me think how petty our Christian “worship” must seem sometimes when we merely sing about how great our God is but often fail to follow through with any physical sign that we are serious. A few tears and a rockin’ guitar doth not worship make.

It would be all to easy to look the complete differences between that fire walk and the average Western church service and draw the conclusion that what Sri Lanka really needs is to clean us its theology before working on its economics. After all, to those of us who grew up in fundamentalism, the word “mission” means “church planting.” The theory goes that if you send missionaries to a foreign land and convert the heathern there, and get them tithing to a good Bible-believing church that their lives will then automatically improve. God will bless them and give them enough food to eat, better homes to live in, and (most importantly) enough money to support a full-time pastor. But even if the people stay poor, then at least they’ll be rich in spirit and if they should happen to die of hunger or disease then their eternal soul is safe and that’s what really matters. Isn’t it?

For some strange reason, however, the Scripture is full of instructions to take care of the poor – even the poor who haven’t joined your church or professed to love your God. At some point we have to ask ourselves if our charity is merely a calculated means to some religious end. What if we give some of those children who surrounded the fire pit tonight enough to eat, a place to stay, and an education only to realize they never became a Christian as a result of our efforts? In an eternal sense was that money and time a waste? The churches we grew up in would probably say that it was. There’s no point saving the body if we lose the soul. In fact, a little suffering is good for the unsaved person. We want them physically miserable enough to look to us for spiritual answers. A little pain is a great motivator.

If the Christian life is one of neighbor-love then does only helping those who are keen to believe as we do really love at all? When Christ identifies himself as being the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned and states very plainly that charity done to those in need is in fact done to HIM, are we then to believe that he then implicitly added “but only if they’re either believers or likely to get saved shortly after you help them.” But unfortunately we all too often are found sitting in the lawyer’s seat asking “who is my neighbor?” as if we hadn’t already heard the resulting parable and still think that we’ve found a clever way to avoid helping those who are not just like us.

Sri Lanka is a country that is majority Buddhist and Hindu. It’s also a country of great need. The mission here is focused not on conversions but on showing neighbor-love through works of charity and kindness to children of all religions and background. Food, medicine, and clothing is not bait for some gospel trap set to snag the vulnerable. World Vision helps sponsor children because our God is love. And love is not a feeling it is an action verb and it requires action to make itself reality.

Just because our God does not require that we walk on hot coals to show our love and sacrifice does not mean that He does not require outward signs of the love we claim to have for Him. Who is your neighbor? Who is mine? I’d encourage you to search your own heart and then look to the needs around you for the places where you can show that love in a real and physical way.

If you’re not sure where to begin, check out the child sponsorship program and find out about kids who at this moment need a meal more than a sermon, a friend more than a tract, and most of all need to know that somebody in this world care about them enough to be their neighbor.

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World Vision Trip

Sri Lanka: Old and New

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The more things change the more they stay the same. Thursday morning I woke up, took my daughter to school, made lunch, and then got on an airplane that took me on a trip halfway around the world, flying past news-worthy cities with names like Baghdad and Allepo and over the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Thirteen hours of flying landed us in Dubai where midnight found us riding in a taxi with a driver who explained to us that in Dubai the Old Town is the section that contains all the new buildings. Soon we were sitting in the baking desert heat and eating pizza while watching a Vegas-Style fountain show blast out (among other things) the music of Thriller. Then we went to the mall with the Starbucks and Ikea and Subway. It was all strange and exotic, yet so oddly familiar. It never ceases to amaze me what America has as its chief exports to the world.

A few hours more and another airplane and we wearily stumbled through the doors into the tropical sun of Colombo, Sri Lanka to negotiate with beggars who try to manhandle your luggage for you and then charge you for that privilege. As my nostrils were assaulted by the mixed scent of salt air, exhaust fumes, and the faint scent of decay that no tropical city is ever without the first word that popped into my head was “home.” The looks and sounds and smells all have so evocative of the West Indian island where I grew that I immediately understood why Columbus thought he had had managed to reach the East Indies by sailing around the world. Even the insanity of the bus ride out of the city had an odd sense of rightness to it as we tried our best to abide by the Sri Lankan rule that no two cars may follow behind each other at any given time. It’s a different place in a different world but it’s still so much the same.

There are distinctions, of course. The surf of the Indian ocean roars just a few steps from our lodgings but the sand is an unfamiliar shade of brown not white or black like the coral-laden beaches of Grenada. The people here find their roots in Asia not Africa and the stream of liquid syllables that characterize the Sinhalese language are nothing like that Jamaican-style English pronouncements of my adopted homeland. Perhaps the starkest contrast of all to me is that the religion here is majority Buddhist and though I saw a few signs of Catholicism during the bus ride to the hotel there was nary a Protestant church or mission in sight.

For all the little differences, being here has sent me on a sentimental journey through my past as I sit here basking in a tropical sun (that is strangely hotter during the morning than the afternoon because of where it sits below the equator). I’m sure that by now my traveling companions have long since tired of hearing me say the words “well, where I grew up…” as I compare this island nation to one that my heart has been missing for a decade. Perhaps it’s just some trick of memory combined with jet lag that warms my soul for scenes both old and new. But I’ll take it. I’ll love every minute of it. Sri Lanka may not be home but the feeling that it could have been is never far from the edge of my senses. The Dubai cab driver had the right of it. What is new is old for me. And what is old has once again become new.

Tomorrow we’ll be out in the field and I can’t wait to start sharing with you what we see.

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Announcement

And Now For Something Completely Different…

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And now it’s time for THE LOOMING NEWS from yesterday!

I’m very excited today to announce that at the end of August I’m going to be taking SFL on a trip with a group of bloggers, writers, and storytellers who will be putting their talents to work to tell the story of World Visions efforts in Sri Lanka. For five days I’ll be taking a break from our usual snarky content here on SFL to tell the stories of people who are doing good to “the least of these.”

Here are some quick facts from World Vision about the current situation in Sri Lanka

– As of 2009, nearly 6,300 children under the age of 18 have been forcibly recruited to fight in the war.

– After the 2004 tsunami and years of civil conflict, Sri Lanka’s population struggles to recover. Almost a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, and thousands of people are still displaced from their homes by the war.

– According to the World Food Program, about 22 percent of children under 5 are malnourished nationally, but the number doubles in areas affected by the civil conflict.

– The end of the civil war boosted Sri Lanka’s economy, which made major gains in 2009.

The Ella Gap view towards the South Coast, Sri Lanka

Since 1953, World Vision has been helping children and adults around the world both with disaster relief as well as longer-term economic and child sponsorship programs. Their programs stand in stark contrast to the strict emphasis on “evangelism only” that many of us grew up around choosing instead to minister with life, deed, word and sign.

I’d encourage you to check out the World Vision sponsorship program for children in Sri Lanka and around the world. I can’t wait to take go on this journey and explore these stories with all of you.