(e)mergent Voyageurs

This past week, Ellen, a member of our YWAM community returned to Winnipeg from a month long trip to Uganda. In addition to her desire to spend some time serving there, she went as a representative for our ministry to help set up contacts for our Discipleship Training School (DTS) outreach there. She was meant to travel with another staff member, but due to passport and visa challenges, she ended up going alone. She came back with some powerful and challenging stories.

I want to encourage you all to spend some time visiting her blog, where she has several posts written during and about her travels in that troubled, but beautiful country. You can scan through them at her blog, Fidgety Feet. However, I want to highlight a few posts. First, I want to feature her post entitled “Saddest Part is What Stops Being Sad After a While”. Here is an excerpt:

Everyone has a story.
Eventually the poor, the widows, the hungry aren’t enough to wrench your heart.
You need to loose limbs.
You need to have stepped on a land mine.
You need to be an orphan and suffering from AIDs, because there are so many orphans how will you stand out? Even in giving misquito nets to the orphans, they selected the most vunerable, needy orphans.
Living in an IDP [Internally Displaced People] camp isn’t enough, you need a sob story along with it.

This is risk of a faith that engages justice issue on a regular basis. You begin to grow callous to the suffering of humanity, and while we function at times with a necessary “triage” approach to meeting needs, we can too quickly dismiss “moderate” suffering in favour of “real” suffering. This is real challenge, both in our engagement with global issues, as well as those within our own communities, families and lives.

In another post entitled “What More, What Next, What is Left After This?”, Ellen shares:

The saddest statistic I heard the entire time I was in Gulu was 4. I heard numbers of orphans and widows reaching thousands. I heard amounts of displaced persons in percentagest of a million. I heard of the number of abducted children, of the years they spent in the rebel army. A decade in an IDP camp. The number of kilometeres walked.
What rips at my heart is 4.

Watching clothing distribution at an IDP camp with the ministry I was helping in Gulu I wondered what help we were by being there. We were just sitting around, just watching while others worked and distributed the donated clothing.
Why did these white people need to be here, making it seem like we were ‘do-gooders’, we hadn’t even donated these clothes.

Then a member of our group told me some information; he said a resident of the camp had told him they love it when visitors come to the camps during distribution time because they recieve 4 times as much.
Because unsupervised, the distributers often only give 1/4 of what they should be. Corruption within the NGO’s and ministries is a problem in the north. What hope is left if even the ministries and charities are taking advantage of these vunerable, oppressed people?

Here is a powerful and very real challenge- in the face of the global justice issues we seek to engage, we cannot blindly give money. Something more is needed, something that will personally invest our physical presence into the lives of the people we seek to love and serve. Ellen continues by affirming all the good that is happening, not wanting to paint a bleak picture or give anyone an excuse not to give. However, her honest requires us to look deeper at how we give, serve and relate to the people of the world, across the street and around the world.

Thanks Ellen.

After the early buzz surrounding the Join (RED) Campaign (which I introduced here), my wife & I went to GAP at the mall to check things out.  While browsing, a woman was chatting with her husband and I overheard her say:

“Gee, if I want to give money to fight AIDS in Africa, I’ll send it directly.  I don’t need to buy these expensive clothes!”

I was impressed by this comment, as she sincerely wanted to give to this great cause.  She didn’t need anything in return.  I thought to myself, Good for her!  Since then, I have heard several other people discuss this interesting issue.  Why must we get something in return to inspire our generosity?  In response to this, some have come up with ways for people to give the money more directly and selflessly.  This is from Mike Todd at Waving Of Drowning:

Here’s the choice: You can lay out $200, get a new iPod, and contribute $10 to a good cause. Or, you can just contribute the $10. We believe we can get 1000 people to donate $10 each. We’d like $10 from everyone in the developed world, but we’ll settle for you, and everyone you know. And when we’re done, we’ll pass the money–all of it–along to the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

First, we need your $10. Just as importantly, we then need you to reach out to all your contacts. Post a link on your blog, send out an email to your friends, hang a banner from your window… whatever it takes. We’ll keep you posted on how we’re doing.

Together, we can do this. Help prove us right. Thank you.

I think this is a great idea which I want to endorse.  Check it out, get involved.

That being said, I have also heard a trend around this turn in the conversation to overly criticize the Join RED Campaign, as well as the lack of enthusiasm surrounding this (Red)emption idea.  Let me try to sum up my feelings:

First, many people buying the products are doing so as gifts.  This means that they are not simply giving out of a desire to get something in return, but to creatively give a gift they would have purchase elsewhere, alowing that purchase to be a gift to others too.  Further, the products themselves have already served to create increasing awareness about the realities of AIDS and poverty in Africa.  As far as I am concerned, this is suversive branding at its best.

Second, the language of guilt and disappointment used by some seem to suggest that people (in some cases especially Christians) are selfishly motivated, giving only when something is received in return.  On one hand, this is somewhat true- but is this really a surprising revelation?  This campaign was created to intentionally subvert this tendency.  Is it perfect?  No, but it seeks to do everything and use any means to raise awareness and funds.  On the other hand, I can think of no time in human history where the level of generosity has reached the proportions that exsist today.  And while there needs to be more generosity (including that which extends beyond simple finances, but I am getting ahead of myself), Christians are often among the first and most generous to give.  In fact, some stats suggest that Christians do not give, but in truth, most of these studies are about giving to the church itself.  (I will be honest: My wife & I won’t be giving to the (Red)emption idea- NOT because we don’t believe in it, but because we have a strong, existing commitment to giving in other ways, as do MANY other people).

Third, while we seek to challenge people to deeper and truer expressions of generosity (which I believe Mike is doing), we do not serve ultimate purpose by undermining and criticizing the “good” in our advocacy for the “ideal”.  In other words, why can’t we call people to generosity without attacking less ideal methods that are still having a positive impact?  This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evaluate and critique methods, but we need to be as generous of spirit and grace as we expect of peoples finances.  In fact, if we are going to look at generosity for the purpose of fighting poverty and disease worldwide, I think we need to go far beyond financial support.  Just as buying a (RED) shirt might be wrongfully motivated by selfishness, so too can giving money be buying out our deeper responsibility to see, touch, know and engage the people behind the issues.  Both can keep us as Christians- as people- at a distance from the connectedness of all humanity.

In the end, I think we need to keep the table open for all kinds of people and ideas to engage these criticals realities, both locally and globally.