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.
