Sunday, July 5, 2015

Our Common World



The depth and resonance of the Pope’s encyclical reminded me of a conversation I had with Regina, chair-woman of the Mapusha Weavers, about the way things were in her community during the Apartheid years. She said it was better in some ways because they had enough rain back then. They didn’t have money but they didn’t need money, they could feed themselves from the land. She wondered why, now, it is rare to have a rainy season with enough rain to bring their corn to harvest. 
What I remember most is the confused look in her eyes at the conclusion of my long winded explanation about carbon dioxide and rich countries eating oil.  I most certainly throw my hat in with the 97% of scientists who say global warming is real and our actions play a significant role in the process but I was speaking with a woman who walks everywhere she goes and prefers to cook over an open fire. Regina is a thinker, she likes to ponder things, consider them from various angles but what I was saying just didn’t make sense.   Our conversation impacted me more for it became a vivid, in-my -face view of our global connection, our common world. As Pope Francis points out, the actions of the rich countries do impact the lives of the poor. Regina can no longer feed her family from her gardens. 

Most of the women of Mapusha are devout Catholic and I know they have  heard about the Pope’s encyclical. I wonder if Regina remembers our talk back in January? My guess is she will focus on the way her Pope emphasized our moral obligation to be better stewards of the earth. She will increase her efforts in whatever way she can. I am the one who will remember the shriveled corn on the browned stalks in Regina’s garden and cringe as I drive my car to the grocery store.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

The Power of Hope





I am both a great fan of hope and a dyed-in-the-wool idealist so you can imagine how I lit up when I read Nickolas Kristof’s column, “The Power of Hope, It Works.” His columns often assuage my thirst for either truly good news or a compassionate response to truly bad news but this column rested on a large-scale experiment which showed, with rigorous evidence what works to life people out of the most extreme poverty. “One of the lessons maybe so simple and human: the power of hope.” 

Reading this column, I imagined a veritable army of iridescent hope bubbles moving  into the monochrome density of a poverty stricken status quo. They moved relentlessly here, there and all about enlightening, enlivening. 

I deeply understand both the need for hope and its power after working with the rural community of Rooiboklaagte in South Africa where the unemployment rate for women is over 70% and the HIV infection rate over 30%. 

I watched carefully over the years but again, you see, I  have to be very careful for my idealistic tendencies can tend to glom on to even an illusory positive. Yet, I can still picture the way a light came on in very sick Anna’s eyes when she heard that many people from America were praying for her to get better. And I can still see the way Eulender, a teenager brimming with ambitions to become a doctor after having watched her auntie dye an inglorious death, began to glow when she heard Americans were going to pitch in to give her the chance to succeed at a top notch private school. Elena was simple, the cause of her sparkle was a new backpack which she could proudly  carry to her second grade classroom.

 Yes, these were  gifts from afar but what caught my attention was the way these generosities opened a door and the door became a pathway and the pathway became a river. Anna went out into the community as soon as she had the strength to walk again and talked to those who were both sick and hidden as she had been.  Her aim was to inspire them to go to the doctor, to know HIV was not a death sentence, to see you could hold your head high despite the HIV sickness.  She became an instrument of hope. Eulender, too, became one of those relentlessly light filled bubbles in her community as she worked each night till two in the morning to learn Afrikaans and English, to read her assignments and prepare for her tests. She is in college now and when she comes back to the village children mob her for tales and stories, inspiration and hope. In this world which I have watched so closely for twelve years, hope birthed more hope, the bubbles multiplied.  

I freely admit my need to hold high the torch of hope but this time, thankfully, I am backed by Kristof and The New York Times and data driven truth.
Enjoy!