Uncomfortable Poverty

Living in Haiti for almost three years seems like an eternity, but it is not very long when I remember that some people have lived here their whole lives. I am still just an ignorant American girl who has chosen to live internationally, while many Haitians were born into their circumstances, and many don't have the choice to live somewhere else.

The very fact that I have chosen to live in a poor country means that I am privileged, and I can really never change that, aside from the option to take vows of poverty.

I still don’t know how to process all the things that I’m feeling. I think because I understand more of the culture and language now, there’s a bigger burden on me for all the people that I talk to and the conversations that I get to have.

I’ve come to the realization that when someone asks for food, their hunger is not a minority, but a majority of the situation in our neighborhood. When someone can’t send their kids to school, it’s the same situation. When a mom doesn’t know where the father is for her third, fourth, and fifth child while she’s currently having her seventh. A woman and a man have been living together for thirty years but never got married. He had another woman for a while also. It’s their “normal”.

My normal is always different, and will always be different. Even if I were to live in a country like Haiti for my whole life, I have still come from an affluent country where I didn’t go hungry growing up. And while we didn’t go to church, it wasn’t because we didn’t have the clothes or shoes to do so. Even though I live in Haiti now, I have always at least had the option to eat three meals a day. I’ve already completed high school and college without really having to worry about where the money would come from (except for that scary day when my mom told me she wouldn’t help me pay for college IF.. but thankfully she was merciful). And I have the option to leave at any moment, and return to a life in place where I am not surrounded by the uncomfortableness that happens in me when I am confronted by what another person doesn’t have.

I don’t know still how to reconcile my wealth with another person’s hunger . . . and I don’t even get a paycheck. But I have food, clothes, shoes, and a place to sleep at night where the roof doesn’t leak into my bed when it rains. So I am blessed.

I keep losing myself and crying when I think about all the people who I can’t help. I think about their stories and how real they are. I think about how easy it is to forget that poverty exists, especially when you don’t have a name or a face to put to it.

Silence is hard because it makes me face all of my uncomfortableness with how I live now that I know. I have a name and a face. I have several names and faces. So the way that I live has to reflect the names and faces that I know. The way that I live has to reflect the situation of my brothers and sisters who don’t have their basic needs.

If Christianity is about loving your neighbor as you love yourself . . . isn’t my neighbor the mother who can’t feed her children or send them to school? Isn’t my neighbor the young girl who can’t get medical care? What can I really have or own then, when my neighbors often have nothing?

How can I give anything less than my life?

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