Category: Poverty

When you live in one of the world’s poorest countries, you often feel like everyone needs your money. And well, most of them probably do.

I used to be wracked with guilt. Every time I ate meat, went out to dinner, or put gas in my car, I would mentally calculate how it compared to the average Tanzanian’s weekly wage. Spending money on anything they didn’t have–whether it be toilet paper or a refrigerator–made me feel guilty.

And we do give. We always look for ministries to support and worthy recipients of donations. But over time, I learned a really important lesson: How I spend can be just as important as how I give.

The money I spend (which originates from many of you) is daily being infused into the Tanzanian economy. I can choose where it goes. Who am I going to invest in today? It’s actually a pretty fun way to spend money.

When our washing machine breaks, and I hire a technician, I am supporting his family. When I buy pineapples on the side of the road, I’m helping that vendor send his kids to school. When my language helper comes to my house, I’m helping her save money to open a shop in her neighborhood.

Every day, every time I hand over cash, I am helping to build people’s lives. Often, that means I make conscious choices about how I spend it. For example:

I try to buy groceries from small shops instead of always shopping at the large stores.
As much as possible, I buy food that was produced in Tanzania or Kenya.
I hire a gal to come to the house and braid the girls’ hair instead of doing it myself.
I buy gifts for friends from local artisans instead of Amazon.com.
I pay for the shoe repair guy to fix up my son’s shoes instead of purchasing new ones.
When I eat out, I don’t always go to the nicest places, and I try to tip well.
I hire a seamstress to sew my daughter a dress instead of buying a new one online.

Everything I need is an opportunity to give someone a job.

Need to buy a knife? Have it sharpened? Here’s your guy! And I wouldn’t mess with him….

We also have two full-time workers, even though we don’t really need full-time help. By paying them good wages, we also support our house worker’s kids and our gardener’s grandmother. Two families are sustained, and as a result, we have more time for ministry.

I’ve wondered how I would apply this way of thinking if I ever moved back to the States. Even there, could I help the people around me by how I spend money? Of course.

Could I seek out the plumber who is just getting started? The gardener who just moved to America? The hair stylist who doesn’t speak much English? Could I use Etsy to buy gifts? Could I hire someone to mow my lawn even though I am capable of doing it myself? Or walk my dogs or be my nanny? Could I eat at the local diner instead of the big chain restaurant, and leave a big tip?

The difference is that in Tanzania, I am surrounded by these kinds of opportunities, and in America, I might have to seek them out. It might mean frequenting businesses that could be considered on “the wrong side” of town. It could mean dealing with the inconvenience of working with someone who is not fluent in English. It could mean paying more for stuff that would be cheaper at Walmart. It might require the sacrifice of time or comfort. But shouldn’t that be okay?

But the point is that it’s possible to help poor and disadvantaged people beyond just donating gifts to a charity at Christmas, volunteering at a homeless shelter, or even buying free trade coffee at Starbucks. We can “distribute our wealth” simply by how and where we choose to spend our money.

Those of us who are rich should be burdened for others who could use our money. By all means, let’s be generous. But let’s also consider those who could really use our business. Sometimes, that can help even more.

Wailing

By Amy Medina

On October 21, 2015

In Life in Tanzania, Poverty

Last week, the wailing crept through our open windows. I instantly recognized the sound: Someone nearby had died.

The funeral proceedings, which last for a few days, were set up right outside the wall around our yard. A hundred people sat on mats and plastic chairs. Sometimes they sang. Sometimes they wailed. Sometimes they just chatted quietly.

Eventually, I got the story. A young woman had died. She was only 32 years old, was married, and had four children. She lived a bit down the street from our house, but her father and sister live next door to us. We didn’t know her, but her children had played in our yard with our kids.

She died suddenly, of a strange illness that came on very quickly. They described it to me as “pressure” in her chest. Her heart? I asked. Yes, they said. I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe a heart attack? But at age 32? She had been healthy, they said. They just shook their heads sadly and shrugged their shoulders.

It’s a story I’ve heard over and over again. The lunch cook at HOPAC died suddenly this past July. She had only been married two weeks. A student from our training program lost two baby boys when each was only 9 months old. A friend lost twin babies. Another friend lost two sisters within two years. And on. And on. All from strange, unexplained illnesses.

In Swahili, when someone gets better from an illness, you use the expression Amepona. Since it was always used with illness, I assumed it meant He has recovered. For example, if your friend was down with a bad cold and misses a couple of days of work, when he comes back, you might ask him how he is doing. Nimepona, he will respond. I am better.

One day, Lucy (my language tutor) and I were working on the story of Noah’s Ark. When we got to the part about Noah and his family living through the flood, Lucy said to me, Walipona.

Walipona! I repeated in surprise. But Noah and his family were not sick! So I got out my dictionary and looked up kupona.

The literal translation is not to recover. The literal translation is to survive.

In English when someone is sick, we would only say He survived if we were talking about a victim of cancer or a heart attack. But when referring to recovery from a common cold, a headache, or the stomach flu, we say, He recovered or He got better.

So what I discovered is that in Swahili, when you recover from any illness, the response is literally translated as I survived.

After living here all these years, after hearing of person after person dropping dead for unknown reasons, listening to the stories of almost every mother losing a child, I am beginning to understand.

Of course, I don’t really understand, because I have access to the best health care in Tanzania, and if that doesn’t suffice, I have access to better health care anywhere in the world. I really know nothing of the fear and apprehension of imminent illness and death.

The United States has 2.3 doctors for every 1000 people.

Tanzania has .02 doctors for every 1000 people, one of the lowest ratios in the world.

Once again, I am reminded of how privileged I really am. Once again, I ask what else God expects of me for blessing me so much.

Today, thank God if you live in a country where recovery is expected and survival is the norm. And pray for four young children–Vale, Tony, Aaron, and Jackie, who have just lost their mother and may never know why.

Beyond Christmas Shoeboxes: Building a Heart of Compassion in Our Children…and Ourselves

By Amy Medina

On January 14, 2014

In Operation Christmas Child, Poverty

The most important starting place is to understand the difference between

Compassion

and

Pity.

Pity is me up here and you down there. Pity is I’m rich and You’re poor.

Pity is condescending. Pity is feeling sorry for you.

Pity makes guilt the motivator.

Compassion is coming alongside. Compassion is We both have needs; how can we help each other?

Compassion is trying to understand. How would I want to be treated if I were in this situation?

Compassion makes love the motivator.

So here are some ideas to help develop compassion in our children. This list is not exhaustive. Feel free to add your own ideas.

1. For one school season, buy all your child’s clothes at thrift stores or garage sales. Buying used clothing is the only reality for the majority of the world’s population. Experience this reality with your child. Talk about what it feels like. Then allow your child to take the money you saved and pick out a donation from a gift catalog such as Harvest of Hope. (which is a great way to give because it helps a poor family develop sustainable income). That’s one of my favorite gift catalogs, but there are many good ones out there.

2. Eat exclusively beans, rice, and vegetables every night for a week. Again–a reality for much of the world. Take the money you save and pick out a donation.

3. Travel on your local bus with your kids every once in a while. Observe. Talk with them about what life would feel like without a car.

4. Read and pray through this fantastic book with your kids. Let’s hope the publishers put out a newer version soon! (This is more about missions than poverty, but there is a lot of crossover.)

5. Go to a low-income area in your city. Shop where they shop and/or eat where they eat. Grocery shop there or have lunch. You’ll get a new perspective, some new dinner ideas, and probably learn a couple things about different cultures.

6. Go to your church’s or city’s local food pantry. Take home a couple bags of food (you can always replace them later). Eat that food for a week.

Note: If you are like me, this idea makes you incredibly uncomfortable. You are probably thinking: I could never do that. What if someone I knew saw me? What if anyone saw me? How embarrassing! How humiliating for someone to think I was poor! And anyway, who wants to eat out of cans and boxes all week?

Exactly. What makes us think that a “poor” person feels any differently? Imagine what it would do to your soul if eating from a food pantry was your only option, on a regular basis.

Meditate on those thoughts for a while.

Now….last but not least….my craziest idea…not just for kids, but for whole families:

7. Consider moving into a low-income neighborhood. I wonder, why is this so radical? It’s definitely a calling, and it won’t be realistic for most families. I understand that, but can we at least pray about it? Many middle-class churches have low-income neighborhoods literally next door. How amazing would it be if a team of church members deliberately moved in–as neighbors, as equals, as friends? To come alongside, to partner together, to share lives, to problem-solve together? Now, that would be a way to teach our kids compassion.

With most of these ideas, you could say, But Amy, these activities are not actually going to help the poor.

No, they are not. But at least they won’t hurt the poor, which is what can happen sometimes with our well-meaning attempts to teach our children compassion. And when we have built up compassion and true understanding for the poor in our children, and in ourselves, that’s when we are ready to really start making a difference.

Faces

By Amy Medina

On December 16, 2012

In Poverty

Whenever you drive into downtown Dar and stop at a major intersection, little boys run up to your car. They are about 10 or 12 years old, and hold a jug full of soapy water and a piece of a broken windshield wiper. As soon as your car stops, they splash water on your windshield, “wash” the window in about 10 seconds, and then hold out their hands to be paid.

I used to get annoyed at these boys. I really didn’t need my window washed two or three times in a half hour (once at each intersection), and I didn’t like that they assumed I even wanted my window washed. I also didn’t like that I am always targeted because I am white.

These boys are most likely all street boys. Runaways from abusive homes, orphans, or cast out for one reason or another, and now literally living on the street. Which is the life that very likely my Josiah could have been living, had circumstances turned out differently for him. And so, a couple of years ago, when one of these boys tried to wash my windshield, all of a sudden, I saw Josiah’s face there instead.

And I started to cry. And instead of shrugging him away, I paid him. Now I do every time.

Like every other American (and much of the world), I have been thinking and praying and mourning over the terrible tragedy of 20 lost little lives in Connecticut. But what has struck me about the situation and how it is being presented is that this tragedy is somehow unusual for our world.

Did you know that in the past couple of weeks, 700,000 refugees have fled Congo? That they are fleeing a militia that has been bombing and burning down their villages, raping and shooting indiscriminately? Ironically, they are fleeing into Rwanda, country where only 10 years ago, the majority tribe massacred one million of their fellow countrymen/women/children, neighbor against neighbor, and usually with machetes?

Did you know that often in some African countries, children suffer a fate far worse than being gunned down by a crazy person; instead they are handed a gun, forced to murder their own parents, and then conscripted into an army to kill their own neighbors and friends?

The United States will corporately mourn those 20 little lives lost on Friday, and rightly so. But I can’t help but ask, why are those little lives so much more valuable than the ones over here? Why do people care so much about this tragedy, and barely cast a glance at Congo? Why is anyone surprised that such an event would occur, when it has been happening in the rest of the world since Cain and Abel?

And I’m guessing it’s because that people see their own children, or themselves, in the faces of those children from Connecticut. They can imagine what it would be like to send their own little ones off to school, only to never see them again. But they can’t imagine a crazed, drug-induced militia entering their neighborhood, raping, burning, and shooting their small children, ripping open their pregnant women before handing their 10-year-old a gun and telling him to shoot his mother or die himself.

The American children have names and faces. The African children don’t.

Adopting three Tanzanian children has broken my heart for other African children in ways that I never imagined, even after growing up here. I see children here suffering and I see my children’s faces instead. I think about my children starving, alone, frightened, separated from their families by tragedy, fighting in wars. Or even just living on the street, trying to make enough money for a meal by washing car windows.

So yes, mourn this tragedy, America. See your children’s faces in the newscasts and hug your own children tighter today. But don’t forget the millions of children and families who endure even worse things every day. Adopt a child. Sponsor a child. Send money to churches in Rwanda who are helping the Congolese.

And remember that we’re not celebrating Christmas because of the warm fuzzies and fun and sugar plums. We celebrate Christmas because our world is desperately, horrifically, tragically broken and our only hope is in Jesus Christ.

A thrill of hope; a weary world rejoices. For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!

Change How You Think About the Poor!

By Amy Medina

On January 9, 2011

In Book Recommendations, Poverty

This is really, really important. Please listen:

“[Consider the story of] Creekside Community Church, a predominantly Caucasian congregation made up of young urban professionals in the downtown area of an American city. Being in the Christmas spirit, Creekside Community Church decided to reach out to the African-American residents of a nearby housing project…

But what could they do to help? Believing that poverty is primarily a lack of material resources, the members of Creekside Community Church decided to address this poverty by buying Christmas presents for the children in the housing projects. Church members went door to door, singing Christmas carols and delivering wrapped toys to the children in each apartment….The members of Creekside were moved by the big smiles on the children’s faces and were encouraged by the warm reception of the mothers…

After several years, the pastor noticed….enthusiasm was waning… Finally one member spoke up, “Pastor, we are tired of trying to help these people out…their situation never improves. Have you ever noticed that there are no men in the apartments when we deliver the toys? The residents are all unwed mothers who just keep having babies in order to collect bigger and bigger welfare checks. They don’t deserve our help.”

In reality, there was a different reason that there were few men in the apartments when the toys were delivered….When the fathers heard the Christmas carols and saw the presents for their kids…they were embarrassed and ran out of the back doors of their apartments….In trying to alleviate material poverty through the giving of these presents, Creekside Community Church increased these fathers’ poverty of being. Ironically, this likely made the fathers even less able to apply for a job, thereby exacerbating the very material poverty that Creekside was trying to solve! (When Helping Hurts)

If you donate money to charities, you need to readthis book.

If you have been on a short-term missions trip, you need to read this book.

If you work at Farm Drive with Hillside or the Spanish Ministry with FCC, you need to read this book.

If you have a passion for helping the poor, you must read this book.

This is an extremely important book. I can’t emphasize that enough!

I can’t tell you how much this book excites me. It has empowered me. It has given me answers where I thought there weren’t any.

I have written about poverty before. It is a subject near and dear to my heart. I grew up in Africa. I spent nine years volunteering with Friends at Farm Drive and Faithblast Kids’ Club in Santa Clarita. I spent two summers working at Camp May-Mac, for inner-city kids. Now I live again in Africa, and I am literally surrounded by poverty, right on the other side of my fence. I have struggled and wrestled and felt guilty when I didn’t give and felt guilty when I did give because I didn’t want to create dependence. And I never really knew how really to help.

Then I read this book over the Christmas break. And I am in awe.

The authors asked poor people and not-poor people to define poverty. Listen to this:

“Poor people typically talk in terms of shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, fear, hopelessness, depression, social isolation, and voicelessness. North American audiences tend to emphasize a lack of material things such as food, money, clean water, medicine, housing, etc….This mismatch between many outsiders’ perceptions of poverty and the perceptions of poor people themselves can have devastating consequences for poverty-alleviation efforts.”

Do you get it? Do you see what they are saying? When we simply give material things to poor people, it actually makes things worse! Why? Because material things are not the answer to their problems (except in emergency situations)! As illustrated in the story above, material things don’t give poor people confidence, security, hope, community, and a voice…which is actually what they need! All it does is perpetuate their idea that they can’t do things themselves, they have to rely on rich white people to do it for them.

I’ve only cracked the surface of the richness of this book in this post. It is powerful; it is life-transforming; it needs to be read by every American Christian. It takes a biblical worldview and lays it over the problem of poverty, helping us to see it in a completely different light. It challenges us to think entirely differently about how we go about helping people. It’s not saying we shouldn’t give; it just tells us the right way to give.

“One of the very biggest problems in many poverty-alleviation efforts is that their design and implementation exacerbates the poverty of being of the economically rich–their god-complexes–and the poverty of being of the economically poor–their feelings of inferiority and shame.”

Please read this book. Then let me know how it changed your life too.

Category: Poverty

How You Spend Can Be Just As Important As How You Give

Wailing

Beyond Christmas Shoeboxes: Building a Heart of Compassion in Our Children…and Ourselves

Faces

Change How You Think About the Poor!