I spent a lot of time this past month making bricks. I spent some time painting, some time working corn, some time in church and some time with local small groups. I spent a little bit of time at the daycare, playing with the adorable kids from the dump.
I spent a very small time at the dump.
The giant main city dump of Trujillo is not a place I WANTED to visit. It smells. It is covered in the refuse of a gigantic city – diapers, hypodermic needles, rotten fruit, dead animals. It is a long and unpleasant ride away from where we were staying. It is full of people. People live in or near the dump, making a living picking through Trujillo’s trash. They are the people nobody wants, picking through the things nobody wants, hoping to find some plastic to recycle, or some discarded food to feed their animals. Maybe if they’re really lucky they’ll find some discarded piece of electronics that will bring in enough money to buy food for their family for the day. If they work two shifts of 6 hours each, for seven days a week, they can make roughly 100 Soles a week. Peruvian Nuevo Soles are not worth as much as U.S. Dollars – these people are lucky to make more than $50 weekly. They are barely scraping by on the food from their animals and their meager income. Their children cannot afford school, they cannot afford consistent medical care, many of them don’t even have a real home.
I have seen the faces of poverty all my life. I have seen children with tears in their eyes staring up from the trash they live in. I have seen old men and women staring bleakly at the camera with all hope gone from their eyes. I have been told all my life how terrible poverty is. I have been told all my life how much we in the U.S. have, and how much we need to give to those who have less. I have been told that the face of poverty is the face of hopelessness.
I need to revise my definition of poverty.
I believe it is true that there are people in much worse condition than the people I met at the Trujillo city dump. I know there are millions of people who would be eager to get a chance to live the same way these people live. I am beginning to wonder what went wrong when I heard the plea from mission organizations to help the impoverished.
I spent two hours one afternoon at the dump. Our mission contact Claudia and the IncaLink intern Matt went with me and my squadmate Nancy to give out water and food to the dump workers, and to share Jesus with them. There were a number of other small groups of us wandering around with the same purpose. We met a few workers, scattered here and there in the dump. We talked with them, shared Jesus with them, and prayed over them. I was stunned. I saw these people, and I expected my heart to break at the sadness in their faces, in the hoplessness as they shared their lives with us. I thought that because they did not have THINGS they did not have HOPE. I had believed that my whole life – the poor, those who don’t have all the STUFF I have, are also the poor in spirit. There’s no question that having no money makes life a lot harder. There’s no question that billions of people in this world struggle just to survive to tomorrow. Those are people incredibly and desperately needy, and our aid is required of us as servants of Jesus. There are also people in this world that have no hope. There are people who do not know Jesus, and whose lives are full of sadness and desperation and hopelessness – but these are not always the same as the destitute. Those who are poor, and those who are poor in spirit, are two different sets of people. Yes, a lot of times these definitions overlap, but I found in the Trujillo dump a different world. I saw people. Just people. I saw people working in an environment I would consider degrading back in the States, but I saw them just out there working. This is their job, and they weren’t acting downtrodden because they were sorting through the refuse of a city – they were acting like hard workers out doing their job. I had for so long defined the lack of THINGS in the same way I defined a lack of HOPE, and I thought for sure my heart would break when I met the guy wearing mismatched shoes and one sock. I thought that because I knew I had dozens of pairs of socks back home. I thought that because my mind was so wrapped up in the materialistic definition of poverty that I couldn’t see anyone the way Jesus saw them. I just saw people at that dump. I didn’t see desperately, helplessly poor people, I didn’t see people with the fire of hope gone from their eyes, I didn’t see people just passing the hours until they died. I saw people.
God called me later to go back to the dump, to actually work a midnight shift. I was not excited about this. I did not want to get my clothes dirty, to lose sleep, to have to deal with dirty diapers and filthy living. I did not want to be part of the lives of the dump workers. I was grudgingly following God’s call, but follow I did. The dump was in some ways exactly what I expected. I had been there before, so it was a familiar sight even at night – hordes of people descending on every new trash truck, sorting out the garbage in the hope of finding something valuable. The smells were familiar, too – as was the feeling of distaste. I didn’t want to get my clothes and shoes and hands dirty. This was not something I was comfortable with. As we walked up to the place where we would be sorting through trash all night, I was thinking about how unhappy I was to be here, and how I was going to be extra careful to not get any garbage on me. I lost track of those thoughts somewhere in the first three minutes. I heard something I never expected to hear in the middle of such poverty. I heard laughter. I heard, and saw, people having a good time. I saw none of the loneliness and hopelessness I had expected to see in the lives of people working in the middle of the night at a garbage dump. I just saw people. Just people. These people, although not the most impoverished people in the world, still had extremely little to live on – but they weren’t acting oppressed! I saw a nighttime blue-collar workforce greeting each other and cracking jokes. I realized I had believed something horribly wrong.
I had thought for my whole life that if you didn’t have STUFF, you were poor. And if you were POOR, you were hopeless. What an incredibly materialistic mindset! The truth is that everyone needs Jesus – and everyone is hopeless. You can be just as unhappy and desperate for Jesus if you’re a billionaire as you can if you have not one cent to your name. I need to redefine my definition of poverty. I need to quit believing that the people without stuff need my stuff to have hope. It’s time to see the world as Jesus sees it – full of people in every walk of life who desperately need His gift. People are not less human because they work in degrading conditions. People are not better off emotionally because they have a car and a house with running water. People are people, no matter where they are or how they live. I’m going to be seeing people eventually on this trip who really are hopeless – probably many of them will be extremely poor, even by the standards of the dump workers I met. Probably some of them will be wealthy. It’s time to check my prejudice at the door. I cannot any longer define a person by what I think of the way they live. As much as it pains me to admit it, I never really understood what the difference is between a materialistic lifestyle and a materialistic view of life – and I may have abandoned the first, but I took the second with me.
I need to revise my definition of hopelessness.
I need to revise my definition of people.
I need to revise my way of thinking about poverty.
I need the heart of Jesus, to see the pain in people’s lives and to want to help them, regardless of their circumstances. I need the eyes of Jesus, to see every person as no more or less valuable than any other and all in desperate need of the riches of the Kingdom of God. I need the hands and feet of Jesus, to ignore how much I value my clean shoes and my cozy sleeping bag and my hot breakfast toast, to reach out to the truly lost and to go out to the truly hurting. I need in me the mind of Jesus to perceive the difference between a poor person and a poor soul. I need to see people as more than the sum of their lives, more than their circumstances or job, more than their annual income – I need to see them as people.
Just people.
