We heard a loud Pop! before we saw the massive house fire from our window. Startled, I peeked through the blinds to a terrible sight, spreading at an unthinkable rate through the wooden home across the street. Illuminated against the night sky, the blinding hues of the flames cast ghastly shadows on the street below as a crowd began to form. We dashed around the house we were staying in, finding bowls and tupperware containers that might be big enough to hold some water and ran outside barefoot. At this point, the entire house was engulfed in the flames and the smoke towered in the night sky, blocking out the stars and shrouding the neighborhood in a menacing haze. Glass was breaking and debris was raining down, pushing the crowd back into the grass. We were too late. In a matter of only a couple minutes, a woman’s entire home had been completely destroyed. Everything was gone and all we could do was watch until help arrived.
The look on the face of my Squad leader mirrored my own- aghast at the deeper reality of the accident. She spoke the ugly truth thatI was too afraid to speak aloud. “Everyone here gets to go home to their beds tonight. But what about the woman who owns the house? She’ll come home and everything will be gone”. We shared the weight of the silence as the mob gazed on.
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As we wrap up month two in the field, I’ve started to notice some troubling trends in the country of Guyana, in the human experience, and myself. Watching the devastation of an impoverished woman’s home caused me to step back and really think about my time here and the necessity of intentional mission work. It wasn’t the fire itself that got me thinking; it was the crowd that formed and the response that followed that disturbed me the most. And I think if we were being honest, we respond to human suffering in much the same way. We watch, we take pictures on our iPhones, shake our heads in false sympathy, and go home to our beds. Before we even shut our eyes to sleep, we’ve nearly forgotten the haunting images that we so placidly observed only an hour earlier. We’ve nearly forgotten that we’ve been in her shoes before in one way or another, begging to be seen. We fall asleep feeling above the woman who’s life was forever changed. And I don’t think its that we can’t relate to her suffering- I’d venture to guess it’s that we’d rather choose not to instead.
In my short time doing mission work in South America, I’ve realized that our work here can easily become the same way. So often, I’ve realized that I can go out during ministry hours, take some photos (while spending way too much time thinking about the Instagram caption), and talk about how “life changing” the experience has been. I generally feel pretty good about the work we’ve done and shake the dust off of my outrageously expensive REI brand boots as I move on to another country. I have good intentions, certainly. We all do. But I think we all fall into the dangerously benign-looking trap of appearing to care instead of choosing to enter into the suffering of another person.
The crowd that formed outside Donna’s house was noisy, disrespectful, and quickly disinterested. Donna, the homeowner, was quickly forgotten and the destruction took center stage. Without love for the home owner, the fire took the limelight and as quickly as the fire was eventually doused by the Linden Fire Department, the interest of the crowd also dissipated. They were enamored by the spectacle of the incident- perhaps as a defense mechanism, creating a wall to shut out the reality of the hurt. But Donna would not be so lucky.
We are among the needy and impoverished every day.We sit at dinner tables with them, work with them, even share friendship with them. In the words of Mother Teresa,
“We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.”
Without being willing to enter into the suffering of the people we encounter, they exit the relationship exactly the way that we do: unchanged. When we enter into foreign lands feeling above the suffering of our fellow man, only appearing to care then easily exiting the scene, we rob them of the most important thing we can give them: the gift of being met where they are. When I walked over to Donna’s house several days later, the most important thing I could have done was look her in the eyes, listen to her story, and tell her I was sorry. “Some people in the world have love in their hearts, and some people have none,” she said through tears, a weathered and broken expression on her face. She wasn’t ready to rebuild her life just yet, but she was in desperate need of being seen. Of all of the people who grew up with Donna in her hometown, my squad mentor Destiny and I were the only ones to seek her out after the fire although a hundred people had watched it burn.
As a missionary, I have to be willing to do more than watch the house burn. I have to be willing to walk up the rickety stairs to her home and sit in the ashes with her. I have to share the painful silence and allow myself to feel desperately inadequate at finding the right words and look her in the eyes. She needs to be a person to me; not a tragic story to throw into a blog. I need to actually care, because every person I encounter on the rest of my Race can easily tell the difference between a generic American missionary and a true friend.
I hope if I learn anything this year, it’s how to walk alongside people, and not choose the high ground. If I never plan to meet the people I encounter on the ground, I might as well have stayed at home and donated $15.00 to a charity. I don’t want to be part of the mob. Because everyone I meet deserves more.
