A Closer Look at Life

Memories of Addis, Part 3

I originally tried to post the following story from a cyber-café in Addis, but internet connections, like many things in the developing world cannot be relied on to deliver the dependable service we anticipate in the West.  When I got back to the states I discovered that the post had disappeared, never to be seen again.

The café was in a squat little building that opened onto the alley behind our hotel.   We tried many cyber-cafés around our hotel, and this one was certainly the slowest.  On one side of the café was a travel agency that seemed surprisingly official, given its humble location.  The rest of the row of shops was taken up with the kind of clothing stores and other shops that seem to be in the act of vomiting forth their entire product line right as you walk by.  In front of every establishment, save the café, a small group of young men stood about talking and eyeing us curiously as we walked past. 

We needed only to walk halfway abound the block to get to the café.  Regardless, it was still quite a production for being such a short journey.  We had not gone 20 yards form the hotel before we had attracted a small army of interested locals, all intent on selling us something.  We had the pleasure of their company until we were safely inside the café, and even then their entreaties reached us through the door.

Among the many varieties of hawkers, there were little girls, dressed in rags and seeming only to know the English words “hungry” and “please!”.  Despite their unkempt appearance, they all had shoe-box sized trays of gum and mints, as neatly stocked and packaged as any gum display in an American convenience store. At first, my heart went out to them.  The more of them we saw, the inevitable question arose.  “Where did they get all the gum?”

The all too disheartening answer is that they got the gum from the people they work for.  Perhaps it was a parent or relative.  Perhaps it was their owner, and they were working as indentured servants or slaves.  Likely as not, these little girls, still shy of their first double digit birthday, were probably orphans and were forced to work as beggars in a racket where someone else gets to keep all the profits. 

There were also the shoe-shine boys.  Usually in their early teens, these boys could be seen all over town carrying their small box of shine and rags.  They seemed to be in one of the legitimate informal businesses of the streets, as I saw many an Ethiopian taking advantage of their services.  They were quite insistent, and it took a very stern tone to dismiss them, which was harder to muster than I expected.  Feeling the lump of money in my pocket, I thought of how glad they would be to have it, but I knew it could be unwise and even dangerous to give in.

Older and more aggressive than these two groups were the “friends.”  These men in their early 20s all knew English well, and were eager to make your acquaintance.  “Hey!  My friend!” they would call from beyond the hotel gate before we even reached it.  After that salutation would come a running stream of offers of all kinds.  Walking into a business or getting into a car seemed the only way to be rid of them once they latched on to you. 

We encountered all these groups on our short walk to the café.  The hierarchy was evident, and the little girls were shushed away by the shoe-shine boys who were, in turn, dispatched by the “friends.”  We had misjudged the opening time of the café, and were thus subjected to a barrage of questions as we stood on the street for a couple minutes while the girl inside wiped the screens with a damp cloth. 

“Who is your friend?”

“Where are you from?”

“Do you want to go on a tour of the city?”

“Do you need a ride somewhere?”

“Do you need a taxi?”
(Here we were mercifully allowed inside.  Our interrogators stayed in the doorway, lobbing questions in at us like hand grenades. 
“Are you looking for a party?”

“Do you want a girl?”

Scott’s head snapped around.  I looked up at the questioner in the doorway.  His face was covered in the hideous smile that evil men the world over use to feign trustworthiness when they seek to harm their fellow man.  It was an evil, shark’s smile.

“No… we don’t want a girl.” Scott responded in a slow measured tone.  His rebuff came out like a threat. 

It must have gotten the point across, or that was the last option in the bag, because the men left shortly after, assuring us that they would be around when we needed them. 

I sat there dumbfounded.  It is one thing seeing a kid on the street reduced to performing a menial task for pennies to survive.  It is worse to see kids being forced to sell a product so others can benefit.  It is another thing entirely to be offered another human being for pure entertainment or convenience, as though she were no more important than a taxi or a stack of black-market DVD’s. 

I don’t know if those two characters could personally have found a prostitute for us if we had agreed to it.  I do not doubt, however, that somewhere on the other end of a chain of partners and contacts, a real woman, or more probably, a young girl was waiting for her next bit of work somewhere in a shanty or a low, dirty building.  In all probability she was a slave, trafficked in from the countryside of Ethiopia.  She may have even been sold by her own family to pay off debt, or simply to buy food.  She may have been forced to serve several men a day, never seeing a dime of the substantial profit she was turning for her masters.  If she was not already infected with HIV, it is only a matter of time until she will be.

Looking back on this encounter, I am deeply saddened at the willingness of those two men to violate the most fundamental of rules God (and many other religions and social codes) gave for human interaction: to protect and take care of one another.  Given the hard, unforgiving life they had probably lived, I suppose their actions are not surprising.

What is surprising, however, is something Scott pointed out to me later.  They would not ask visiting foreigners if they wanted a prostitute at the sobering hour of 9:00 in the morning (on a weekday) unless sometimes the answer is “yes”.

Memories of Addis, Part 2

I left Addis as I came to it, in the dead of night.  As I sat waiting for the plane to board, I looked out the towering airport windows into a blackness that was more inviting, more vibrant and less frightening than the one that greeted me upon my arrival. 

After only five days, I was surprised to find that being back in the care of Lufthansa was a little uncomfortable.  Even at that extremity of its influence, I could feel the numbing effect of wealthy Western living begin to creep back over me. After being immersed in the boiling caldron of striving and progress and pain that is Addis, the austere atmosphere of the airport seemed almost oppressively silent.

It was a packed flight, with every seat filled or reserved for someone that would get on in Khartoum.  As will happen when people experience forced proximity, there was an edge of tension as we loaded the plane.  Two men in the rows in front of me got into rows with the flight attendants when they weren’t allowed to change their seats.  It was the end of a long day for everyone, and from each interaction the stewardesses walked away with a look and a headshake that showed they were close to snapping at someone. 

At first I was disgusted to see these petty squabbles break out.  People out there are going to starve to death tonight and here you are fighting about not getting an aisle seat.  I started to feel an unwarranted, self-righteous indignation that we American Evangelicals are so fond of when we think we have really done something wonderful.

During the long hours flying back across the globe, I could not shake the image of the man one row up trying to buy his way into business class on the spot just so he didn’t have to sit near a baby that might start crying.  I kept thinking of a tall German man whose gripe was obviously about leg room.  (Normally a complaint I would understand.)

In the end, what is sticking with me about this experience is not some jaded frustration with Western privilege; the kind that would make me loudly decry those inconsiderate jerks who are whining about luxuries I take for granted too. 

What is sticking with me is that these people were coming from the same country that I was.  Simply being on that flight meant they had spent at least a day in Ethiopia, and probably more.  These people, fighting about airline seats had been surrounded by the same poverty that I had been.  They had seen the same suffering I had.  Or had they?

We as humans have a shocking capacity not to see.  On that plane I was seeing people who appeared to be utterly unaffected by the destitution they had just been surrounded by.  As I sat there, dizzy from the worldview-altering week I had in Addis, I began to feel sad for those people who remained oblivious to the plight of their fellow man despite their proximity to his sufferings.

Really, though, I have no right to judge these people.  The Bible speaks often about God softening or hardening hearts to his purposes.  I would say that He has softened mine to a degree that simple humanistic empathy can not achieve.  I feel privileged that I was allowed to see just a little of the genuine humanity of the Ethiopian people, suffering and all. 

I realize now that my time in Addis was a brief parting of the clouds when the haze of busy Western living was drawn aside for a moment.  In that moment I was able to see people a little more as God sees them.  I saw them as valuable intrinsically, rather than as simply in the way of my happiness. 

The question I ask myself, and God, is how long and how often can I continue to see them that way.

Memories of Addis, Part 1

As I look back over my journal of the trip, a few images stand out.  None of these is more striking than one from the drive from the airport to the hotel in Addis. 

For me, this introduction to the developing world came as quite a shock.  To begin with, I only had two weeks notice that I would be traveling to Ethiopia, which had not provided me with enough time to really wrap by brain around what I was about to experience. 

When it came to the actual travel, the miracle of modern aviation also prevented me from easing into the experience.  Until I left customs in Ethipoia, the only real indications that I had left the States were what I could see out the plane windows and the fact that the stewardesses on the Lufthansa flights were speaking German in addition to their impeccable English.  (There was also the Lufthansa airport lounge in Frankfurt, which was far too nice to be in an American airport.)

So, ushered away from Colorado in comfort and convenience, I walked out of the Bole International Airport in Addis essentially unprepared for what I was going to see. 

The drive into Addis ran down a divided boulevard lined with what I would later recognize as some of the nicer apartments and shopping centers of Addis.  In the darkness that first night, they were incomprehensible jumbles of stark florescent lighting and concrete interspersed with shaky, corrugated metal fences.  The perpetual, boiling chaos referred to as “traffic” across the developing world had picked us up in its turbulent flow. 

The curbs and sidewalks were crowded with “parked” cars and people standing or walking about.  At intervals I noticed a particularly well dressed young woman standing under a street light or groups of men performing business transactions in a handshake with money passing one way and small items passing the other. 

I was just beginning to wonder whether I was witnessing the prostitution and open drug transactions that I had heard about when I saw a boy in his early teens moving along the sidewalk under a streetlight. 

I wouldn’t have even noticed him if he had been walking.  He was crawling.  He moved along in the same awkward gate you know as the spider-crawl; legs out in front, weight resting heavily on the hands trying to keep pace behind. 

He probably didn’t think of this as the spider-crawl, though.  To this boy, it was just getting around.  One of his legs hung limp in front of him with his deformed right foot dragging along on the pavement.  It was swollen and misshapen, twice the size it should have been.  The foot looked absolutely huge on the end of his emaciated leg. 

As we drove by him, the din of the busy street quieted suddenly and I heard, clearly and distinctly through the open window of the truck, the scraping of rough skin on the concrete.  The sound suggested a thickness and a toughness that surpasses anything that we in the West would ever call a callous.  It was the sound of a lifetime of coping with a broken body, not one day of which was ever spent in a wheelchair or in physical therapy.

I sat bolt upright in the truck and stared straight ahead of me.  Scott turned around and looked at me from the front seat to guage my reaction.  “We can’t help that kid,” he said later, “but we can keep other kids from ending up like that.”

True indeed.  It put the mission and the calling of Christ to help the “least of these” into a new perspective for me.

It's Tough All Over

If there was anything that I discovered on this freshmen trip to the developing world, it is that some things are the same all over.  One of these things is the attitude we take towards the pain that life will inevitably bring.

For those reading this that are Woodmen Valley Chapel regulars, you have probably heard Matt Heard talk about pain avoidance more than once.  For the rest of you, I will provide a brief synopsis. 

The logic goes something like this.  Life is going to hand us painful experiences at some point. In those moments of pain, we must decide whether we are going to simply deaden the pain with the numbing effect of drugs, alcohol, sex, sports, work, movies, play, etc., or if we are going to grapple with the problematic notion that God loves us and yet something awful has just happened. 

What the Gospel promises is an answer that is larger than our circumstances if we are willing to look beyond our present pain and see a larger picture, or at least trust in the character of the author of a larger story who has written an ending that we cannot yet see or understand. 

It was a surprise for me to find that this message is just as salient in Africa, as it is here in the busy, comfort saturated West. 

Talking with Habtamu, our guide, I gave him the Cliff Notes version of this to see what he would think.  He just put his hands up and started humming.  I thought I was going to get an “amen” or two out of it. 

It turns out that it doesn’t matter if you are living in a hut made of sticks and mud or if you are living in a five-bedroom ranch house with a great mountain view.  There is still pain that only the Gospel can fix.  Out of the thousands of people we saw walking the roads of Ethiopia, we saw two fall over flat into the dirt.  “Drunk…” muttered Eyob as he drove past, unconcerned. 

After much conversation on this topic, I have come to believe that the point of the missions World Orphans and others are undertaking is not simply improving the quality of life.  Suicide and divorce rates among industrialized nations should be enough to show that money and education will never be sufficient ways to improve the essential human condition.  All they do is offer less dangerous more engaging ways to numb the pain of loss and disappointment that we all experience at one time or another. 

The point of Christian missions (as differentiated by that of secular NGOs) is to offer the singularly unique message of the Gospel of Christ.  It is to offer the truth that God’s love for each of us does not depend on our circumstances or our bank accounts.   

It is also true that His love does not build houses on its own.  His love does not magically produce anti-retroviral drugs to keep parents with AIDS alive longer.  It doesn’t magically provide clean water to drink.  We can provide all of these things.  Its our job.  He provides the one thing we cannot; a reason to live in the first place.