Can you believe?: haiti

Showing posts with label haiti. Show all posts

11 February 2010

Klaipeda shorts

Walking to LCC International University:
a third of the way there

Klaipeda University; 2/3 point

I think we're there....

"Gordon’s greeting was legendary. A wide smile lit up his face and spread to a sparkling welcome in his eyes. The warmth and openness of his reception radiated at once acceptance and expectation, engaging friends across the spectrum of the Quaker family."

These words from Gordon Browne's memorial minute, adopted by Plainfield Meeting, Vermont, evoke a wave of wonderful memories. For example: As Friends World Committee for Consultation's Midwest field staff, I'd often go to Gordon's office in Philadelphia by overnight bus, via Dayton, Columbus, and Pittsburgh. After an early morning breakfast at a diner across from Friends Center, I'd enter the building, rub my tired eyes, drag a pen across the sign-in sheet at the Friends Center desk, squint into the hallway, and heave my backpack into the FWCC suite. My first glimpse of Gordon might be his back as he talked on the phone, but as soon as he turned and saw me, his face would light up exactly as Plainfield Friends described--and it was as if I had all the energy I'd need for a full day of work.

(Here's the full minute. Thank you, Friends!)

Judy and I are at the LCC International University, Klaipeda, Lithuania. In a few days, we return to our home with new visas, but in the meantime, we're enjoying getting to know this fascinating institution.

One of the highlights so far was yesterday's midweek worship service. Michele Hershberger presented an interactive sermon on the paralyzed man and his friends (Mark 2). The students proved to be alert and responsive co-preachers as she and they peeled back many aspects of the event--salvation in forgiveness of sins, salvation in healing, and even redemptive confrontation of a religious system that had been intended for good but had grown corrupt.

The background theme of the sermon was the question, "What would Jesus do in Haiti?" I was struck by an incredible image: the opening up of the roof by the paralyzed man's friends, linked in my mind to images of friends and family members desperately prying open the space needed to reach their trapped friends. How many people have been trapped by neglect, by systems and standards that were allowed to corrupt--in full view of the world?

Speaking of response to tragedy: If you're in Portland, Oregon, you still have a couple of hours to decide whether you can respond to this vigil request from Reed student Andrew Barney, as passed on by Reedwood Friends Church:

From Andrew who is organizing a vigil on the Reed College Quad this Thursday (Feb 11) at 5:30 pm to commemorate and show solidarity with the 14 high schoolers killed in Ciudad Juarez last Sunday. This event coincides with vigils held across the country and globe. Andrew says: "While I haven't been to Reedwood my family is Quaker and I thought that your attenders might be interested in attending. I invite anyone who has time to come this Thursday and show support."

Beacon Hill Friends House is an incredible place to live in community. Forgive my bias--it's where I met Judy. They've got space for several residents at a time of year when demand is fairly low, so please spread the word:

Vacancies at the Beacon Hill Friends House Spring 2010

Beacon Hill Friends House is a Quaker-sponsored community of 21 people, open to people of all religions and backgrounds. Quakerism encourages peace and social concerns. We make decisions in house meetings using consensus. Everyone attends two house meetings a month, at least three of the five meals a week cooked by our kitchen manager, serves on a couple of committees, completes a chore once a week, and is generally helpful around the house. If you are committed to the challenge of making a home with individuals of diverse interests and ages, our community may be an ideal place for you to live.

Typical room description: Share with one roommate of same gender. Room includes bed, desk, chair, mattress. Share a bathroom with two to four other people. Possibility of moving to a single, depending on how long you’ve lived in the house.

The building: Historic landmark on Beacon Hill, near the State House. 12 minute walk from Park Street Station and Charles/MGH on the Red Line. Common spaces include: library, parlor (with a piano), tv lounge, kitchen, dining room.

What’s included in the monthly bill: All utilities: electric, water, heat, wireless internet. All of your food: our kitchen manager orders all the food, so you never need to go grocery shopping. The kitchen manager also cooks five vegetarian meals a week, with occasional meat offerings. Residents fix their own meals the rest of the time.

More details and photos on the BHFH Web site.

Friday PS: I usually store my weblog photos on Photobucket, but yesterday and today I've been unable to access photobucket.com at all. For the time being, Photobucket-hosted images may be missing from my entries. If anyone knows what's going on with that service, let me know! Thanks.

More links:

Books I'm recommending sight unseen, written by Friends connected with George Fox University: Tom Head, a long-time supporter of Right Sharing of World Resources, has written Envisioning a Moral Economy, available from Pendle Hill Publications. And Barclay Press is announcing the publication of Ron Stansell's new book, Missions By the Spirit: Learning from Quaker Examples. Judy and I heard Ron read extensive excerpts from his manuscript a couple of years ago, and have been waiting impatiently for the full book to come out.

An eloquent goodbye to the late Serbian Patriarch Pavle.

Thanks to youtube and jesusradicals.com, an interview with Dorothy Day, part one, part two, part three.

Friends and abortion: Rachel MacNair's personal journey.

Christianity Today's "Global Conversation" continues: "Sowing subversion in the field of relativism."

Dorothy Stang's accused murderer returns to the news. (See "Testimony 3" here.)

Nancy Thomas describes the process and blessings involved with North Valley Friends Church's minute on immigration.

21 January 2010

Why Haiti?

I've been thinking about the reasons disasters seems to cluster more in some places than in others. Clearly, I'm not the only one who's been thinking about this--it didn't take long for Pat Robertson to weigh in. (Responses have ranged from "idiotic" to "what do you expect from him?" to a critical "qualified defense.")

Last Sunday, on a visit to Kazakhstan, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill gave his own analysis:

Haiti's tragedy has stirred the whole world. It's an ill-fated country. As a French colony, Haiti had prisons where people were sent from France to serve life sentences. It was a terrible corner of the world. Then the country freed itself from colonial rule, but, unfortunately, unlike its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, Haiti was unable to establish a normal life and get on the sort of development path that could lead people to prosperity. I have been on this island, shared by two countries. These countries--the Dominican Republic and Haiti--seem like two different worlds. One part of the island flourishes, the other is dominated by crime and political instability.

And now the serious problems of this side of the island are compounded many times by a catastrophic earthquake. We see the depths of human suffering right on our TV screens.

Kazakhstan, like other countries, knows very well what an earthquake is like. When serious natural disasters happen, usually people get organized, start helping each other, and set the stage to receive external aid. But in Haiti, we are seeing the opposite: people die from hunger, thirst, disease, and the hands of criminals; you can can imagine what kind of hell Haiti's residents are in.

The human tragedy of Haiti's devastating earthquake unfolds against a background of poverty, hunger, crime, drugs, corruption, all of which have many causes: historical, economic, political, social, climatic, and, not least, the role of personality in history. But we must not forget that in fact at the heart of many modern social problems--from drug abuse and crime to environmental pollution--is the condition of the human spirit.

God saw fit to create us with a sense of morality, which makes itself known to us as the voice of conscience. It is by this sense, more than by anything else, that humans differentiate themselves from animals. After all, animals also display mental capacity. When we observe dogs, we can be amazed by their intelligence, their intelligence, their diplomacy, their cunning.

However, in addition to instincts and intelligence, human nature has a moral sense. This is a very important human feature that distinguishes us from the other living creatures of our world. From this very source--the heart of human nature, the inner recesses of the soul--everything is revealed; as Scripture says, from the human heart come evil thoughts (Mark 7, 21). And if we turn those evil thoughts into evil deeds, the actions are secondary, they're the outcome--whether we're talking about politics, or economics; whether we mindlessly waste the natural resources that God gave us, and pollute our environment, or create unjust relationships, or cause famine, social upheaval and drug use....

Is this a subtler version of Robertson, as some charge? I've tried to provide a sufficiently long excerpt here for you to come to your own conclusions.

The first things that came to me when I heard Pat Robertson quoted on Haiti being "cursed" were, almost simultaneously, these thoughts:

What kind of a God would visit unrelenting punishment on generations because of the spiritual expressions, however heterodox, of a specific few rebels?
And what about the "curse" of conspiring to enslave, and keep enslaved, a whole people?
On the other hand, what if that pattern of slavery and cruelty did in fact create a zone where a spirit of oppression rules and must be explicitly dethroned?

That last thought reminded me of two experiences, which I've probably mentioned before. The first was a visit I made to a Quaker ministry site in Jamaica that has been troubled for decades by poor management and corruption. My colleague Vince asked one of the local staffers, "What was here before this was a Friends ministry?" The answer: "A plantation. And that's how we're still treated."

More recently, Mike Berry told us about how his church and other Annapolis churches confronted that city's history of involvement in the slave trade and reached for reconciliation between descendants of slaves and slavers, with remarkable results for the community.

Robertson's remarks have provided a lot of visibility for online material on Haitian history. Here are a couple of examples: Spencer Dew, "Is the Devil a Black Man?"; Jean R. Gelin, "God, Satan, and the Birth of Haiti," part one, part two, part three.

My fantasy vacation is a Caribbean cruise, on the kind of small passenger ship that my grandfather Knut Maurer sailed into the Caribbean many times.

(Photo at right: MS Meteor, his last command.)

I imagine good food, good conversations, the gentle roll of the ship, and many hours of uninterrupted reading.

What if this delicious (and not cheap) escapist vacation coincided with, say, a terrible earthquake? That's just what happened to the MS Independence of the Seas, which docked in Haiti after a spirited internal debate among cruise line management. This Guardian article and this Cruise Critic newsletter outline some of the dilemmas.

I sympathize with those voting to have cruises continue visiting the country, despite its devastation. Among my reasons--there are local people who rely on ship traffic for income; a crisis is not the time to tinker with national tourism policy, as important as that is; and, most of all, buying passage on a cruise, even a fantasy cruise, cannot and does not guarantee immunity from reality.

Whether it's a fire at sea or a disaster on land, a time may come when there's a higher priority than escapism: namely, to witness, to care, to help, to be real. Some of those cruise passengers who are visiting Haiti, even points far from the epicenter, will never forget this moment of realism. I am sure that at least some of them are now part of the worldwide web of care mobilizing around Haiti.

Among the many helpful Haiti-related posts, I particularly appreciated these: "Don't choose a charity ... based on administration costs." (When I worked with Right Sharing of World Resources, and we were seeking partners to work with in India, I learned how precious competent administration can be.) And "posts and articles written by aid workers." Christianity Today's special subsite on Haiti is here.

14 January 2010

Haiti's agony

If ever a country had more than its fair share of trials, it's Haiti. Early estimates of those who've died, according to vesti.ru, are already at 50,000, with countless more injured, homeless, and in desperate grief. Many of us observers are also grieving, some report simply being numb. For some observers and bloggers, the agonized questions boil down to this: "Why, God? Where are you?"

I see that my own emotions go back and forth. Part of me simply grieves. Part of me tries to pray my way through the day--for example, when I made myself a cheese sandwich, it became a prayer for those waiting, waiting, waiting for some food and meds in the earthquake zone. And part of me kept prodding the rest of me: stay in the game. Don't give in to despair. Statistically, it's still one death per person, despite the spiked and unjust mortality rate; the only thing you can do for those still alive and in distress is keep your wits about you, pray, contribute (in our case, to Mennonite Central Committee), and advocate the hell out of injustice.

I was strengthened in that direction by two helpful blog posts. Rachel Held Evans bluntly states, "We already failed Haiti." She explains (the emphases are hers):

These people have been living in abject poverty right under our nose—less than 700 miles from our shore.

While we spent millions on weight-loss pills, our neighbors were dying of hunger. While we bemoaned the fall of our inflated financial institutions, our neighbors were struggling to find shelter for the night. While we filled our homes with Christmas presents in celebration of Christ's incarnation, our neighbors watched their children slip away into despondency, as hunger and sickness overcame their little bodies.

Christians love to debate whether homosexuality is a sin and if gays should be allowed to marry. Perhaps it is time to debate whether such gross inequity is a sin and if we should allow ourselves to continue to grow richer while our neighbors are so poor.

. . .

In Richard Stearns’ excellent book, The Hole in Our Gospel, the president of World Vision explained, “It is not our fault that people are poor, but it is our responsibility to do something about it.”

This line of reasoning is not a way to distract the honest theologian from the dilemma of God's role or God's apparent absence, but it does confront us with our responsibility. What if God's provision for global poverty and injustice is a wealthy, unselfish, and prophetic church? (I put the prophetic element in because statistically, American Christians are amazingly generous, but how much is naively misdirected?)

In "Haiti--Where was God," my second helpful reading, Ben Witherington reasons, in part, along the same lines as Evans:

. . . We have known about these problems in our own backyard for decades. For decades now the U.S. would rather throw good money after bad on military adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere when in fact with a fraction of what we have spent in the last decade on war the entire country of Haiti could have been rebuilt and given decent housing!! Yes its true. And these are our backdoor neighbors. But of course they do not have oil and other commodities to offer us, so we as a nation have largely ignored them and their cries for help, hoping that the piecemeal efforts of small U.N. and Christian agencies would pick up the slack----which they have been unable to do, so overwhelmed have they been by the grinding indigenous poverty and needs of that whole country, not to mention governmental corruption over many decades.

The reason I don't get all righteous at God when disaster happens is that I'm afraid God might wonder out loud why my priorities were so conveniently oriented around myself. "The poor you will always have with you"--not to mention earthquakes, floods, famines, windstorms, collapsing Towers of Siloam; how can I pretend to be surprised?

Links:

Quaker connections with Haiti include eight or more Friends churches associated with Evangelical Friends Church Eastern Region; the decades-long work of Christian Service International in Haiti; and many individual links--thanks to Raelene Fendall for this specific example, Jean and Joy Thomas and the Haiti Christian Development Fund. (Friday PS: We hear that Tim and Ann Kendall with Global Outreach are also OK.) Many meetings in Northwest Yearly Meeting, including ours (Reedwood) plan to make a special collection for Haiti this coming Sunday, responding to this call.

Remembering George Willoughby.

The enduring theme of the Great White Hope (Avatar, for example)--David Brooks; Soong-Chan Rah.

Wrestling with "the least of these" in Matthew 25: Is Chaplain Mike sharpening his interpretation, or safely spiritualizing it?

Evangelizing Tiger Woods on national television, and the backlash--two viewpoints: Ross Douthat. Martin E. Marty. Meanwhile, not a moment too soon: some hints about a forthcoming book on ethics and evangelism.

Second thoughts on the Nigerian Christmas bomber: Why didn't he use the toilet? And: How to lose Nigeria and alienate Africa.

Fascinating interview with Stephen Kotkin, author of Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment. (Thank you, Sean.)

Jean-Rene Ella, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"

Can you believe?