Lesson #2- Poverty Is More Complex Than We Thought It Was

What does it mean to be poor? Why are people poor? Most people would say that to be poor means you lack material possessions. Others might say a lack of knowledge, or maybe even values. Some people might say that poverty is a result of spiritual, moral, or value deficits: bad choices, as a result of bad morals or values, lead to poverty.

If, like me, you take some time to read up on poverty, maybe even study it at school, you come across increasingly complex explanations. For instance some have suggested that poverty is being trapped in a web of various systems, such as cultural, religious, political, family, and economic systems. Others point to history as the cause of poverty. The Chalmers Center at Covenant emphasizes poverty as broken relationships between God, one's community, one's self, with the created world, and with people outside your community ("the other").

But even after all of the books I've read, all the conversations I've had, all the projects I've studied, I have routinely been shocked during my time in Kenya by just how complicated poverty really is! And in this post I don't want to argue for one or other understanding of poverty so much as to show how the causes and effects of poverty are complicated beyond our wildest imaginings.

What caused the poverty of our friend "Magdalene," and what does being poor mean for her? "Magdalene" grew up in a remote Kenyan village that survived through raising small amounts of food on a small piece of land. Because of a patriarchal cultural system, enforced by Kenyan law at the time, she could not inherit land as a woman, so when her mom no longer had money for school fees for her education, she married her off to an older man in her village who she hardly knew.

This husband immediately moved to Nairobi and left her back home. He would come home every Christmas; she got pregnant almost every year, until she had 8 children. Somewhere along the way she began brewing illegal beer to try to pay for her children's needs. Later, she decided to go move in with her husband. When she arrived in the Kibera slum, she found he had, like so many of the migrant workers here, started a new family. She chased away the new wife; her husband beat her, drank a lot, provided nothing for the family. Eventually he tried to kill her, and she ran away to another house with her children. In the new house, her landlord routinely raised the rent double what it had been; she could not keep him from doing so, because he might have the thugs kill her. Later on this same woman got a job with some white friends of ours. She did excellent work, and they trusted her for several years. One day they found out she had been stealing from them.

When her children get sick she goes to the hospital, but the staff are rude, and do not explain anything to her. She thinks they charge too much or want a bribe, but she can't understand because it is too technical for her. In church on Sundays, "Magdalene's" pastor preaches about giving every week, but never about sexual purity, because, as Magdalene says "he is the worst of all." He regularly calls her for big donations, because she works for white people. When the husband spoke to the pastor, the pastor told Magdalene that God was mad at her for leaving her husband, and that if she got back together with him, she could be a part of the leadership team. Even though she explained that her husband had tried to kill her and had never given anything to the family's income, the pastor said divorce was wrong so they had to get back together. Another time the pastor preached on how black people are cursed because they are descended from Ham, but white people are blessed because they have descended from Shem. This pastor is a part of a large church with generally well-educated preachers, but because this is a slum, the worst pastors, sometimes even pastors who have done bad things like embezzle money or sexually harass church members, are sent there.

What caused Magdalene's poverty? Bad decisions? Occasionally. She shouldn't have stolen from her employers, and if she loses her job this will increase her poverty. But bad decisions don't really explain most of it. Is it a lack of knowledge? Sometimes. If she understood medicine more she could get better care, or if she were more educated about the Bible she'd know that her pastor is a wolf in sheep's clothing and wouldn't believe his lies. But even still, would knowledge have solved all her problems? Not by half. Does a lack of material possessions cause her poverty? Again, the answer is sort of, but not really.

What does poverty mean for Magdalene? It means constant fear for her physical safety and the safety of her children. It means she is vulnerable to the Wild Wild West of a Kenyan slum, where gangs run the streets, people are kicked out of their homes, the police beat and rape and take bribes, and where the worst of all services, from electricity, to plumbing, to education, to health are all crammed into one place. It means that her children sometimes go hungry, that she sometimes feels forced to do things she knows are wrong, like stealing.

But more than all of this, being poor for Magdalene means having a perpetually marred identity. Being poor means that everyday she is taught in a thousand different ways that she is not an image bearer of God, that she is less valuable, less important than people who are not poor. Her religious system tells her lies that say she is cursed, and that if she gives money to a corrupt pastor God will give her health and wealth. Her political system tells her she is worthless by "pay-to-play" politics, where justice is bought and sold. Her cultural system tells her she is worth less than men, and should be subject to the whims of a violent husband, and also that she is worthless because she has to do menial labor. This marred identity, this feeling of shame and worthlessness, is at the back of many of the decisions that Magdalene does get to make: being told time and again that she has no value, she begins to believe it and eventually act like it.

Poverty is not mud walls and dirt floors. I have been on small farms with people who I believe live lives closer to the prophetic vision of everyone sitting under their own vine and fig tree than I do in my materialistic affluent life. I have seen people that we would think were "destitute" who are active leaders in their church, who provide for their family with the literal fruit of their labor. No, poverty is not mud walls, but broken identities, it is powerlessness, and entrapment. It is being oppressed, kicked around, constantly taught implicitly and explicitly that you are less. This ain't your Papa's view of poverty, but it's the one we've found here.

And all of this means that solutions to poverty that are one-sided don't work! If we think people are poor simply because they don't have stuff, and we give it to them, often we only increase their sense of worthlessness. We leave feeling like gods, and they leave feeling less than human. If we think the issue is just a job, so we provide a job, but don't address a political system that robs and steals, or an oppressive religious system that curses and embezzles, than we're just feeding the beast. If we address knowledge, or values, without addressing cultural systems that take all decisions about child birth out of the woman's hands, or that turn a blind eye to sexual harassment and adultery, we're sending people out to simply be more aware of how everyone treats them like nothing.

Take a look at the poor in your community and the "reasons they're poor" that you've accepted in your own mind. Take a look at the projects that you're involved in to try to help the poor, and ask yourself: Have we thought about the system? Is the culture, or the church, or the political system somehow contributing to their poverty in some way that we haven't seen? What is the implicit message of our charity? Are we giving people material things while reinforcing the lies they believe about themselves??

This has been a constant theme on this blog, because it has been a constant theme of our lives here. The system is real, if we have but eyes to see! The Bible teaches us that the powers are at work and that they corrupt every human institution! And our charities really do often reinforce lies the poor believe; we put a bandaid on a hand, and then chain feet to the floor.

I'm tempted to end on this fairly dismal note, because I think every Christian and every church needs to take another look at what we believe about poverty. But I won't leave it here for one reason: Jesus is the Risen King. The kingdom is coming. Aslan is on the move, and winter's bite is ended. And when Christ comes he makes his blessings known wherever the curse is found. The kingdom of God brings solutions bigger than Satan's snares. Sin's hidden complexity is over-matched by the kingdom's all-encompassing healing and redemption. And as we draw near to Christ, as we join in the Biblical story as the story of our lives, as we learn to look with His eyes at the poor as image bearers and the systems as corrupt and unjust, we will begin to live out of this kingdom and find ways to really engage with the poor in life-giving ways. And as a reminder of this, we've included a whole bunch of really joyful pictures from celebrations we had with members of our farmers groups this past week. So let's all ask Christ to guide us into true understanding and merciful and just living.

Peace,
Michael

*Most of my understanding of these models comes from Bryant Myer's life-changing but very technical book Walking With The Poor. For a lighter, also life-changing read, try When Helping Hurts, by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.

Lessons Learned #1- Walking Among the Oaks, Rebuilding the Ancient Ruins

Well, Rebecca and I are wrapping up our time in Kenya, and sadly, probably wrapping up this blog as well. So as we wind up nearly 2 years worth of blogging about our time here we wanted to take some time to discuss some of the ways we've grown in our understanding of God and His world through this experience. As with many shorter-term missionaries, when we look back at our time it can be difficult to see how little we've accomplished, but we're blown away by how much Jesus has taught us. We want to share some of that with you over the next several weeks, starting today:


Friends from NCF, Magadalene (Right) is a Sudanese refugee
who runs a small craft business that employs other refugees



If anybody had asked me why I spent my senior year looking for a way to get over to Africa as a missionary, my answer would have been immediate: read Luke 4. Jesus, quoting Isaiah 61, declares that the Spirit of God has anointed Him "to preach good news to the poor . . . to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Jesus' kingdom, I would have said, is inextricably bound up with the prophetic vision of radical justice, mercy, and blessing for the poor. If we want to follow Jesus, we'll embrace his kingdom vision and serve the poor like he did. If the gospel ain't good news for the material poor, it ain't Jesus' gospel. 

It's a good question to ask ourselves from time to time, particularly in so-called vocational ministry: why are we doing what we're doing?  Why are you going on a short-term missions trip to Africa? Why do you volunteer at the soup kitchen? Why are you on the deacons board or the outreach committee at your local church? Maybe like me, your primary answer would be something like, "Jesus loves these people. They have needs that I can help them with. This is part of God's kingdom."

If so, then I think you've got fully half of the reason why God calls us, the affluent, the "haves," to ministry to the poor, the "have-nots." Because it is 100% Biblical to say "Jesus loves the poor and so should I. I can help." But if I've learned one thing about ministry among the poor over the last year it's that this is only half the story.



Our friend Agnes and her (huge!) family



The other half comes from the rest of the Isaiah passage that Jesus' quoted.* "They (the formerly poor, brokenhearted, captives, and debtors) will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor. They will rebuild the ancient ruins . . . they will renew the ruined cities." You see, Jesus rescues the poor for a reason: he wants to use them to change the world.  It's a theme that runs the course of the Bible from beginning to end, from Yahweh's choosing of pagan-and-as-good-as-dead-Abraham to found His chosen people and stuttering-hesitant-murdering-Moses to lead His people out of bondage, to the early church era, when God in all His foolishness chose the weak things to shame the strong, the lowly and despised things to overcome the things that are.

Now where does that lead us, the materially strong, the intellectually educated, the confident and young children of privelege who go out into the world to "help those poor people?" It leads us to realize that Jesus Christ has chosen the outside of the camp as the center of His kingdom work. He chose a 13-year old pauper for his mother, podunk Nazareth for his home, blue-collar labor for his occupation, and 12 uneducated commoners for his leadership team. And therefore if we really understand the upside down nature of the kingdom, if we get God's special care and concern for the poor not just as projects but as fellow employees in His kingdom work, then we will run to the poor because that's where we'll find Jesus doing his most amazing kingdom work! It's a mystery difficult to explain, but I've come to believe that God calls people like me to serve the poor because that's the only way in today's society that I'm ever going to meet any of them, and He knows that without relationships with the poor and broken I'll never really get Him or what He's doing with the world.



One of our best group leader's with his father


Lesson 1 is simply this: if you want to understand the Jesus who spoke those words in Luke 4, you not only have to help the poor, you have to enter into real relationships with them. And through these relationships we'll find that the poor, as oaks of righteousness and rebuilders of walls, have a whole lot to teach us about Jesus. I have come to believe over here that living a Chrisitan life without relationships with the poor leaves you looking at Jesus with only one eye open. Because you miss a great deal of his ransomed-poor-transformed-to-oaks-of-righteousness work.

So why are relationships with the poor so important (besides the fact that Jesus calls us to them)? The answers are endless, but here are a few:

1. We learn what it looks like to really follow after Jesus. Truth is, for most of us, it's easy to follow Jesus, or at least to think we're following him. Not so for the poor. A few stories will illustrate the point. We have Indian friends here who are unemployed and unmarried, at least partly because by becoming Christians they lost their entire web of cultural and familial connections which would normally provide them will all sorts of support (jobs and a spouse for sure). Or what about our friend Iris, who comes to church week after week, teaches the children in Sunday School, loves and greets everybody with the love of Jesus, but goes home to a slum, to a home where her grown children (and thus grandchildren) still depend on her financially, and as often as not can't find work to put food on the table? What about our pastor friend, who takes in about 300 bucks a month, and with that runs an orphanage for 20 some-odd kids, leads the church, runs a small neighborhood school, does high intensity evangelism and discipleship? And then who has gotten car-jacked at gunpoint twice in the last 18 months for his pains? What about our young friends who live in the slums, who have no decent living anywhere on the horizon, who live in a culture where you cannot marry until you have become wealthier than they can imagine, and are trying to follow Christ's sexual ethic in their lives in a culture absolutely ravaged by infidelity and promiscuity? What, for heaven's sake, about Gabriel, the farmer that taught me to plant rice, who has ten kids of his own and takes care of five others who've been orphaned? There are stories at home as well: my friends I met through Advance Memphis, who have risked their lives to leave the gangs, or given up on all the money they could easily be making by selling drugs. Regardless, relationships with the poor force us to realize that following Jesus is costly. They shake us out of our apathy.



Rebecca chatting it up in the rice paddy



2. They help us see the deadly lies we believe. The rich young ruler walked away from helping the poor because he couldn't do without his riches. You and I justify our extravagant lifestyles by making "needs" of everything from car-per-person families, to private school education from 3 yrs to 30, to flat screen TVs. Furthermore, we often secretly believe that a) God blesses us financially if we really follow Him, and b) wealth creates happiness. If you don't think you believe those last two, here's a test: when you've visited poor families, have you ever thought, a) "Wow, these people really need Jesus. They probably have a lot to learn about Him," or b) "How can these people be so happy with so little?" Because if you have, you, like me, have bought into the health-wealth-gospel through the back door syndrome so typical of our culture. But when I think of Ezekiel or Joyce, two farmers who live on less than an acre of land in wooden or mud huts and yet who are two of the happiest, most faithful Christians I have ever met, all of these lies fade away. God does not necessarily bless the faithful financially; sometimes they suffer financially more than anybody else. But neither do riches bring happiness! Because if they did, why are so many Americans struggling with a lack of fulfilment and feeling miserable amidst all the stuff, and so many Kenyan Christians rejoicing daily in the very little the Lord has provided?

3. We participate in the body of Christ. Plain and simple, I have rarely been as challenged in my walk by the physical presence of a church community as I have been at New City Fellowship Nairobi. Why? Because both culturally and economically we're worshiping together in a much more diverse group of people than any I have encountered before. Paul says that we're the body of Christ, but too often our lives are so homogenous that we hands forget about how much we need the feet. Relationships with the poor preclude this.

4. And finally, we meet Jesus in the face of the poor. Jesus said that "whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers, you have done unto me." Mother Teresa regularly talked about meeting Jesus in the face of the poor. Of course this always sounded like garbage to me . . . until I really found myself among the poor and in relationships with them. And then I realized there is a divine mystery here, that to the poor belongs the kingdom of heaven, and for those of us who are not poor, we encounter Jesus in a special way in our relationships with them.



Rebecca with two farmer friends. We regularly sleep in their
village in one of the homes of a group member.



In all these ways and many others our relationships with poor farmers in the rural areas and poor city-dwellers at church have forced us to rethink our reason for wanting to be a part of "incarnational" ministry. Yes, we want to help those who Christ loves. Yes, we want to serve the way he served. But we also desperately long for relationships with the poor, we long to walk among the oaks of righteousness and work alongside the builders of walls. We have so much to learn about God and His kingdom through relationships with all the people that we typically treat as ministry projects, or as total resource-deficits. May God give us His eyes! May God give us His heart! May God knit together His church, founded by the blood of Jesus, and held together by the Spirit, that all people from every corner under heaven, every race and tribe, and every economic class on the planet would find themselves drawn into the great body of Christ, and so meet the Head of All Things, Jesus Himself.

Peace,

Michael

*Richard Hays has written about "echos" of the Old Testament in the New Testament, and my guess is that many who heard what Jesus read from Isaiah 61 knew how the rest of the chapter went. Besides all of this, the whole idea of Jubilee was to give back to the poor resources that would allow them to provide. This was not a soup kitchen jubilee, but a resource/capital jubilee as farmers got back their land. So regardless, I think Jesus claimed the full Isaiah 61 prophetic vision for his own ministry.

Hospitality in the Hinterland

This past week Rebecca and I made the 4.5 hr trek up to our Meru group a little bit earlier than usual. One of our farmers, Samuel, had just insisted that we come and visit him at his home for a meal before the meeting started and we'd decided to do it.

We just happened to run into the group chairman when we arrived in the village after an hour and a half of bumpy, dusty, dirt roads. This was a real God-send since we didn't know where Samuel lived, nor had we any game plan for finding out..

I realized when we arrived that these farmers live in the most remote area of any in which we work. This is the "real Africa" that we all seem to have embedded in our subconscious: sun-scorched brown soil, tough, scrubby and sparsely scattered vegetation everywhere, an unimaginable amount of dust. And Samuel's farm and family is equally typical: he lives with his wife and children in one mud hut among many that scatter a large compound on which his father and mother and the vast majority of his siblings and their wives still live. The farm is 17 acres (which is enormous by the standards of some Kenyan regions), but there are four brothers who will divide the land when their father dies; the scads of small grandchildren who ran in and out of the shadows of trees and huts, laughing and pointing at the "mzungus," and munching on the leftover chappatis that we couldn't finish are a fitting reminder that that 17 acres will get real small real fast.

Samuel's wife beamed when we walked into the small hut where they'd set a small wooden table and chairs up for our meal. We ate delicious food, and lots of it. The children love visitors because it means that the "best foods" are prepared, and everything was cooked with obvious concern: the tea had lots of milk in it, there was plenty of chicken, and lots of chapatis (the tortilla-like food that people give to visitors and cook at Christmas). And by now we've been around long enough to read the signs and see that this family had gone well beyond what they had to do to welcome us, strangers from far away.

Halfway through the meal, Samuel leaned back and said, "You know in our African culture, we love visitors. We say they are blessings."

Those words shook me from my slumbers as it were; these Kenyans had saved to be able to serve us meat, had spent the morning preparing. They had given us costly food for them, their favorites for sure. They had washed our hands before the meal, and made sure we were comfortable at every moment through the entire affair. I know nothing of hospitality like this. I can't even imagine what it would be like to welcome someone with half of the lavishness with which they welcomed us. And then, when we have finished, this man and his beaming wife thank us for coming. "Visitors are a blessing."

When we come to a new place our home culture gives us the lens by which we evaluate what we encounter. But stick around long enough, and their culture will become a lens with which to look back at where we came from. And Kenya has taught us the beauty and joy of lavish hospitality, and more importantly taught us that hospitality is a gift that the poorest can give, and find great delight in the giving. And if that is true for Samuel of Meru, how much more for us, who have material wealth beyond the comprehension of these villagers?

The author of Hebrews tells us to be hospitable because in so doing some have entertained angels without knowing it. Well, if an angel is essentially a messenger of God, I can say confidently that some visitors have received hospitality from angels as well, and that the lavish hospitality of Kenyans has been refreshing, challenging, and a powerful ministry of God in our lives.

Peace,
Michael

Under The Vine and Fig Tree

Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid . . .

                                                                                                                     Micah 4:4

Last week I went down to the village in Murang'a where our Pilot group meets, even though we didn't have a meeting scheduled for that day. The road to the village rambles through a hilly countryside along the Sagana river, with small farms crammed  with tobacco and vegetables crowding the river banks on one side of the road, and dry scrub land rising up into dusty hills on the other. And then the road suddenly spills out onto a broad plain. This too was once as dry and dusty as the surrounding hills, but the community irrigation project has turned the dry lands into a vast flood-filled plain separated into countless small rice-paddies. And a good number of those paddies belong to members of our group. The electric green of the rice creates a stark contrast with the brown shabbiness that covers most of Kenya just before the October rains, and amidst the green you can see spots of orange, purple, red . . . farmers in imported American t-shirts and traditional congas hard at work in the fields, as they have been since early morning and will be till after the sun sets. On clear days you can see Mt. Kenya rising up some 14,000 feet above the village, but on Tuesday it was totally hidden behind hot hazy clouds.


Mzee Gabriel

I went to Murang'a to learn how to plant rice from the oldest member of our group, Mzee Gabriel (mzee is a respectful Swahili title meaning "old man"). Gabriel shouted a greeting to me as I got out of my car, and I tiptoed my way along the walls of the rice paddies to get to him. In order to grow rice, farmers have to build mud walls about two and a half feet high around the paddies to keep the irrigation water in place, and these double as "sidewalks" of sorts to get around without wading knee deep in water.

Yet while it's difficult to get to Gabriel's farm because of all the mud and water, when we get there the problem is that there isn't enough of either. Farmers have to plow the land thoroughly and then to level it before planting. The leveling happens after the paddy has been flooded, and then it has to be flooded again for planting. But because the group is still waiting for new pipes, because it's difficult to regulate water rationing in the group leaving the members further down the system vulnerable to shortages caused by those upstream, because so many people are planting rice and the river's water has sunk down in anticipation of the rains, Gabriel hasn't gotten enough water for the last 2 weeks to plant. He had hoped Tuesday would be different, but at least by 10 a.m. when I arrived, it was still too dry.

Gabriel speaks almost no English, so it takes a few minutes for me to realize that he wants to try to rearrange some piping to try to get more water to his rice paddy. But I finally get it, and we spend the next 25 minutes hauling around plastic piping, trying several different combinations to get the water, which is powered only by gravity, to come flowing into his field. But to no avail.

The farmer's life here is shaped by water: almost never enough, and then suddenly and surprisingly so much that her crops rot in the fields, and the rivers become impassable. Even after irrigation infrastructure arrives there are issues of water management, of rising and falling river levels, of maintenance. And you wonder: how does anyone survive in a business where the biggest factor is totally unpredictable and totally out of the business owner's control?

Lucky for me, Gabriel's farm is pretty close to his sister's. She is also a member of the group, and she's got just enough water to allow for a little planting. And so Gabriel grabs his nephew and the three of us begin. While the nephew jogs over to the rice nursery to pick the seedlings we'll plant, Gabriel and I wade into mud up almost to our knees, and begin leveling the surface of the paddy to prepare for planting. The mud is deep, and I sometimes sink up to my knees, but the sun is hot overhead and the cool water which continues to pour into the field mixes with the soil and keeps me surprisingly cool.

Plant seedlings are amazingly tough. If you're new to gardening like me, you tend to treat your seedlings like fragile pieces of glass or china that might break at any moment. But the farmers rip them up by the bunch full and toss them around almost carelessly. They know that God's immense creativity has brought forth unmeasurable strength hidden within those bright green shoots, that if He hadn't few would ever make it to the table. And so I grab a fistful and, following Gabriel's lead, begin planting the seedlings deep in the muddy soil in tight rows. When you plant rice you're bent down to the ground almost the entire time, and you walk backwards, and I do neither of these with anything approaching either the speed or grace of my two teachers.

And as I bend over in that muddy rice paddy and shove fistfuls of rice into the dark sticky soil, we begin to talk and laugh and hear each other's stories afresh. I learn that Gabriel has 10 kids of his own, and takes care of 5 orphans besides, that he used to sell vegetables in Nairobi and that he rented this land when the water came and his business started to lose money. He asked me about America, about our farming, asked me to greet Rebecca. After about an hour we take a break when Gabriel's wife bring us mugs of hot uji, a porridge made from millet and sorghum. We hide under the shade of some nearby maize stalks and I drink two mugs. Throughout the day the exotic birds brought here by the sudden appearance of great quantities of water flit back and forth over our heads, nesting in the trees and resting on stalks of maize still standing in the fields.

And then, after another go at it, we finish planting the small section which has received enough water, and hide in the shade of a small solitary tree in the middle of the rice paddies. We eat heaping bowls of rice and beans. I say my good-byes, Gabriel thanks me for coming. I will go home to Nairobi, but he'll stay behind and work in the fields till after dark . . . till enough water comes for him to finish his field.

And I am struck again by the kindness and strength of these people, who know the land and get their daily bread by it, who welcome strangers like me into their homes, their work, their meals, their lives. Amazed by men and women old enough to be the parents of my parents who work from sunup till sundown, and yet who fill their working hours with happy Swahili chatter and often spend their lives working beside their siblings, their nephews and nieces, their own children. Amazed by all of this, and what's more by God's good creation, by His gifts mysteriously given and received. For is not all of this planting and harvesting just a more complicated gathering of manna in the wilderness? For who can explain how it is that the rice which we eat under that solitary tree comes from the small seeds planted in muddy soil four months previously? No, it is all grace and gift from start to finish, divine and mysterious. And my brief participation in this particular mystery is also a gift, a gift given last Tuesday and in nearly 700 other days spent in this country which is just different enough from my own to make God's great grandeuer unmistakeable. And for all of it, I am truly grateful.

Michael

Praying Through The Process

Ok, now it’s time for a work update. A lot has happened, and as we approach the rains there is a lot of work that needs to be done. I want to invite you to pray through this update, asking for God’s grace to be given to us and to these farmers.

The farmers who have gone for loans through Equity Bank in our Pilot have hit a snag in the process, and are frustrated by long delays and broken promises on the part of the bank. I think by now everybody has their rice crop in the ground and is doing ok, but everything was delayed because cows got sick and then the loans didn’t come through in time. This was a classic case of “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is;” the farmers were given a timeline by the bank, they followed through, the bank hasn’t (yet). There are a lot of reasons for this, some valid and some not so valid, but the exciting thing is that our farmers are really looking at this as a learning opportunity; all of the hiccups and bumps along the way turn into ideas and improvements for the future when these farmers see the whole process as a learning experience. And if they carry that mentality into all their work on the farm, that’s a very good thing. In the meantime, keep praying for them, for their rice, and for the market come Nov-Dec!

Our farmers in Ngare Ndare sold a bunch of onions considering El Nino rains flooded the fields and kept them from getting a truly great harvest. About half of the group repaid what they took from the group plus interest (although some of them still have balances from previous projects), and so when we visited them this past month we expected a great report. Unfortunately, things ain’t so simple. The group had used their loan repayments to buy onion seeds for their members, and they went with a new seed company this time. The problem? Only about 30% of the seeds germinated. Again, this is a major disappointment for them, but they’ve been figuring out how to deal with these issues on their own for over a year now, and we feel confident that this is a setback that they will overcome. Those folks up there are smart, hardworking farmers; let’s pray God would bless them in their efforts (and that they will get a refund for the seeds from the company)!

Embu farmers sold all of their sunflower oil and the byproduct with a lot of marketing help from our Anglican partners. That means that a good number of them should be able to get new loans from the group for the next season. That’s a huge success for the project if so, even if there were major issues along the way. Meru farmers didn’t do quite so well, but a number of them will get new loans if the logistics can work out. It’s amazing how many projects get sidetracked because of simple logistical failures (remember the bad seeds and slow banks?), so please pray that they would get through this.

We continue to look for markets for the aloe vera farmers. They’ve sold some, and they’re working hard, but this market is a new and complicated one, so pray that God would give us wisdom in how to search it out and connect farmers with it.

And last but not least, in Kibete we finished our training on Table Banking. It only took us, oh what, like 14 months? But we did it. For those of you who have forgotten, this training will help the group use their group savings like a mini-credit union, allowing members access to loans for investments, emergency loans for death or illness or heavy property loss, and for savings with interest. For a brilliant explanation of what this looks like, check out our friend Trey Nation’s blog on savings groups in Cambodia at http://myfatherwasawanderingaramean.blogspot.com/. Please pray that these farmers would get a good start on this project, that they would have the wisdom necessary to take care of their group’s money, and that this table bank would be a blessing to them and their community.

In our earlier blog post this week, we talked about systems of injustice working against the poor. Here again in our work life, you can catch hints of similar issues at play. Why has the bank gone so slowly? Why would a seed company sell such bad seeds? The loan officer for the bank has routinely not only made promises that he has then left unfulfilled, he has also made mistakes in the process, and then asked farmers to take responsibility for fixing them (come to town again, wait another week till I come, fill this form out now that I’ve fixed it, etc).

We have seen this same thing happening in both the church and among a number of other organizations we’ve run into. Our farmers tell us that the government ministers involved in getting irrigation to their community will call them at 11 a.m., when they are in the middle of work in the fields, and say, ‘drop what you’re doing, I need you right now.’ And so they do it. Church leaders will show up at poor churches and expect them to make special donations as signs of gratitude for their pastoral work. When development organizations make mistakes, often instead of fixing them themselves, they push responsibility for the clean up onto the poor members their projects are supposed to help. Why did this project fail? Certainly not because the development workers didn’t do their job right. Must have been the poor folks.

In other words, one of the systemic issues in Kenya and in the U.S. is the way that perceptions about the poor fuel demeaning attitudes and actions towards the poor. Most cultures have a handful of myths that explain why the rich are and should be rich, and the poor are and should be poor, and neither of the countries we’ve lived in are any different. Maybe it’s the American idea that everybody gets an equal opportunity, that both wealth and poverty are simply the result of a set of individual decisions made by people who could all do equally well, or poorly, if they only made the right decisions. Or maybe, and more common here, is the heretical health wealth gospel, which subverts Jesus blood given ‘not for works we had done,’ and turns it into, ‘hey, if you just have faith, your cows won’t get sick and your kids won’t die.’ Not surprisingly, this anti-Christian doctrine is preached predominately by the rich to the poor, whether that looks like the wealthy Western world televangelists who are broadcast daily on every T.V. station here, or the wealthier Kenyan purveyors of this doctrine who, having learned the script well from the American televangelists, preach the message: ‘if you just ‘plant a seed’ by giving money, maybe one day you can live rich like me.’ These aren’t the only myths, either. There are all sorts of myths that justify the rich man’s riches and the poor man’s poverty.

The result is a callous lack of concern at best, and a straightforward abuse of the poor at worst. We have heard horror stories of the big institutional churches here “punishing” pastors who offended their bishop by “relocating” them to the slums or a poor rural area. The poor get worse service, receive worse advice, and are constantly forced to wait on the wealthy churches, governments, schools, or development organizations to do things in their own, precious time. In short, the myth that the rich simply earned their riches and the poor their poverty gives the rich an excuse to treat the poor as unimportant second class citizens, and the poor every reason to accept and believe this categorization about themselves.

So as you pray through this report about all our various endeavors here in Kenya, join with us also in praying that our hearts and attitudes about the poor would change. Pray that God’s Word would challenge our own arrogance and the arrogance of the wealthy and powerful here, that we would remember that God has a special place in His heart for the poor, that they are equally valuable bearers of His divine image in the sight of Jesus who died for us all. Pray that heart changes would lead to dramatic changes in attitudes and actions, that we would begin to treat the poor as God does, and to recognize that many of them would have done better than we have if they had been given the lavish opportunities we have received . . . and that many of us would have done far worse if we had received the opportunities that they have been given.

All of this is very close to our hearts; we long to see the wealthy, including ourselves, grow in our ability to see the poor as God does, and to refuse to buy into the myths that allow us to look down upon them. None of this negates the very Biblical message of individual responsibility, which is a tremendous factor in the success and failings of all people everywhere, but it is a reminder that the world is a complicated place, and that we’re called to have mercy oozing from our hearts, and eyes sharp enough to see the unjust systems, beliefs, and practices that hurt the poor among us.

May God’s kingdom come in our hearts, that we might truly live the prayer: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Michael

A Long Overdue Update (Or At Least A Start At One)

Well, I’m actually embarrassed by how long it has been since I’ve written anything. So this week I’m going to play catch-up. Check out what has been happening in our lives at church and what we’ve been learning there in this post, and then check back in mid-week for an update on work. And, if all goes according to plan, we’ll sum up how our ever-growing love for and understanding of the Scriptures dovetails with all of the dust of daily living before you go home for the weekend on Friday.


Jesus knows what he’s doing; the past 8 months at NCF have turned into an unexpected pastoral internship of sorts that has been an incredibly powerful, challenging, and growing experience for me. Since Januaryish, I have met every Tuesday with our two pastors to help plan and evaluate worship services and to discuss and pray through the pain and joy of our congregational life together. I’ve gotten a chance as the interim worship leader to really think deeply about worship that glorifies God in the context of an extremely diverse group of folks, and then to try to actually live a theology of diverse worship in a world of broken mics, busted speakers, cross-cultural conflicts, and busy schedules. And because our pastor has had to go down to S Africa for a couple months to finish some studies, I’ve gotten the incredible experience of preaching to an audience that has seminary professors and Hindus who have never heard the gospel sitting side-by-side.

Both Rebecca and I have also gotten the chance to learn a bit more about what it means to be present to suffering, particularly among the poor. Just this past weekend we spent the night at the hospital with a friend with very painful pneumonia and pelvic inflammatory disease, we encountered a situation of grave injustice committed in a “Christian” workplace against a dear friend of ours, and one of our closest friends from the slums lost her mother.

On the surface, each of these stories could be very similar to the experiences of families in our own home churches. But the reality of life lived on the margins economically creates a deeper, darker reality that our affluent American lifestyle has kept us from seeing. In each of these experiences poverty created a void, a gap, a situation of powerlessness filled by injustice. A friend endures sexual harassment because she’s afraid to lose her job in a culture where masochistic tendencies protect powerful men and leave vulnerable women defenseless. A sick woman enters a hospital environment where staff are stumbling drunk and where apathetic doctors give second-rate service at first-rate prices because those who (like me) don’t understand medicine can’t understand the issues. And a mother of seven, who cannot find regular work and lives in a one room mud hut in the largest slum on the continent, faces a culture which requires her to provide hundreds of dollars worth of meat to greedy relatives who will come to her mother’s funeral in order to feed themselves. The consequence if she does not? As one of our friends told us, “If she does not follow the culture and feed them well, they will call her names for the rest of her life, say she is the one who shamed her mother, and even curse her using witchcraft.” And in this case, which is really the worst of the three, these greedy relatives probably won’t stop eating off our friend’s tab the day they lay her mother in the ground; our friend fears that they will probably steal her farm there as well because she, as a poor woman, cannot defend herself against the land-grabbing of her cousins and uncles.

If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself with you, you shall support him as though he were a stranger and a sojourner, and he shall live with you. Take no interest from him or profit, but fear your God, that your brother may live beside you. (Leviticus 25:35-36)

The law of Leviticus, as well as other parts of the Old Testament, reflect the belief that poverty at its worst has the ability to exclude individuals and families from the community. And in a month where we have seen injustice of Old Testament proportions, with the wealthy oppressing the poor, with men taking advantage of the women in their midst, with witchcraft being used to backup greed, we hear these words and realize once again that the Biblical story provides the most powerful exposition of injustice the world has ever known, and at the same time the only hope for a world wracked by injustice: the rule and reign of Yahweh God, who hears the orphan and the widow, who protects the stranger, who brings His wrath in power against all of those who use their position, influence, culture, and even demonic involvement to abuse and oppress any of God’s treasured children.

Because the system is against the poor and the powerless, whether it’s the hospital system which provides decent care for the rich and negligent extortionate care for the poor, or the cultural system which leaves widows vulnerable to land theft and abusive cultural practices even in the midst of their deepest grief, or masochistic systems of authority that protect men who abuse women. The threat of demonic curses, and our friend’s stories of seeing and experiencing the power of witchcraft in the past, has forced us spiritually confused Prebyterians to re-evaluate our laissez-faire stance towards the demonic world and to ask ourselves hard questions. But one thing we do know: Satan works some of his most deadly deeds in the nebulous and difficult-to-define systems of our world; that the truth of sin is that the systems we create are worse than the sum of our sinful parts, that the structures that oppress and push down the poor are exponentially more evil than the evilest individuals, and that their deadly effects are more easily hidden because we cannot point to simple individualistic violations. Who do you blame for cultural evils? Whose fault is it that the courts don’t do justice? Whose fault is it that only the rich hospitals can afford decent doctors? The answer must be all of ours, but in our individualistic American mindset that is an answer we all too often ignore.

But the God of the Bible does not. The God of the Bible provides an answer to the demonic forces that affect our structures. The answer is the rule and reign of God, the Kingdom of Christ. And we are called to prayerfully work for the poor and against injustice wherever the curse is found! So pray for our friends, and pray for us, that justice would roll down like rivers, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Peace,

Michael

Pilot Project: Small Struggles, Small Victories

Quick update on the Pilot group for those who are interested. We went there yesterday, and it looks like about half the group has begun planting in earnest (from the nursery to the field), and the other half is getting ready to do the land preparation. What this means is that everybody is a little behind. We've had a series of small obstacles, starting with hoof and mouth disease among the cows (less bulls for plowing, less cash for paying people to plant or help with preparation). Some farmers went to the bank we've been working with for an emergency loan, but it has been slow in coming, also causing delay. Also the weather probably made the germination a little poorer than could've been hoped for.

On the other hand, farmers tend to be a pretty negative bunch and as best I can tell, there have been no serious issues that will follow us to harvest. What's more they've worked together to figure it out, and have been persistent, without throwing up their hands and waiting for us to come up with solutions. Best of all, at this past meeting we got a "market survey report." Becca and I were wondering why they were talking about that thing we did way back in January until we realized that the group had, on their own, found out about a large buyer, raised the money to send somebody to investigate, and will be sending somebody again with a sample today. If the price is good, this buyer will be a basically inexhaustible market, but he only buys in bulk: in other words, this group would do exactly what it meant to do, to allow a group of farmers to better producers and find better markets than they could on their own. AND it indicates that the process we brought to them, which is the heart of the whole project, has at least to a minor extent been carried on. We taught them the value of market research, showed them how to do it, they bought it, and at least this time, carried it out on their own. Praise the Lord! Pray that the bank would move faster, that the buyer would come through, and that the group would keep on trucking!
Peace,
rhodes