It’s breaking news everywhere. Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, shook yesterday as a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the tiny island country. An earthquake of this size is devastating regardless of where it strikes. In poverty stricken Haiti, it is of the highest level of trauma. Haiti, comparative in size to the state of Maryland, lacks infrastructure and the means to enable recovery from such a force as this quake. Haiti needed help before the quake and Haiti needs help now.

In 2007, Haiti ranked 43^rd in the world for highest number of people living with HIV/AIDS. The risk of contracting a major infectious disease is high for Haitians due to unclean water. While 80% of Haitians identify themselves as Catholic and 16% as Protestant, nearly half of the 9 million island inhabitants practice voodoo.*

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When I asked my friend Adina to describe Urbana 09 to me recently, she simply said, “It's insane!”

Urbana 09 is happening right now in St. Louis.  Adina said there are 17,000+ college students from around the world in attendance this year. They are discussing topics such as human trafficking, poverty, HIV/AIDS, divisions between peoples, and even environmental degradation affect missions.

One of the key themes of this years Urbana is on incarnational missions. They are taking a close look at the first four chapters of John’s Gospel for a rich understanding of Christ who came and dwelt among us.

Adina is very excited about all that she is learning and taking away with her from this event and she mentioned she is thinking hard about what it looks like to bring Urbana home.

Tonight was commitment night at Urbana. This is the night when the students have the opportunity to publicly commit to an area of mission involvement. That can be anything from committing to pray and learn more about God’s direction for them to committing to joining cross-cultural service anywhere in the world.

These students represent a rising, contagious love for God and for justice. As they make their commitments tonight, finish their college educations and venture into their illuminated path for righteousness, they need encouragement and prayer. For some, they are taking risks to live out bold fiery faith.  

I am excited for Adina. I have seen a joy in that woman that will no doubt bless countless others no matter where she ends up. And to think there are over 17,000 others like her, making courageous life altering decisions tonight excites me.  Like Adina said, “It’s insane!”

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(Durban, South Africa)

At first glance, the Zulu children we met on the bus en route to Ithemba Lethu’s leadership camp were just like any other seventh graders we had ever met. They boarded the bus with tremendous enthusiasm. They were full of life and noise and a certain pre-teen angst. They were excited to be with their friends, armed with bits of junk food, slightly insecure and were chatting about celebrities and rappers. If one didn’t already know that the children were from one of Durban’s poorest townships, that most lived in tin shacks, or that many were being raised by siblings just a few years older than them, it wouldn’t have been immediately obvious that these kids differed from suburban American youth.

As the weekend progressed, we began learning more details about their lives. One child’s parents had just died. Her mother died of AIDS and her father was murdered by human hands. She was now living with an aunt who didn’t want her.  Several of the children were being physically abused on a regular basis. School was not a safe place for the kids because teachers hit them with pipes.

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I was sitting at my kitchen table the other day, looking at an ad for the new film, The Blind Side. It was an engaging graphic, with two people walking away from the viewer across a football field. The one on the right is a huge African-American man, dressed in black and white, almost identical to the small blond woman on his left. Their hands and arms are synchronized, the only difference being the turn of her head and the sun shining on her light hair and white face. Interesting.  

I drove to the mall to see Blind Side because my wife said I could not skewer it without watching it first.  So I did, but went to an early show, so I would not have to pay $12 for a movie I hated. I love the cheaper tickets, except for the fact that it’s too early to pop fresh popcorn, so the teenagers at the snack counter serve the stale stuff popped the day before.  

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Tatyana lives in post communist Moldova, a country still experiencing the aftermath of the cruel regime,  twenty years later. Tatyana is a middle aged woman, although her rough hands and tight wrinkles lining her eyes and round face declare otherwise. Tatyana bears deep scars on the palms of her tiny hands. She always carries with her, kind eyes; the kind of eyes that reveal that she holds within her many layers of experiences and wisdom. Tatyana is a member of the persecuted church. The scars from her hands were caused by smoothing cement barehanded while communist soldiers looked on in mockery. Tatyana and her friends were building a church in 1985. They were given permission by the Soviets to build the church so long as they didn’t use any building equipment.

I had the privilege of being with Tatyana in 2005 on the 20th anniversary of the building of this church. It is a beautiful church. About 200 others were there that day. They were the people who had built that church alongside Tatyana and who bore scars of their own to prove it.

These people were heavily persecuted during this time. They were tortured, separated from loved ones and dispersed to foreign lands. Tatyana remained in Moldova during the heaviest times of persecution. What I saw in Tatyana and in her scars and what I saw in those who had gathered from near and far for the reunion, was not the pain that they had once endured, rather, I witnessed an overwhelming, incredible, indescribable joy.

I asked Tatyana about her regrets later that evening. She told me she had none. I asked her if communism were to re enter Moldova again would she flee. She smiled and told me the most joyful times in her life were also the most painful. She would endure the torture and the pain all over again if it meant bringing her that type of joy.

In my experiences traveling to developing countries and spending time with the oppressed, I have seen this joy despite age, culture and location. I do not seek to glamorize poverty in any way and yet, I cannot help but be intrigued by the fact that the most joyful people I have met are those who have experienced or are experiencing incredible amounts of pain and suffering. 

It’s as if those who have much are less satisfied than those who have little. The empty are filled. The weak are made strong. The poor become rich.  So what happens where joy and pain collide?

Consider John 16:20-22 for a moment.

I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.

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September 10, 2009 marks the day headlines across the country and a few abroad revealed this: U.S. poverty rate hits 11-year high.

 

While several news sources posted the story I’ve chosen Reuters to share if you’d like to read the article here. 

 

Poverty stinks from every angle. It challenges personal esteem, often times deflating it. It challenges relationships, often times breaking them. It crushes dreams and snuffs out hope.  It’s suffocating, it’s exhausting, and it’s awful.

 

A few years ago I worked for an accredited Non-profit organization that was run by the church that employed me. This organization sought to bring life transformation to families residing in local motels. Motel life is generational. If you were a kid growing up living in a motel, odds are you are raising your kids in a motel today. In 2002, when I first began with this organization, there were an estimated 250 families living in motels in one city.

 

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"Go big or go home" is a phrase you will hear often around my family. While I appreciate small gestures and I find beauty in simplicity, there are some occasions when you just need to go all out.

National Public Radio's "This American Life" highlighted some of those occasions today in their episode "Going Big". The first vignette is especially inspiring.

Check it out at this link;

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=364

What do you need to do up big right now?

How could your community be changed if you stepped up in a huge way?

 

 

Dan and Rob were filming from a plane today over the Kibera slum outside of Nairobi Kenya.  The plane crashed.  The pilot was killed and an airline employee is in critical condition.  Dan and Rob are still in the hospital being checked.  David and Tim were not in the plane and they are fine.  Rob has burns, cuts, and other pains, but he is in pretty good shape.  Dan was in worse shape, but so far they haven't found anything serious.  Still checking some pains.  Please thank God for this miracle and pray for their fast and full recovery and for God's will in all this.  This has been very traumatic for them and us.  Updates will be posted on twitter.

Thanks for your prayers!

Doug Parris

(Dan's father)

giveadamndoc@gmail.com 

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In Venice, we had a decision to make, we could either stay there for three days and then hop on a ferry to Greece or we could go our original route through Eastern Europe (the more expensive of the two.) Rob wanted to stay in Venice and David wanted to head through Eastern Europe. I was the tie-breaker. We had only one connection on that entire route through Eastern Europe and it was Veda, a friend of friend in Serbia. I said a little prayer that God would provide a worthwhile opportunity to justify the extra money and the Eastern European route, and then we set off.

Veda is our age.  She is an architecture grad student, and someone who I quickly learned had thoughts of helping the world but was afraid to. She said she had the fear that she would get so attached to whatever cause she took up that she would never be able to give up, and would get completely burned out in the process.  I understood her hesitations completely.

In Serbia, when you think of the poor, you think of the gypsies that are always begging on the streets in Eastern Europe. When we told her about our documentary and how we wanted to film stuff having to do with poverty, the first people who came to her mind were the gypsies. The second thing that came to her mind was how she didn't trust them and thought most of them were criminals and thieves. She pretty much refused to take us to one of their villages.

Over the next two days, Veda saw how persistent we were to go to one of these villages. She started making calls to friends who had done some work with the gypsies. She got word of a village near the market that we had already planned on visiting, but she assured us, "If I feel the least bit uncomfortable, we are leaving!" So that next day we went to the town market and saw Gypsy people selling all kinds of stuff they had found in the trash. I bought a little stuffed monkey for 15 cents because David insisted I needed a mascot for my backpack. The market was filled with dirty little puppies being sold by dirty looking people, but all of us knew we needed something a little more intense.

After leaving the market, Veda couldn't get a hold of her friend who knew about the village and was forced to go ask some police officers if they knew where it was. When she went to talk to the police officers, they basically ignored her.  Another man randomly walking by overheard her and said that he knew the President/Chief of that Village and he suggested we just walk in and ask for him.

When we approached the village in Veda's car, it was clear that this was not a village, but a full out slum. Both Rob and Veda were very nervous, I was a little nervous, and David not really at all. (That's usually how it breaks down in every situation.) We creeped into the slum and people were definitely staring us down. We approached the center of the village, asked for the President, and were taken to his makeshift house. He was ecstatic that we had come and gave us an interview for about 45 minutes. Then he escorted us all around the village: took us into dusty homes, had little kids breakdance for us.  He also showed us the school he was building, his little dinky radio station, and TV studio. We got unlimited access into this village.  The whole time Veda was surprised at how well she was translating and got more and more comfortable as the day went on. It became not about just being a good host to her poverty craving, American filmmakers, but it was becoming her own cause.

Towards the end of our time, the people made us coffee and we chatted about poverty and America.  Then we watched footage from their village beauty pagaent. One man from the village came by and was so excited that we had come because we cared about the poor. It was so backwards, we felt like we should have been the thankful ones for them letting us into their lives, but it was the other way around. They just wanted to know that they were not "forgotten."

As we left the slum that day, I asked Veda what was going on in her head because I saw her mind racing.  It was the same look that I had after visiting Africa for the first. She hadn't even know these people existed in her small city. (Quick note: The people we met were actually not gypsies. For the most part, they were a different people group called the Ashkali.  They had fled Albania after having their homes burned, suffering from genocidal attacks by the Serbian government under Milosevic.) So many of her predjudices disappeared during those last few hours, and she was asking herself how she could get involved in that slum. She started recalling the dreams she had been too afraid pursue just days earlier. Her passion was to build sustainable homes for the poor using her skills as an architect.

As she described these new developments in her heart and mind on our drive back to her house, David and I looked at each other and we both had the same looks on our face.  "This is what Give A Damn? and Speak Up International are all about...connecting those who need something to live for with those who just need something to live!"   "Give A Damn?" is a humorous, adventurous, and compelling documentarythat will inspire and lead young people to get involved in themovements to end extreme poverty and fight injustice.

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