No, I'm not ending my Lenten discipline 2 weeks early (although my food cravings really want me to). When I finish writing this, I need to put together a presentation for my church on global hunger issues, as part of a hunger dinner in support of the Asian Rural Institute. I get 10 minutes to explain global hunger and my work in Uganda. Suggestions?
In 10 minutes, what can I say? I can explain where hunger is, as I've done in the past couple of days. I can talk about why hunger is, as I've done in previous weeks. I think the most important thing, though, is to make people understand why they should care.
This goes back to the LFD method I mentioned last week (or meant to, maybe it didn't go up until this week). The middle step is crucial, feeling for the people who experience hunger. Too many times, I think, we ignore what we don't experience ourselves. There was a good quote in the preface to Killing the Wizards (I need to read the rest of that book sometime) about how we could deal with privations because we knew they would end some day, we could look forward to returning to civilization. Most hungry people can't. How well can we feel for them, these people who struggle daily to meet needs we forget? We can only try.
I've been reading On Liberty lately (I enjoy nonfiction at the gym, it keeps me at the right level of distraction to get the best workouts). One of the biggest points Mill makes is that we need dissension in order to keep our beliefs from becoming rote actions. Maybe we need shocks to our understanding, to our comfortable lives, to keep our feelings from becoming shallow motions. Maybe I can provide some sort of shock to the people at the dinner Sunday.
In 10 minutes.
Or maybe I can show them some pretty pictures, satisfy their desire for liberal warm fuzzies, and send them on their way full and happy. The original plan for the hunger meal (not that I was involved at this stage) was to have what I've heard of other places: people are assigned nationalities and given some facts about what their life would be like. Food is portioned according to the socioeconomic status you have been assigned, from a spoonful of rice to a Happy Meal. Our head pastor vetoed that plan as unfair.
Umm . . . yes. Unfair. Uh huh.
Instead, we're having a lentil and rice dish with a dessert of cookies, but not enough per table to serve everyone. Not quite as strong. And we only have 30 minutes, which gives me 10, 10 to ARI, and 10 to discuss the cookie thing. Not much time to sum up global hunger.
In other words, I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do. Hopefully I'll come up with something.
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1 comment:
Beck,
I have been reading your discipline and have been impressed with the clarity of your thought and also with its simplicity. I would love to get others to read it as well.
So here is my reaction.
I am overwhelmed with the enormity of the problem. You would have us learn and yet I don't know where to begin (Other than with your blog). We should evaluate so many different programs, and yet I feel that I haven't the resources to do that properly. We should feel for those whose lives are so different from ours that the feeling cannot really leave the intellectual realm. How do you put it in context? And then we should do. What does that mean? Is our best effort in this affluent society to live green and earn as much money as possible so that we can send it to some organization that will do the work for us? Do we all get passports and go for a week on a short term trip (and accomplish what in the long term?)? Do we write letters and lobby Congress (can our voices be heard over those of the special interests?). This is your struggle - we all have our own immediate problems. Sometimes we can deal with them and sometimes we can't. When there is a problem outside of that realm that is so overwhelming in scope and so baffling as to solution, it is easy to set it aside and not do anything, or do just a little to make ourselves feel better. How do we make positive action simple, possible, dare I say easy?
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