You can see the poverty in pictures and even hear it in the media on rare occasions, but here poverty takes on a face and a name, and no matter how much you want to you can't change the channel or mute it or put on something that makes you feel better about yourself. It becomes a living, breathing, hurting person with a story, to sum it up, it becomes real. You can shake their hand and look them in the eyes, you can talk to them, and the people who make up poverty will smile and talk back to you, it goes from "being someone else's problem" to standing there asking you for a little money to make it through another day
Being here has greatly changed my perspective on the stories where Jesus heals the men with Leprosy, it' so easy to read about the diseases and think about how terrible it is, but it's a completely different thing to come and see see the men and women whose hands are permanently closed in a fist, or who have lost their limbs and appendages to this disease. It's heart breaking to meet the people who have lost fingers or toes because they have no feeling and didn't know that they were losing that body part to an accident or having a rat chew it off. To see it and finally understand why they were exiled and why nobody wanted to see them and why they had to be beggars opens a the story to a whole new dimension.
We've been trying to get the supplies together so that I can begin to set up an electric fence for the hospital and it's been more difficult to get the supplies then I ever would have imagined. They have nothing like a Home Depot, Lowes, or Menards. It's all shops that are individually ran with very limited supplies and it can take you a whole day just to find a shovel. It's absolutely mind blowing to how easy things are in America, we have whatever we want in one place the majority of the time and if we don't it's easy to figure out where you have to go to get it. Not so here, you go to one shop and ask, if they don't have it go to the next shop and so on. It's so easy to spend the whole day looking for one thing that you can walk into a store and get in 5 min in the US.
It's amazing how you can be in one of the most densely populated places on on earth and feel completely alone, you're surrounded by people every day yet only a fraction on them can understand what your saying and only a fraction of that fraction can communicate back with you. I never quite understood what people said when they said they were surrounded by people but they still felt alone until I came here. It's a totally helpless feeling, that you can do nothing to change, where you are completely reliant on God for everything and you learn to take a true joy in his presence. But even with that assurance that He's always right there with you and will never leave you is easy to forget sometimes, and it's a daily challenge to run and engross my self in the internet, movies or computer, because with those it's an easy way to pass the time and it's an American comfort, but in doing that you rob yourself of so much of the experience, when you're sitting and looking at a computer screen all day you miss the beautiful sunset over the mountains. When you're listening to music all the time you miss the songs of nature that are being sung around you by the animals and the elements. But most of all you miss the people, you become so distracted by things that you give up trying to interact with people all together. Instead what has to be done is the times you do feel alone let the emptiness consume you, let it fill every corner of your being, let it saturate every place and then simply let God take over that empty space. Focus on what he has done for you, focus on the ways He's brought you through the other times that we in our human, finite reasoning deemed as "impossible." This is so easy to say, yet next to impossible to do especially in America. That's one of the biggest reasons I'm glad I was brought here, was to be broken of my comfort. Yes it hurt, it hurts more than anything I could ever have comprehended before I came here. But what happens in that pain and sorrow is amazing.
The best way to describe it is through weight lifting. You can lift weights comfortably so that you never feel any pain, but in doing so you don't make much, if any progress because you never push yourself. But if you lift until it hurt, if you push until you can move, the results come alot faster. In the same way we can go through life being comfortable and never pushing ourselves we grow a little here and a little there but never enough that anybody would ever know. But when you are willing to go into those times of pain in order to grow, in order to get stronger the outcomes cannot be fathomed
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