Sunday, May 30, 2010

Keeping it Out

While there isn’t anything intrinsically just about living in another country, it is a lot harder to come up with a legitimate response to poverty when poverty is no longer calling your name – sometimes literally – when you walk out your front door every morning.

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For whatever reason, it is easier to look down your dusty dirt road and come to the realization that there is someone living within a five minute walk who will go to bed hungry than it is to look down your paved driveway and realize that, if you were to get in your car and drive for ten minutes, you would find the same thing.

In Kenya, where windows have screens and bars but no glass, and closed doors leave a gap a few centimeters from the ground, it’s harder to keep things out and harder to keep things in. But, in America, where our houses seal tightly enough to keep in the AC or the heat, and no one would ever dream of coming to peep in your windows, it becomes easier to pretend that life in our boxes is all that there is. To assume that what happens in our houses, our cars, our schools and offices, is all that there is to reality.

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So, we do things that force ourselves to come face to face with reality. We go on missions trips and watch movies. We read books, and sign petitions, and, sometimes, we do crazy things, because we realize that there is more to life than our box.

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