Rich in our Poverty

By the time we served visitors dinner and cleaned up and got the girls bathed and in bed last night, Matt and I were toast.  But I had 25 English workbooks to grade and Matt had a slew of budget numbers to crunch, so to try to slug through a little better, we put on Chef's Table, a travel documentary slash cooking show.  We graded and crunched and salivated through one of the world's best restaurants in Mexico City (tacos tonight!) and as I half-listened and half-graded, the humble Mexican chef shared a thought-provoking idea with the interviewer.

"Mexico, I think, is a place that is truly rich in it's poverty."

As soon as he said it, the camera panning over a line of street vendors with colorful corns and spices and tortillas and ceramic pots brimming with molo, I thought, YES, that's it.

The cameramen captured the insight well, and so does Haiti.

It's what surprises visitors to Haiti the most, I think.  They come expecting the poverty, thinking that that means desolation and despair and poor people.  They didn't expect the richness--and it seems so contrary, yet it is so obvious--that they spend the week trying to deal with it, trying to accept both ends, trying to understand it ALL together.

We know rich, we North Americans.  We know kiddos with iPads and good schools and stuffed cupboards who are deeply unsatisfied and lost and unhappy.  We know friends who have roofs over their heads and cool air in the summer who have no joy. We know nice roads and clean stores, we know trusting food and running water and electricity and we know that even when we say, "there is nothing for dinner" that there is always, always, always, always, yesterday and tomorrow something for dinner.  We know libraries and trash removal, we know parks and playgrounds, we know private vehicles and sidewalks.  Even if we don't know summer homes and fancy cars, even if we'd never call us rich, we know these things intimately.  We know rich.

Haiti knows rich, too.  Let me tell you the rich Haiti knows, just what I see with just my eyes, just this week so this post doesn't go on for days.

Before the sun is even all the way up, hundreds of thousands of children in our village, across the island, are wobbly-headed under five gallon buckets of cold water, carefully carrying the days' water home before getting ready for the long walk to school, and when I watch them, they are grinning, bright, rich smiles in dark cool morning, chattering with their friends.  I wish I could tell you how many times Lily has watched this and said forlornly, I wish I could do that, too, wish I could really be LIKE them. I never get to get the water in the morning and hang out with my friends at the pump.

On our way home from school Monday, Lily and Sofie laughed with delight at a young boy cutting through the rice fields, as rich with green rice and reflections of blue sky as can be.  Totally naked, he balanced and hopped happily over the dark brown boundaries, and with jealousy they noted how "buns in the sun" must be the best thing in the world.  

I had some used clothes and books and belts and shoes and baby things gathered up from visitors and teams and our family, and yesterday I asked the kitchen ladies to please come take whatever they knew anyone could use, and as if my mud room was Target, they shopped and sorted and giggled and chatted and finally left each with a bag tucked possessively under their arms, kissing my cheek and acting rich.

Judeline and Rujerry sing now as I write, her deep voice and his rich smooth one carrying across the campus, across the village, across the rice fields, rich praise pours from the chapel, from our students.

Ten men from our village work right now under the blazing sun behind me, cutting footers for the new classroom building with machetes and pick axes, dressed in rags and mostly barefoot, and chatting and laughing up a storm as they sweat, rich and overjoyed with work to do.  Though it's hard.  Though it makes them a shade darker.  Though they've already worked in their gardens this morning and though the work would be done anywhere else in a day by heavy equipment.

And if there's a group of women to be celebrated on International Women's Day, it's these rich women.  They work from sun-up to sun-down, (and not Stacey work in workbooks with a cooking show on and a red pen and a heating pad under my back).  They work with strong hands, cooking with recipes never written down, making due with what we would call nothing, nothing, guarding over their children, whom they bore in dark homes with no medical help, like hawks, covering the walls of their woven homes with magazine pictures from magazines I tossed last month, sweeping the dirt floors 'till they are clean dirt in neat sweeping patterns, pouring sweat as they sing Chants d'Esperance, Songs of Hope, and chatter and help with homework without being able to read it, and wash every sock, every shirt, every towel, bent over a bucket by hand and force and if you stop by, if I stop by, if anyone stops by, whatever is in that pot over the charcoal, however little there is, however many people will be eating from it, you're going to be sat down in the only chair and handed the only plate to choke down their only food.

And our students.  Our students, they get up at five Monday morning to find all the tap-taps, to get all the motorcycles to get here in the dust on horrible roads, through ridiculous traffic, and often times, around rioting and manifestations. Then class for hours, then chapel, then lunch, then evangelism, then work-study program for two hours, then dinner, then study hall for two hours, then prayer service for two hours, then bed...over and over and over only to leave on Friday afternoons for weekends.  And weekends is when they work, the kind that they don't get paid for.  Weekends are when they are with their children, with their spouses, weekends are when they pastor one, two, three churches, when they work on programming, when they visit church members who are sick and struggling, when they share the Gospel in their communities, when they preach on Sunday, when they deal with whatever problems came up that week. THAT'S rich sacrifice, that's rich service.  

Micheline, Micheline cares for her five children, her two grand-children, sends money to support her husband in Brazil who's supposed to be sending money home, gets them fed (not cereal or a pop-tart) somehow and washed and ironed and off to school, somehow, and is wiping Nora's runny nose and chasing her across the yard by 7:45am so we can run out the door, and when I come home Nora is giggling and Micheline is crawling on the trampoline with her like a lion.

Haiti blends hot peppers into its peanut butter, for heaven sakes. Haiti crushes all it's cocoa beans into bars of chocolate  by pile, by hand, in it's spare time.  Haiti won't hardly eat a thing without a rich, complicated sauce to pour over it.  Haiti ties out it's livestock, sometimes miles a away, at sunup and brings it into their homes and yards at sundown.  Haiti sews every uniform by hand, Haiti crosses many miles by foot, Haiti carries many burdens on her head, Haiti seems to know every single person she sees and Haiti baffles us all because she smiles and sings while she does it.  

Rich in her poverty.

I love searching for and celebrating the richness, because it doesn't truly boil down to the chocolate, or the spices or the mountains or a cheerful attitude, but to Jesus.

And I love it because I think God does, too.

Man alive, am I a story of His richness in my utter poverty.  Heavens, is it through my weakness that He is strong.  Surely it is in my ashes that He is beautiful, and my shortcomings, so many in His hands, somehow made rich in Christ.  Some wild paradox, for sure.  

As O. Chambers says, it is not up from the wells of human nature that Jesus brings anything of use--He brings them down from above.  "The well of your incompleteness runs deep.  So make the effort to look away from yourself and look towards Him."

Haiti easily takes your eyes off the poverty with the richness of friendship, the richness of generosity, the richness of perseverance, the richness of faith...and I hope that as Christ-followers we easily take the worlds eyes off our gifts and abilities and victories in pale comparison to His almighty richness.

So are we serving out of our weakness or out of His power?  Are we orienting our hearts and minds from what we lack or from what He abounds?  Are we scraping the bottoms of our poverty with despair or are we open-handed, waiting expectantly, faithfully for Him to bring down the richness we need from above?

I hope and pray that I am a place like Mexico, like Haiti, a woman in whom Christ is truly rich in my poverty, and that while people may come expecting to see me and surely be disappointed with what they find, it's HIM in me, Him in Haiti that astounds and meets them and changes them.

And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness...Romans 8:26