It's time to finish up with South Africa and move onto what's next. We came home from Cape Town last Monday. I went to Valpo for 3 days where I could process with people who have previously been in the CGE Namibia program. Then I headed home for 3 days. Now I've been in Birmingham for 3 days doing training for Youthworks, which is what I have worked with for the last 3 summers. On Friday, I head to Atlanta with 3 other individuals to lead Christian service trips for the summer. My role is to coordinate several crews of high school youth in sending them to different ministries and service organizations in Atlanta.
This shift has been so busy that I have not had much time to sit and ponder over my experience in Namibia. It was not until last night when I was chatting with a guy from the Youthworks office that I finally "snapped." We discovered that he did the same Namibia program with CGE in 1994, which is nuts because Namibia got its independence in 1990 and South Africa in 1994. He then led a discussion on poverty with the other 70 staff in training. It was incredibly difficult to sit and listen to their perspectives after what I have experienced. Poverty is entirely different in the US as compared to Namibia, but my experience in Namibia has no doubt shook me up when thinking about living in this world with such inequality and injustice.
When I think of poverty now, I can't help but think of it in terms of how individuals not in poverty are the ones causing it. The culture of my own background is the oppressor that takes hope away from those without hope. People in poverty rarely do anything by themselves that puts them into their poverty. And if they are currently making bad decisions that keeps them there, it is our inability to acknowledge their own integrity that pushes them to their habits. What are we doing that is creating this culture of hopelessness in individuals? Why are we not welcoming all individuals? As I walked between bars at night in the downtown streets of Cape Town, I saw individuals who had probably not been acknowledged as a real person created in the image of God. I could visibly see what this had done on the psyche of these individuals. Then I came home and saw the same longing to be acknowledged as a creation of God in the homeless individuals on the streets of Chicago.
You might call me a young idealist from reading some of my writings, but I've have my bouts of unrealistic and unexperienced idealism. yeah...time for me to eat dinner and get back to this later. I have many more reflections about Namibia and I will probably keep this blog going to share my experiences from Atlanta.
