Tag: generosity

Beyond the Myth of Scarcity

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Thanksgiving is coming up this week, and yesterday SheLoves magazine published a piece I wrote about my childhood memories of Thanksgiving dinner and the cultural myth of scarcity that I grew up with. In light of world events over the past few weeks–violent attacks and decisions about whether to welcome refugees in the wake of that tragedy or not–the choice between living with a mindset of scarcity or a mindset of abundance has never been more crucial. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Growing up in upper-middle class American suburbia, Thanksgiving was usually the day that we ate so much our stomachs hurt—seconds and thirds and dessert, as much as we wanted, because it was a feast day. And although Thanksgiving was a special meal because it brought my extended family together for a big party, it wasn’t like we were leaving the dinner table less-than-full on other days.  I cannot remember there ever being a time when we did not have enough.

I learned early on—in school and everywhere else—that being successful required that I “get ahead.” I learned that the economy and other national interests needed to be protected at all costs, whether that meant bombing our enemies or building walls to keep them out. If they came in, they might suck away our prosperity, leech off our system or, even worse, threaten the affluence and convenience that we had come to jealously guard as our way of life.

Still, we always had more than we needed–everything in abundance–but we did not believe in abundance. Scarcity, or the threat of scarcity, always cast its shadow over our lives…”

Head on over to SheLoves Magazine to read the rest!

 

Ramazan and Eid

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          We decided to try the fast that first day of Ramazan, just to see what it was like for our neighbors. We set our alarms to wake up at 2:45 am, early enough to make breakfast and eat before the first azan, or call to prayer, reverberates through the the pre-dawn darkness and everyone stops eating or drinking anything for the next 16 hours—until the fourth call to prayer ends the fast a little after 7 pm. It was difficult to do, especially in such hot, muggy weather. We’re used to feeling hungry from time to time, but the most intense thing was the thirst. I was amazed by the way that our neighbors—and especially the women—go about their same routine of housework all day without food or water: scrubbing their family’s clothes, making food for small children or working men in their household who aren’t fasting, hauling water for cooking, bathing, and laundry, walking out in the sun to buy vegetables at the market.

Then, in the early afternoon, preparations begin for aftar (or iftar), the fast-breaking snacks that everyone eats in the evening before going to pray namaz and later having dinner. I spent hours at my friend’s house learning how to make the chana (spicy chickpeas), pakori (onions deep-fried in spicy chickpea flour), tamarind chutney, papar (deep-fried potato chips), and sarbat (lemonade) that people eat at iftar, along with fruit and dates and other tasty snacks. That evening, another family invited us to come over and break the fast with them. The mother of the family waited patiently for the azan, lost in silent prayer, while the younger children restlessly awaited the voice over the loudspeaker that would signal it was time to dig in.  The call rose from the nearest minaret in melodic Arabic, “God is great…” and along with the thousands of others sitting together in their own houses throughout the community, we broke our fast with a date, then lemonade, fruit, and all the deep-fried goodness on the plates in front of us.

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aftar (“iftar” in Arabic), fast-breaking food

          We haven’t fasted since that first day, but we have continued to be welcomed into the celebration of aftar with our neighbors. We’ve tried our hand at making a few pakori ourselves, and we’ve run around delivering fruit and pakori to different families as they send plates of their homemade aftar to our house.

One night, we were invited to the home of a wealthy Muslim lawyer who lives nearby our slum and invites anyone who wants to come—mostly poor people from our community—to eat aftar, biryani, and sweets at his house. Despite our not having fasted and our complete ignorance of how to pray namaz, we were welcomed to eat, to watch, and to talk. That open feast for the poor reminded us a bit of the kind of party Jesus describes in Luke 14:12-14.  Right after that grand feast, we had the experience of breaking the fast in a more humble setting with friends of ours who hadn’t made aftar most nights at all because of the expense. We chipped in supplies and they did most of the cooking, teaching me how to make even more kinds of ramazan treats. I love the patience and the devotion to God, the sacrificial hospitality, and the vigor of celebration that I saw in the way my neighbors observe Ramazan.

          After a full month of fasting came three days of celebration: Eid. In preparation, everyone cleaned their homes from floor to ceiling, painted their houses in bold colors, and decorated with shiny paper with designs cut into it. The women stayed up all night preparing simai (a sugary dessert), pulki (a spicy yogurt curry), and mattar (peas—also spicy), and on that first day everyone dons expensive new clothes and goes out visiting one another, dressed to the hilt. Andy and I ate in fourteen different homes that first day alone, which made us feel very included and happy—but also VERY full, and a bit sick from the ridiculous blood sugar spike that so many servings of simai brought on!
On the second day, we participated in another Eid tradition: big family outings to different parks and attractions around the city. We went with a large family to the zoo, and since one of the sons in the family makes his living as an auto rickshaw driver, all 13 of us piled into his auto for the half-hour trip!  The zoo was, well, a zoo—that’s really the best way to describe the atmosphere of noisy crowds packed in everywhere.  I think at least a hundred other people from our slum must have been there; we ran into people we knew everywhere. It was a lot of fun to go around to all of the different exhibits with these incredibly excited kids (and excited parents) who had never been to a zoo in their lives and were fascinated by each new creature.
          Eid is one of the few times that families in our community get a day off to do something fun together, and the zoo is one of the few fun places in the city that is cheap enough for almost anyone to afford, so we weren’t really all that surprised to see how crowded it was. We were a bit taken aback, though, to see how a giant playground inside the zoo drew even bigger crowds than the animal exhibits—and by the fact that most of the people making use of the equipment were teenage and adult men!
          The third day of Eid was thankfully a bit more low-key, although house-to-house visiting and simai consumption continued. We’re glad to have been able to share another important cultural experience with our friends here, but also tired enough to be happy that all the celebration is over!

The generosity of the poor: friendship at the margins

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          We’ve now spent just over a week in our new community, but it feels like we have been there much longer.  For the first few days, we had a constant stream of children and adults visiting our room, giving us suggestions on how to set things up, watching to see how we would make food, and asking us how much we paid for each thing we brought home from the market (we usually paid too much, and they were sure to let us know!).  One day, to make sure we got a fair price, our landlady took us to the market to bargain for our wooden bed platform.  She drives a pretty hard bargain.  After we bought it, the bed was loaded on top of a cycle rickshaw, we sat on top of it with our landlady’s 10-year-old daughter, and the three of us rode down the main road all the way back to our community, like a slow-moving parade float in the midst of car, bus, and motorcycle traffic whizzing past us!  Slowly, we’re learning how much we should bargain things down in the market, how to knead dough for chapatti with the perfect ratio of water to flour, which spices to crush together for a meat dish.

We’re also getting to know the people who live around us, their families, and their stories.  Many of those stories involve loss, because sisters or daughters have died in childbirth, parents have died in the prime of life from disease, and family members have been injured in accidents or suffer from chronic health problems.  We are amazed by people’s resiliency as they deal with so much tragedy and death, and by the strength of the families here and their ability to care for the orphans, the elderly, and the otherwise vulnerable people among their relatives.  It’s not uncommon to see a single son supporting his mother and sisters, saving up his earnings to pay for their dowries one at a time, or a single mother taking a job as hired help in a rich family’s home to be able to keep sending her children to school.          Andy has spent a lot of time wandering around with the guys in our neighborhood, drinking chai and visiting their workplaces—most of which are recycling-collection stands or workshops where they make beautiful wooden furniture by hand.  I’ve spent a lot of time visiting women, many of whom are literally hidden away from the outside world because cultural tradition, a conservative mother-in-law, and/or fear of sexual harassment (a threat which has some basis in reality but which is also trumped up and used as a means of control) keep them from ever leaving the house.  We’ve both spent time visiting the families who live in crowded plastic and bamboo tents on the alley behind us, several feet lower and closer to the black river which surely expands during monsoon.  As we fill our water drum from the leaky hose in the morning, we watch women and children from that alleyway haul water back and forth by hand in small containers because there’s no morning hose service to their homes, and they’re too close to the sewage canal to dig a well.  And when we head over to our landlady’s back courtyard to use the toilet, we look over a low wall into that same alleyway where we know that there are no toilets at all.

There’s a custom in Indian culture that when guests are invited over for dinner, they eat first while the hosts watch.  The hosts actually don’t eat until after their guests leave.  When we first came to India, we found this an awkward and obnoxious arrangement, but the longer we’re here the more we come to appreciate it.  In our community, a dinner invitation from a poor family is a big gift to begin with.  Offering the guests food first—after you’ve already spent hours preparing it and are feeling hungry yourself—is sacrificial.  You’re making sure that the guests eat until they are full, even if it means that there may not be enough left for you and you may go hungry, and even though you’ve just spent a large percentage of your income on that meal.  In the past week and a half, we’ve already received this sacrificial gift many times over.  We still don’t feel comfortable being given food first, but it has challenged us to give to others more sacrificially than we are used to doing.

The more we learn, the more we realize there is to learn, and we feel honored to be welcomed into our neighbors’ world.  We feel humbled by how much more our neighbors have been able to offer us and to teach us in the past week and a half than we have been able to offer or to teach them.  Coming as outsiders with nothing, as yet, to contribute, we have no claim on their generosity and friendship, much less their patience with our own ignorance and unintended faux paux.  But if grace is undeserved favor, then our Muslim and Hindu neighbors are mediating our Father’s grace to us in abundance, and teaching us a lot about Him in the process.