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Eric in Bolivia
 She stood on the packed mud floor of a mud and straw brick hovel. Her children clustered around, clutching at her skirts. Outside, the early summer temperature was already quite high. It could rise as high as 36 degrees Centigrade. At nights it would plummet to 0 degrees Centigrade. There was no fireplace in the single living room, and no electricity. Water had to be fetched from a hundred metres away. Her husband was sick, but walked several kilometres every day to a back-breaking job that paid just enough to keep the family alive.A single home-made ladder led to the upper room. The whole family slept up there on the floor. The daily meal would be cooked over a wood fire in the open-air hearth outside, or over the single gas ring linked by a tube to the Calor gas cylinder. There were five of us visiting. She had done her best to clean up, and the family’s best blanket had been spread along a single plank balanced on bricks to form a seat for her guests. The family’s entire wardrobe of clothes was bundled over two ropes, hanging across the corners. We learned that she was about 25. She looked 45. Her name was Concepcion. Her eastern Andean origins showed in her coppery colour and high cheek bones. But it was her eyes that got to you. There was so little hope there. Only when she talked about the two children who were sponsored by first-world Christians did the burden lift a little. When one of us asked gently ‘Is there anything special we can pray for, for you?’ her voice became strangled by the attempt to hold back her tears. Through the interpreter she said ‘I would like to be able to own this house and the land that goes with it – but I do not see how that could be.’ We learned that tenants who stay in a property for 10 years automatically gain the right to the land, so the landlord moves them on in the ninth year. When we asked how much it would cost to buy the property, we were told the princely sum of £2,000 would do it – just £2,000. I am a bloke. A bloke from a prosperous first-world country, where we worry about the stability of our banks, our mortgages and the prospects of the England football team ever winning anything. Suddenly my concerns seemed stupid, shallow, selfish. It was like God was saying ‘Open your eyes, Eric. This is the stuff that breaks my heart. When is it going to touch yours?’ I am a bloke. I have never had much time for the guilt-mongers: the bleeding hearts and their collecting tins. But now I was face to face with human need, with the poverty that blights the lives of little children and grinds the poor into the ground. Oh, they manage – they have to. It’s what they do. But don’t let’s excuse ourselves with the fondly maintained illusion that they are ‘happy with their lot’. It is breaking them down – human beings like you and me. Made in the image of God. I sponsored two more children. It really was the least I could do. I returned sobered. Ashamed of a Christianity that justifies us in our affluence and does not compel us to generosity. We have got so much . . .and we give so little. Fellows, it is time for us to get involved. We really can make a difference. Church is boring because it’s all words – we never do anything. It is time to change all that. Sponsor a child, go on a mission trip. Open your eyes and start to agitate for a church that makes a difference where it counts – among the poorest of the poor. Maybe there we will meet Jesus – the real, authentic, down-to-earth Son of God. After all, didn’t he say ‘When you did it to the least of these my brothers, you were doing it to me’.
Eric went to Bolivia with Compassion International.
To sponsor a child through them, go to www.compassionuk.org
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Eric Delve, 19/10/2009 |
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