Ran across some interesting articles in the BBC NEWS this morning.
I'm learning a ton about the roots of ethnic strife in China and all that's blazing hot and ugly in the streets these days; but that got me thinking about other instances of ethnic strife, and that got me searching for news from my adopted homelands--Hungary, Ukraine, Croatia, Romania, Bosnia, Serbia...Eastern Europe in general.
So I found this article on the Roma. Check it out at this link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8136812.stm
It gives an interesting snapshot on their ethnic and cultural history and does a graphic job of speaking to the kind of heavy-handed hate they've been trampled with through various European eras.
For centuries, the Roma people's nomadism has marked them as shifty, deceitful, lazy, suspicious, other. In fact, in the throw-down with the Turks in the Ottoman wars, other Europeans often branded them as Turkish spies. This sparked the first widespread Roma genocide in Europe in which the Roma people were viciously hunted, humiliated, and butchered. (The article mentions everything from head-shaving to ear-slicing to forced sterilization.)
It's a sordid history, one that doesn't get a lot of face time in high school and college history classes.
It's also a sordid reality that's just beginning to get face time in world news reports and political summits.
You should really read the whole article--it's a fast read, and I promise you'll learn something. (I did.)
Join me in perusing the worlds news for a bit--there are so many human stories we need to start investing in (our time, money, service, prayer, whatever). But it all starts with tuning in, listening to the story, and sharing it with your neighbors.
Thanks for reading.
Come back again soon.
7.11.2009
7.08.2009
FADED LEVIS AND TAILORED BLAZERS
I'm working in downtown Grand Rapids this summer, on South Division Avenue. The area is still developing, and I always find it an ironic juxtaposition to walk down Weston and see the fixed up facade and foundation of Rockwell's (a local bar and grille) smushed up right next to this torn up, forsaken, sagging space next door. The building is actually leaning and crumbling, as if a good kick in the bottom right corner would send it tumbling right down into dust.
Dust.
Each morning, I pass a few stony churches, a cheap motel, the friendly lime-vested security guard by the hospital, and a couple of ministries for the homeless and unemployed in Grand Rapids. I nod to the man slinking along in faded, tapered Levis and an 80s-style track jacket, plastic bag slung over one elbow.
Sometimes he nods. Usually he just walks on.
There's a couple of dudes and that one lady who hang out on the cement steps in front of the motel, smoking cigarettes early before the heat hits and their street gets busier.
I like mornings.
They feel right.
I also like my job. I work for an independent consultant who specializes in diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency--basically, he's working for social justice in the corporate sphere, and I get to write for him. I'm thankful for the job, and I'm learning a lot (more on that another day).
But some days, I head into the office to write for a bunch of our clients who are sealing and dealing, swapping and gambling on millions of bucks in corporate America and I wonder what the heck I'm doing. Because, despite the relevant and purposeful work that I think we're doing, that I think corporate America needs, it's just a world that doesn't jive with me.
Some days I can hardly stand it.
Some days I just want to scream--It doesn't matter!! Dust to dust, man! Your money, my pride, all of our foolishness--dust! The money makes me sick some days--it's just a bunch of arbitrary numbers and dirty coins and crumpled papers that we toss around, that we use to make some people powerful and some people powerless.
Not that money can't be used well. But most of the time it just seems like a gluttonous mess.
It just that my mornings make such an uncomfortable juxtaposition between the scraping by and the smooth sailing, by some people scrambling after coins in the street while others are bathing in riches, by some people people sporting goodwill track jackets and plastic bags and others tailored blazers and BlackBerrys.
It bugs me.
But I'm glad it does, because I'd be much more worried about my future if I didn't feel sick sometimes at that kind of weighty imbalance.
Instead, I've got an itch for a world that isn't so sadly comical. In that world, maybe the corporate gurus walk out of their offices someday and go take the dudes and that one lady on the street for lunch. In that world, these people might just start to care about each other. In that world, we might see the super-privileged begin to heave some of the heaviness off the underprivileged and the scale might just shift a bit closer to even. A bit.
It's my job to help make that world a reality.
Dust.
Each morning, I pass a few stony churches, a cheap motel, the friendly lime-vested security guard by the hospital, and a couple of ministries for the homeless and unemployed in Grand Rapids. I nod to the man slinking along in faded, tapered Levis and an 80s-style track jacket, plastic bag slung over one elbow.
Sometimes he nods. Usually he just walks on.
There's a couple of dudes and that one lady who hang out on the cement steps in front of the motel, smoking cigarettes early before the heat hits and their street gets busier.
I like mornings.
They feel right.
I also like my job. I work for an independent consultant who specializes in diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency--basically, he's working for social justice in the corporate sphere, and I get to write for him. I'm thankful for the job, and I'm learning a lot (more on that another day).
But some days, I head into the office to write for a bunch of our clients who are sealing and dealing, swapping and gambling on millions of bucks in corporate America and I wonder what the heck I'm doing. Because, despite the relevant and purposeful work that I think we're doing, that I think corporate America needs, it's just a world that doesn't jive with me.
Some days I can hardly stand it.
Some days I just want to scream--It doesn't matter!! Dust to dust, man! Your money, my pride, all of our foolishness--dust! The money makes me sick some days--it's just a bunch of arbitrary numbers and dirty coins and crumpled papers that we toss around, that we use to make some people powerful and some people powerless.
Not that money can't be used well. But most of the time it just seems like a gluttonous mess.
It just that my mornings make such an uncomfortable juxtaposition between the scraping by and the smooth sailing, by some people scrambling after coins in the street while others are bathing in riches, by some people people sporting goodwill track jackets and plastic bags and others tailored blazers and BlackBerrys.
It bugs me.
But I'm glad it does, because I'd be much more worried about my future if I didn't feel sick sometimes at that kind of weighty imbalance.
Instead, I've got an itch for a world that isn't so sadly comical. In that world, maybe the corporate gurus walk out of their offices someday and go take the dudes and that one lady on the street for lunch. In that world, these people might just start to care about each other. In that world, we might see the super-privileged begin to heave some of the heaviness off the underprivileged and the scale might just shift a bit closer to even. A bit.
It's my job to help make that world a reality.
6.26.2009
FINGER-PAINT IS SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON
I’ve been toying around with some dreams in between daily life stuff.
Bear with me as I sketch some of it out...and thanks in advance for sticking with me through this post--I promise it's important.
I promise this blog won't be all about Hungarian adventures, but, the fact is, those adventures excavated some serious life goals that I didn't even know were simmering way down deep. Soul-stuff. Sticky-stuff. The kind of stuff I can't let go...stuff God won’t let me let go.
Every day since November, I think about this little Ukrainian girl named Japuca. Here’s how it started:
We rattled up to this sketchy, communist-bloc-type children's hospital and wound our way up through stale and sickly smells to the abandoned children's wing. There were ten or eleven cribs in the three rooms we were in--none bigger than a small bathroom--and the kids were pretty much Roma kids. Gypsy kids. Dark hair, if they had any, deep dark eyes, and too many scars.
Yeah, the Roma people have scars.
See, the Roma sort of get shoved to the reeking outskirts of every city and country, glean what tin or wood or leftover stuff they can, then slap together their own ghettos out of everybody’s way. There’s this huge racial stigma that goes back about a thousand years, back to when they were known for being nomads and musicians and whatnot. People take one glance at their swarthier skin and spit out all kinds of hatred. It’s sick. I won't go into a bunch of detail today about all the institutional racism in Europe against the Roma--legislation, education, healthcare--just know that they don’t belong anywhere. So they scrape by together, anywhere they can.
So they’ve got, like, zero resources and a bunch of kids; so if you're a mom, what do you do? You think, "Hey, if I drop my kid off at this hospital for a while, she might get at least one meal a day, which is something I can't give her." (There are a lot of other reasons for abandonment too, but this is a huge one.)
So the kids just kind of show up there.
The children’s hospital is understaffed and under-resourced too, so there are barely enough nurses to change diapers and get everyone fed each day--which means each kid probably gets less than five minutes a day with another human being, unless you count the moaning or cooing or spitting up of the other babies in the room.
So we students just decided to love on them for a while.
I like kids, but I’m actually not that great with babies; while some people’s motherly instinct goes into full roar in a roomful of babies, that’s not me. But this was different, because Japuca was important to me right away.
They told us not to pick her up because recently she'd been hustled out of the hospital, horribly beaten up by her dad, then deposited at the hospital again. She had a lot of bruising and a bunch of scabs all over, especially on her head. But with all the other babies being toted around, you could tell she just had to be picked up too. So the nurses nodded an okay and pretty soon I was holding this baby girl in these pilly maroon fleece pants and a pilly pink sweatshirt.
She was beautiful.
Her eyes were like dark copper, and she was mostly bald. She didn't talk, just beamed at me as wide as her little mouth would stretch while we all talked and cuddled and sang kid-Jesus-songs and rapped to Flo-Rida. (It was a good mix, okay?)
Her legs were really bowed and stiff, more like stilts than baby-legs, so I was worried about trying to help her walk. But Jordan helped us, and we cheered as she sort of slid around in forward motion, both of us hanging on tight and supporting her body. She was so excited.
Japuca was about the size of a 10-month-old, maybe a year, I don't know. But her face looked older, so I checked the date on her crib: 7/7/05.
Japuca was three.
See, in the first five years of our lives, babies get cuddled and cooed at and passed around church fellowship halls until their moms are sure they caught some horrific virus; and eventually they start to toddle around and mumble baby-things; and then they get into learning games and puzzles and Memory; and even when their parents want to blow their brains out after playing Candy Land for the umpteenth time in a day, they are learning. Their synapses are crackling and all kinds of cognitive pathways are being formed. And they’re hearing words and learning to walk. And they're remembering mom’s and dad’s faces, and they’re getting love and attention all over the place.
The problem for Japuca is about much more than having enough food or clean diapers or cough medicine. The problem is, nobody is loving on her or being goofy with her or singing to her. So we did with a fierce passion for a while--I don’t know how long--couple of hours.
And then we had to go.
She was still beaming at me.
I had to put her in her crib while she whimpered and clawed at the wooden bars (which are totally not safe for babies and were banned in the US, which is why they have them in the Ukraine). And my friend Debbie was putting her baby Ivan in his crib too, and we had to leave; and it was like somebody was ripping into my lower intestines and throwing all my guts on the floor and then stomping on them and then pouring lighter fluid on them and then burning them in a great big pile in the dirty cement hallway. Yeah, it felt like that.
And they were screaming as we left and the screams were just echoing through those awful empty stairwells as we sprinted down the stairs and out the door. And I didn’t think I’d ever breathe again. Because, suddenly, it only felt right to breathe the same air as Japuca and all those kids, even if it stank and nothing was very pretty.
It felt wrong to leave.
And nothing will feel quite right until I go back.
And I will go back. I will bring friends, and we will play as long as we want (maybe forever?), and there will be finger-painting involved.
We can play all kinds of puzzles and Duck Duck Goose and sing-songy things and rhyming games, but mostly I think we will finger-paint. Because every childhood should involve finger-painting. And somehow I think there might be a connection between finger-paint and making Japuca smile again and maybe hearing a word or two, even if they are in Ukrainian or Romanian.
This is one of my kingdom-dreams.
Please pray over it.
Pray that God provides the paint and the program and the plane tickets. Soon.
Please pray for the Roma people.
Please pray for the abandoned kids in that Ukrainian hospital.
Please pray with me for Japuca; pray that someone will hug her today. Pray that someone tries to teach her a word. Pray that somebody will take her for a walk outside. Pray that I will get the chance to love her and many others like her again—in a tangible, present, physical way, not just this prayerful, spiritual way.
Dream with me. Pray with me.
Thanks.
Bear with me as I sketch some of it out...and thanks in advance for sticking with me through this post--I promise it's important.
I promise this blog won't be all about Hungarian adventures, but, the fact is, those adventures excavated some serious life goals that I didn't even know were simmering way down deep. Soul-stuff. Sticky-stuff. The kind of stuff I can't let go...stuff God won’t let me let go.
Every day since November, I think about this little Ukrainian girl named Japuca. Here’s how it started:
We rattled up to this sketchy, communist-bloc-type children's hospital and wound our way up through stale and sickly smells to the abandoned children's wing. There were ten or eleven cribs in the three rooms we were in--none bigger than a small bathroom--and the kids were pretty much Roma kids. Gypsy kids. Dark hair, if they had any, deep dark eyes, and too many scars.
Yeah, the Roma people have scars.
See, the Roma sort of get shoved to the reeking outskirts of every city and country, glean what tin or wood or leftover stuff they can, then slap together their own ghettos out of everybody’s way. There’s this huge racial stigma that goes back about a thousand years, back to when they were known for being nomads and musicians and whatnot. People take one glance at their swarthier skin and spit out all kinds of hatred. It’s sick. I won't go into a bunch of detail today about all the institutional racism in Europe against the Roma--legislation, education, healthcare--just know that they don’t belong anywhere. So they scrape by together, anywhere they can.
So they’ve got, like, zero resources and a bunch of kids; so if you're a mom, what do you do? You think, "Hey, if I drop my kid off at this hospital for a while, she might get at least one meal a day, which is something I can't give her." (There are a lot of other reasons for abandonment too, but this is a huge one.)
So the kids just kind of show up there.
The children’s hospital is understaffed and under-resourced too, so there are barely enough nurses to change diapers and get everyone fed each day--which means each kid probably gets less than five minutes a day with another human being, unless you count the moaning or cooing or spitting up of the other babies in the room.
So we students just decided to love on them for a while.
I like kids, but I’m actually not that great with babies; while some people’s motherly instinct goes into full roar in a roomful of babies, that’s not me. But this was different, because Japuca was important to me right away.
They told us not to pick her up because recently she'd been hustled out of the hospital, horribly beaten up by her dad, then deposited at the hospital again. She had a lot of bruising and a bunch of scabs all over, especially on her head. But with all the other babies being toted around, you could tell she just had to be picked up too. So the nurses nodded an okay and pretty soon I was holding this baby girl in these pilly maroon fleece pants and a pilly pink sweatshirt.
She was beautiful.
Her eyes were like dark copper, and she was mostly bald. She didn't talk, just beamed at me as wide as her little mouth would stretch while we all talked and cuddled and sang kid-Jesus-songs and rapped to Flo-Rida. (It was a good mix, okay?)
Her legs were really bowed and stiff, more like stilts than baby-legs, so I was worried about trying to help her walk. But Jordan helped us, and we cheered as she sort of slid around in forward motion, both of us hanging on tight and supporting her body. She was so excited.
Japuca was about the size of a 10-month-old, maybe a year, I don't know. But her face looked older, so I checked the date on her crib: 7/7/05.
Japuca was three.
See, in the first five years of our lives, babies get cuddled and cooed at and passed around church fellowship halls until their moms are sure they caught some horrific virus; and eventually they start to toddle around and mumble baby-things; and then they get into learning games and puzzles and Memory; and even when their parents want to blow their brains out after playing Candy Land for the umpteenth time in a day, they are learning. Their synapses are crackling and all kinds of cognitive pathways are being formed. And they’re hearing words and learning to walk. And they're remembering mom’s and dad’s faces, and they’re getting love and attention all over the place.
The problem for Japuca is about much more than having enough food or clean diapers or cough medicine. The problem is, nobody is loving on her or being goofy with her or singing to her. So we did with a fierce passion for a while--I don’t know how long--couple of hours.
And then we had to go.
She was still beaming at me.
I had to put her in her crib while she whimpered and clawed at the wooden bars (which are totally not safe for babies and were banned in the US, which is why they have them in the Ukraine). And my friend Debbie was putting her baby Ivan in his crib too, and we had to leave; and it was like somebody was ripping into my lower intestines and throwing all my guts on the floor and then stomping on them and then pouring lighter fluid on them and then burning them in a great big pile in the dirty cement hallway. Yeah, it felt like that.
And they were screaming as we left and the screams were just echoing through those awful empty stairwells as we sprinted down the stairs and out the door. And I didn’t think I’d ever breathe again. Because, suddenly, it only felt right to breathe the same air as Japuca and all those kids, even if it stank and nothing was very pretty.
It felt wrong to leave.
And nothing will feel quite right until I go back.
And I will go back. I will bring friends, and we will play as long as we want (maybe forever?), and there will be finger-painting involved.
We can play all kinds of puzzles and Duck Duck Goose and sing-songy things and rhyming games, but mostly I think we will finger-paint. Because every childhood should involve finger-painting. And somehow I think there might be a connection between finger-paint and making Japuca smile again and maybe hearing a word or two, even if they are in Ukrainian or Romanian.
This is one of my kingdom-dreams.
Please pray over it.
Pray that God provides the paint and the program and the plane tickets. Soon.
Please pray for the Roma people.
Please pray for the abandoned kids in that Ukrainian hospital.
Please pray with me for Japuca; pray that someone will hug her today. Pray that someone tries to teach her a word. Pray that somebody will take her for a walk outside. Pray that I will get the chance to love her and many others like her again—in a tangible, present, physical way, not just this prayerful, spiritual way.
Dream with me. Pray with me.
Thanks.
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