At around 8:00 this morning I walked out of my front door expecting to hear the normal morning bustle of wheel barrows, laundry buckets, and young men with machetes talking as they start work. Instead what I heard was an indistinguishable rumble of several voices, a choir of requests occasionally reaching a crescendo when one voice rose above the others. I looked for the voices, expecting to hear news of some recent event in the street. What I saw instead was a crowd of 40 to 50 people, hands stretched out over our compound’s small metal gate. Also lining the gate were 8 to 10 of our workers, walking back and forth, talking to the crowd, and making waving motions.
“Sak te rive (what happened)?” I finally asked, a little nervousness showing in my voice.
Quickly and casually my friend replied, “Yo vle kek ti radio (They want radios).”
This is not good, this is not good, was all I could say in response.
The people had come because they had heard that people from the compound had been given little radios. These radios, which came with a crank flashlight, were given to us yesterday by a team. We had given them out to our workers and the hospital workers, then sent some of the workers home with boxes to discretely share with their friends. But somewhere our plan had gone awry, and word had gotten that there were radios at the Wesleyan compound. Hence the mini mob.
Fast forward two hours. I was at the airstrip in town, which is really a large, clear dust path usually covered in goats. Three North Americans had just arrived with plans to respond to a distress call they’d heard in the States, and we had gone out to give them a ride. They loaded their bags into the bed of the truck while a crowd of 15 or 20 kids mostly under 25 stood nearby watching in the shade of a tiny block building. Once all the stuff was loaded, a single box of water bottles, left intentionally, sat on the ground in front of the group.
There was a moment of stillness.
Then before I knew what happened, pieces of cardboard had been flung in every direction and the crowd of kids were now entangled. Pushing, pulling, and wrestling, they grappled for the bottles. When all the bottles had been snatched up, the group separated, leaving behind 4 flat chunks of what had been a box.
In the midst of it, I had backed uncomfortably into the truck and pulled the door shut behind me. As we pulled away from the airport I shivered. This is not the
Giving in a desperate place, however, is more complex that I ever realized. It takes networking and discretion, wisdom and shrewdness, which we hope will characterize our daily distribution efforts. We get it right much of the time. But sometimes, on an atypical day like today, we’re reminded again of the weight we carry by having resources in this culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment