standard of living

I attended an informal fundraiser for Haiti hosted by my sister-in-law in order to raise funds for Explorers Sans Frontieres last weekend. A friend shared about her numerous trips down to Carrefour, Haiti (Carrefour is about 6 miles south of Port-au-Prince). She lived with a family and spent many months teaching English. She recounted the love, the joy and the generosity amongst the people she lived with and related how the community has been coming together post-earthquake to rebuild.

The media has bombarded us with so many images of suffering, of chaos and of poverty since the Haiti earthquake, a sensational portrayal of a poor backward country: multitudes of impoverished (black) people in need of aid and help from our superior society.

Before we condemn Haiti and its people to our categories of exoticized and backward other as we succumb our personal opinions to the CNN newsfeed, let us remember the richness of the lives of people who live there. I was particular moved by my friend’s reflection on the death of a close friend of hers:

“He didn’t survive the earthquake. He was 30. But I thought to myself at age 30 in Haiti, you’ve already lived a long hard life, but he lived a full life. He experienced so much.” (paraphrase)

A full life. Many of us here in America never live a full life.

I leave you with something from Reason for Being: Meditation on Ecclesiastes by Jacques Ellul:

Let me repeat that the absence of progress does not result in sameness or stagnation. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done” (Eccl. 1:0). These words do not amount to a quantitative or practical assessment, but, as we have said, a judgment concerning being (“What has been… what will be”), and the way people carry out their action- not the means of human action. There is an enormous change in the way Genghis Khan killed (with the saber) and our way (with nuclear bombs), but the behavior pattern is the same. Murder, envy, domination—these do not change. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

To use a classic distinction, we can have (quantitative) human growth, but this does not indicate (qualitative) human development. As noted earlier, we need to look at reality in terms of what God reveals to us. We may live in the “illusion of progress,” but God’s revealed truth shows us what it really amounts to.


* Note: This post was written one or two weeks ago.
** My sister-in-law is involved in another fundraiser for Haiti that will take place on Thursday Feb. 25th at 6:30pm. The event is called Help for Haiti: Beyond Media Coverage and will be held at the Penn Museum.