(photo by Lois Clotworthy)
For many years I have pondered the difference between the poverty that the Old Testament prophets raged against and the poverty that Jesus called blessed.
Earlier this month I was in Uganda with a Fitzroy Youth Team visiting the school where we had funded a new building through Fields Of Life, a Northern Ireland NGO. We were in Onialeku a very poor rural area near the city of Arua in the north west of Uganda. I tossed around the poverty dilemma again.
One of the problems in that part of Uganda is that fathers are handing down their one acre of land to three or more sons. The land is dividing up to smaller and smaller plots that make it difficult to make enough for your family. Wars have taken their toll. Parents are uneducated and have to use their own initiative and drive to start schools for their own children.
There is much poverty to rage against. The little pot bellies of the children tell a story of bad diets. Water still needs carried home from wherever there might be a well. One of our activities was the first time children had used glue or finger paints. As for their health clinics… Our family sponsor a child here and it angers me that because of the location of her birth she hasn’t the things my children take for granted.
And yet as I spoke to this community at the Commissioning of the new school building I said that the world calls them poor but that they are only poor in shillings (the Ugandan currency). I had been inspired by the wealth of their faith, the passion, their vision and their hope. Their sense of community. Their resourcefulness and resilience. Their lack of cynicism revealed every time you waved and everybody waved and smiled back.
We, I went on, are wealthy in shillings but as for faith and passion and vision and hope? I think this taught me something of what Jesus meant. I saw the blessings of the the poor.
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