I recently went to the presiding bishop’s summit on domestic poverty in Arizona. It was a wonderful think-tank comprised of people who do all varieties of work combating poverty in the United States. At the start of the meeting the point was made that while the Millennium Development Goals are important there is a need to focus on the poverty and deprivation that continues to persist within our own borders, despite our substantial GDP. This is absolutely true. It also made me sit back and think hard about our very human experience with limited resources and time, and thus our need to carve up how we spend those resources and time.
I am the chair of the executive council committee on HIV/AIDS and in our committee we have this conversation quite often. How much effort should we continue to put into pointing to the ever present but changing face of the AIDS pandemic in the United States? Does focusing on the international pandemic pull attention from the domestic problem and allow people to rest in false comfort of AIDS being ‘over there’? Or is there a way to see the commonality of the problems facing people both infected and affected by HIV in Africa, Asia, South America, our very own Province IX and in the borders of the United States?
In all of these places people face stigma, people face their fears of illness and dying, people struggle for access to healthcare, and family members care for orphaned children and ill loved ones. The magnitude of those particular problems might vary among individuals especially depending on their economic resources, but they are still very present and I believe the church is called to respond to every one of them.
We encounter a similar dilemma with poverty. I have heard people who work on domestic poverty dismiss international aid work as ‘sexy’ and lament the lack of people rolling up sleeves and going into their own backyards. Those comments fail to recognize that many of the problems of poverty are pretty similar in the U.S. and in Africa. I have met some of the loneliest and most deprived people imaginable while working with the homeless on the streets of Boston. And I have seen children alone and starving in Africa. Authentic relationship with each of those people forces us to face their needs which are enormous both materially and spiritually.
Good thing our God is so big and that His economics are all about abundance and love.
We also talked at the summit about having enough faith to dream big and step forward to do the work we are called to do… each according to his or her own gifts. The need of the world can be entirely overwhelming and yet at the root, many of the sorrows that people share across the world are the same. When we find those areas of similarity and focus on the synergy that can come from solving the same problem in different settings – amazing things can happen. When we trust in a God of abundance instead of viewing ourselves as competing for scarce resources or attention, again amazing things can happen. I pray that our church will have a big enough heart to care for people over there and over here.
Dr. Christiana Russ is a pediatrician doing her residency at Boston Children's Hospital, currently working at an Anglican mission hospital in Kenya through a joint arrangement with Children's and the Diocese of Massachusetts. She is also chair of the Executive Council Standing Commission on HIV/AIDS.
When the Democratic and Republican parties meet for their conventions at the end of August and early September, they’ll be unveiling their parties’ new platforms - and we want to make sure that the fight against extreme poverty is an important part of both of those platforms.
