Food
for Thought
By Coleen Hedglin
A
Haitian proverb states, Bondye bay, men li pa konn separe,
meaning, “God gives, but he doesn’t divide it
up.” The job of distributing his gifts seems to be
left up to us, the proverb suggests.
We’ve
read many statistics; we’ve seen photos; perhaps we’ve
traveled, and we know, or at least we’ve heard of,
the situation at hand: the rich are getting richer, and
the poor, poorer.
You
might think that I’m going to continue here by describing
the startling differences between life in the Two-thirds
World and life in developed countries. You might think,
then, that I’ll go on to say that the answer to this
problem, for those of us who are not poor, is to give away
money to the poor. I’d rather tell you about a problem
I have: I’ve learned that giving money to someone does
not necessarily liberate either of us. Two recent experiences
illustrate this for me.
Rose
Marie is my neighbor. She came by last week to ask me for
fifty gourdes (Haitian currency worth about $2) to
help with her family’s needs. I had the money, so I
gave it to her. Now, when I think about it, it’s only
by a series of chances that I have access to the resources
that I do, and that she has access to so much less. Maybe
that’s the reason I don’t feel liberated after
giving her the fifty gourdes that she needs. And, as Rose
Marie began to thank me profusely, cowering before me in
gratitude for my “act of kindness,” telling me
how God will bless me for my generosity, it couldn’t
be more clear to me that she has not been liberated by this
experience.
Is
the solution to not give Rose Marie the fifty gourdes?
Will that solve the problem? Let me tell you about another
friend.
Judith
scowled at me recently when I apologized for not paying
back the fifty gourdes she had loaned me a couple
of weeks earlier. Then, giggling as she walked away from
me, she added, Menm nou menm nan, meaning, “We’re
one and the same,” because the fifty gourdes
just doesn’t matter and we’re all one and the
same family anyway. This experience was liberating.
So
why is liberation absent from one experience and present
in another?
It
seems to me that our liberation from money lies in our attitudes
about it. St. Paul seemed to be addressing this question
when he wrote the church in Corinth, seeking funds from
the church in Corinth for Christians who were suffering
economic hardship in Jerusalem. He wrote:
...Give
according to your means. Provided there is an eager desire
to give, God accepts what a person has; God does not ask
for what someone does not have. There is no question of
relieving others at the cost of hardship to yourselves;
it is a question of equality. At the moment your surplus
meets their need, but one day your need may be met from
their surplus. The aim is equality; as Scripture has it,
“The man who got much had no more than enough, and
the man who got little did not go short.” (II Corinthians
8:12-15)
Paul
was quoting from Exodus 14, where God sends the life-sustaining
manna to the Israelites en route from Egypt to the Promised
Land. They discovered in their daily gathering of this bread
from heaven, that if they gathered more than what they needed,
or tried to hoard it, it spoiled.
I
think a Haitian proverb applies here: Manje kwit pa gen
mèt, meaning, “Cooked food has no owner.”
It dawned on me that this is how Judith viewed those fifty
gourdes—like cooked food on the dinner table.
Imagine we’re at the table. I ask you to pass the beans.
As you pass me the beans, both you and I are clear about
the fact that those beans are no more mine than yours. At
the same time, we’re both going to take an amount of
beans we need, not more, so that everyone who needs beans
at the table receives them. We share because we are in an
equal relationship with one another by the mere fact that
we sit around the dinner table together.
Because
of the absence of this attitude of equality, the poor and
the wealthy are caught in particularly enslaving relationships.
It is often a first reaction of many visitors to Haiti to
want to give of their surplus. And it is often the first
reaction of many Haitians they meet to ask the visitors
for money. Decades of experiences of giving and receiving
that don’t emerge from equal relationships have caused
this. Relationships are often defined by first acts of giving
motivated by pity or guilt or maybe self-righteousness,
fostering feelings of inferiority and superiority, helplessness
and control, dependency and patronization, perpetuating
the ever awkward and enslaving relationships that inhibit,
even block, liberation. Finding ways for both parties to
see redistribution of resources like passing the beans might
be one step in leading towards liberation. But first, everyone
must equally understand and exercise their right to sit
around the dinner table.
One
of the first things I tell visitors who come to Haiti as
part of our Transformational
Travel delegations goes something like this: “This
experience is not about guilt. It is not about pity. This
experience is about learning new truths about ourselves
and about our world. It is about making new friends and
recognizing our connected-ness with others in very different
places. And, it’s about sparking meaningful change
in our lives, change which is motivated by these new truths,
change which is motivated by love and respect for self and
others.” It’s about learning how to pass the beans,
and how to have them passed back. After all, they’re
just beans.
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