after five years, I still don’t feel I’ve developed a good response to the people asking for things. But this particular boy helped me discover why I find these
moments so difficult. He was only asking for a little change. Sure, he meant for me to put a few coins into his hand, but more than that, he wanted a change from having to sleep on the streets, from the frequent fights fending off others who would like the same coins he had in his pocket, a chance to go to school, for a change.

It’s easy to walk through a new neighborhood and drop a few coins into an outstretched hand. But I wrestle
with how to address the immediate needs that a little change can satisfy without undermining or neglecting the bigger changes necessary for building a world where children don’t have to beg for their survival. Short-term and long-term needs battle for our attention. Should we focus limited resources on feeding people who are hungry today or on helping develop the capacity for people to feed themselves tomorrow? Resolving the conflict between our world’s short and longterm needs requires more than incremental changes. What is needed is nothing less than a deep transformation in our societies and in ourselves.

Living in a Haitian community has demonstrated to me that this transformation grows out of relationships and
shared experiences across cultural, racial, and economic borders. As we live together and understand one another’s realities better, we each are changed. Perspectives and possessions we once needed may no longer seem as important, and the deeper needs we may have neglected often become clearer to us. Answers that once seemed obvious are no longer so simple, and problems that seemed without solution begin to open up to new possibilities.

The kind of love that Jesus calls us to will not lead all of us to move to Haiti, but it will inevitably lead us to step out of our comfort zone, to relate to people we might typically overlook, to spend time in neighborhoods we wouldn’t ordinarily visit, to read books that challenge our assumptions and amplify the voices of those we might not hear otherwise. As we share in the lives of those who are different from us, the labels we have used to
classify and distance ourselves from them, tired old words like “poor,” “homeless,” and “beggar,” will disappear from our vocabularies and be replaced with individual names of neighbors who we count as precious
in God’s sight. The kind of transformation we are called to is not a single event. It is something that grows within as we love and live with others who are different from us. The challenge is for us to keep our hearts and
minds open and to live in such a way that those who live and think differently from us can change us.

The little boy in Port-au-Prince that day was right to ask for change… change for himself and change for me. I wish the change only amounted to a little pocket money. From now on I will see this boy’s outstretched hand as an invitation to a relationship, to the kind of relationship that can transform me and transform our world.


Kris Stoesz is on staff with Beyond Borders there. She is an experienced elementary school teacher and is currently focusing on the development of Haitian teachers.