the problem of pain

Not that this thought process is altogether shocking, considering where I am and what I’ve signed up for, but I have (once again) encountered the great (unanswerable?) problem of pain – that is, how there is so much pain in the world, so much suffering, and yet how I believe in a God that is loving, merciful and promised to take care of His children. C.S. Lewis wrote a book on this, and I’m beginning to think I probably should’ve brought it with me.

I think I am guilty of (no surprise here) projecting my views/understanding/academic knowledge onto the third world, perhaps to the neglect of my understanding of the whole person. That is, I tend(ed) to think of poverty in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (basically, that you have to fulfill your base needs for food/shelter before you can pursue things at the top of the pyramid, like self-fulfillment or whatever) and Aristotle’s notion of the political being (kinds-sorta-similar idea).

But I think I did this at the risk of not fully understanding the emotional/spiritual needs of people in poverty. (Perhaps this is inevitably the case when, in a class like the Politics of Development, there are broad stroke assumptions (for the sake of theory) about the situations and needs of huge swaths of people (e.g. those who live on >$1/day).

Ang Tulay is, like I’ve said, designed to help children and adults process their grief. Which means that the small group leaders get an intimate look at what people in local communities have gone through, have dealt with, are currently struggling against.

And I tend to think that if, in North America, your average family struggles with all sorts of things – struggles to maintain a healthy marriage, kids getting along, not getting bullied, having a secure job and income, and a hundred other things – and your average individual in North America deals with all those human emotions/needs for acceptance, love, companionship/friendship, value/worth, purpose, etc etc….

Then how much more are those pursuits complicated with the struggle to stay alive!??!

Everything is intensified, the struggles, emotionally and relationally, become even more indomitable. Crises in marriage turn into women and children fleeing (to what? Overcrowded relatives, where everyone needs to bend their knees when they lay down to sleep, so there is enough room; or to the streets?); crises in employment turn to the use of children to sell hand-crafts on the streets, because people are more likely to be compassionate to children rather than adults; the breakdown of family life because of gambling and alcoholism turns into suicide for parents and fears of abandonment for children.

This may seem painfully obvious, but it was moment for me – that the pursuit of basic food and shelter doesn’t take priority over emotional needs to the point that they are ‘shelved’ until those basic needs are satisfied. Everyone’s heart aches for acceptance and love, regardless of their physical status. (This sounds kind of contrived as I write it, but when you meet families dealing with these struggles, and realize they crave a safe place to talk and someone to understand what they’re dealing with, it hits you with an unbelievable force.)

One of the activities in Ang Tulay, during the session on feelings, is called “color my heart” – basically, each participant is given a paper heart and asked to color it in a way that they feel like represents their emotions/their heart…like, red for anger, black for loneliness, etc etc. One of the participants, a girl (maybe 8 years old?), split her heart in half – one half was colored half happy, half sad; the other half was colored “worried” – the worry, for this tiny child, was that her mom would leave and not return, or that something would happen to her. That hit me like a boatload of bricks – that a child would be so consumed with fear of abandonment. Perhaps it shouldn’t shock me, but when you put a tiny face, a tiny body, a smile, with the story; when you see that child leaving ECCC and imagine what she is returning to, your heart breaks.

After Saturday’s Ang Tulay session, I cooked myself dinner and sat down and realized that I couldn’t really eat. I was really consumed with the sheer enormity of pain in the world – and I thought, I don’t want to listen to any music (everything speaks of struggle, it seemed; and happy music seems contrived); I don’t want to read my book, because it’s about pain; I don’t want to read my bible, because I can’t sort out how God would allow all this pain; I don’t want to talk to anyone, because I know I’ll just start crying; and I won’t be able to sleep, because of all this whirling around in my head.

And a sheer uncomprehension for how the staff here do their jobs – how they confront this pain, the reality for these families, on a daily basis. In a lot of ways, the struggle for me is to figure out how I fit into this.

Following lunch at Ang Tulay, the families who participated where given some gifts – supplies that had been donated a few months back for typhoon relief, but which were just being distributed now – things like sacks of rice, cooking supplies/utensils/pots, towels, pillows, basic clothing, sleeping mats, etc etc. The same girl who had colored her heart with loneliness got a green bouncy ball in her family’s bag and was bouncing around in her seat during lunch, waiting to play with it. When she was finished, I took her outside to throw it around.

(Again, forgive me if this sounds like one of those contrived third-world-missions experiences, but it was a moment for me…)

I have NEVER seen a child so excited about a ball in my entire life. I mean, even in my experiences with children in the third world elsewhere; this kid was all their excitement and more. We threw/bounced the ball back and forth, and she literally couldn’t stop laughing and smiling as we were playing…she was so joyful, so ecstatic, to have something and someone to play with. It was incredible; it made me laugh too, at her sheer joy at catching a green plastic ball, probably worth a grand total of 10 cents. She was so joyful.

I think we threw that ball for the better part of an hour…we started counting how many times we could catch it (in my head, it was how many times we could catch without dropping, but she just kept going up when we dropped it :) and I think we totalled more than 400 in the end (not to mention that I was really impressed by the fact that an 8 year old could count to 100 in ENGLISH?!)

She went home with her mom after all of it; if all goes according to plan, her and her mother will be back next week.

There’s no grand conclusion at the end of this post. I have not solved the problem of pain, I still don’t know how to process a lot of what I’m feeling and encountering (again, no big shock, but still). I am extremely thankful for children and their ability to bring joy; and I’m really thankful for my housemates at PJM, who are able to make me laugh and who I can spend time with just doing nothing and occupying a different mind-space to take a rest from all the madness. And, ultimately, I’m thankful to be here, to be a part of what’s happening, regardless of how much or how little I can contribute.