What is Your Greatest Need?

Tonight I was asked a rather familiar question: What is the greatest need facing Children of the Nations?

Although it's pretty narrowed down at the moment- secondary schools(!)- the question always brings an array of thoughts to my mind- schools, vehicles, internship scholarships, etc...

Nevertheless, I love the question each time it arises. It indicates that someone is considering our kids, someone has taken notice and is willing to take action. Admittedly, often times the problems in Africa or other developing nations are so overwhelming that we become paralyzed. We can be such an all-0r-nothing culture. If I can't do it all, I will do nothing.

We hear the statistics and in hearing them the situations of the subjects (aka people) often become less real to us. It's like Monopoly money. I mean, who really has a stack of 500,000 bills? Just consider the facts below:

• Some 3,000 children die of malaria each day in Africa, one every 30 seconds. (National Geographic, July 2007)
• Malaria is the biggest killer of children under 5. (The Africa Malaria Report)
• Malaria costs Africa more than $12 billion annually. (The World Bank)

Honestly, is it possible to truly understand the above "hard facts," or perhaps more than understand- is it possible to truly feel the impact of such a harsh reality? Wen Kilama, a Tanzanian malaria researcher translated the above statements regarding malaria in this way: "If seven Boeing 747s full of children crashed into a mountain every day, would the world take measures to prevent it?"

Imagine you are walking on a shore full of starfish... :0 Not really.

It's simple, the greatest need for every child in Africa is that we take notice and that we live our lives in light of what we know-- there are great needs to be met and we have the opportunity to be a part of meeting them.

Enter In

Henri Nouwen, in Out of Solitude, a book recording his speech addressing graduates at Princeton University, devotes several pages to the topic of “caring.”  It is from within these pages that I have been greatly challenged in the past weeks.  As an American, as a Type-A, task-driven individual working in Malawi I find that I have often times been compelled by the cure without allowing myself to truly care for the person. 

 Jesus always cared.  He was not afraid to enter into the pain or the need of the individual he was curing.  After years of working in Malawi, I began to attribute my comfort with poverty to the fact that I now know and see the people more than the situation.  But, a good friend who spent a year in Malawi put it best when she said, “They [Malawians] really do constantly know poverty that to me seems like a play they act only to go home and eat food from the Fresh Market or WholeFoods.” 

 After reading and re-reading this chapter, I found myself more cognizant of numerous opportunities to care.  In Malawi, the act of caring often times remains close to the original Greek word “Kara,” meaning to lament. For me, it has meant sitting or standing with a friend or child and allowing myself to feel what they feel and to weep for the things which they weep—an old friend suffering the loss of his baby, a young girl’s childhood replaced by motherhood, a child lacking the most basic of needs.  Because they are impoverished and because babies go hungry and die in the Third World does not remove their pain. 

 We each have the ability to truly care for someone.  I, for one, am beginning to better understand the importance and the necessity of allowing myself to do so.  It has not been easy and it has not been neat.  But, somehow in doing so, I have become acutely more aware of the commonality of our humanity and our common need for a God who can offer hope in the midst of hopelessness.