Sorry it's taken me a few days to get to writing again, the internet here goes in and out and it's taken a few days to get into a schedule with the time changes and everyone settling in! I did make it to Cape Town safely, after a long two-day journey! I promise that I will be posting pictures as soon as I can, when I have the time (and internet capacity) to upload them!!
It's hard to sum up my first impressions of this place. I guess the first thing is how absolutely beautiful it is here. The entire city is overshadowed by Table Mountain, and surrounded by ocean on three sides. Driving around the city, sometimes you look up and the view takes your breath away. It is unlike any city that I have ever been to. (I promise that I will be posting LOTS of pictures as soon as I get the chance to upload them!)
Cape Town is a lesson in extremes. Today was our first day of work, and it summed this up quite well. We are staying at a lodge in the upper-class section of the city, which is very safe and quite wealthy. (Apartments nearby are available for 1,500,000 Rand, or about $150,000). Driving through this area, we saw several fancy cars, nice apartments and buildings, and well-dressed people going about their business. After we drove through downtown and began toward the outskirts of the city, we saw the houses getting smaller and more hastily-built. Soon we arrived at Crossroads, the largest squatter settlement in Cape Town. On the right side of the van, you could look out the window and immediately see rows of crowded, dilapidated shacks. On the left side, however, the road and the shacks were separated by a large construction site that seemed to go on as long as the settlement did. We asked Neville, our driver, what the construction was for. He said that they were building nicer apartments and homes along the roadside, "to put up a better front."
How many times do I do this in my own life? On the inside I may be impoverished, starving, and barely holding on to survive. But I create a chasm between the real me and the world around me, building a facade to hide my desperation. I appreciate authenticity and honesty, yet I'm definitely a person who tries hard to have it all together, or at least come off that way to everyone else. How would my relationships be different if I allowed people to see behind the walls? But this isn't even what got to me.
As we were driving through Crossroads, I looked out at the cars on the highway nearby, and saw a fancy car (I know next to nothing about cars, so don't ask me what kind it was specifically). I can't imagine living in Cape Town as a wealthy person and driving my fancy car down these streets. Seeing people who don't know where there next meal is coming from, as they're on their way to a fancy restaurant or shopping trip. Encountering the "least of these" from the comfort of their plush leather seats at 65mph.
But I can't even say "they," like I have no responsibility in this. Don't I drive by poverty all the time? Even though I live in a nation where people are much more fortunate than the people living in Crossroads, I encounter the poor almost daily (and if I don't they're only a few blocks away). But what am I doing to help the people around me? One of the other students on the trip was talking later, and said the poverty didn't hit him until we were on our way home. We may be going into the settlements every day, but we always know at the end we have a hot shower and meal waiting for us. We have clean clothes, a warm bed, and safe water. We have an "escape" that many of these people have never, and will never, know. It's hard to grapple with the fairness of this. What makes me deserve such a privileged life when these people have nothing?
The truth is, there is nothing that makes me deserve anything that I have, or that puts me in a beautiful home in Massachusetts while they are in a Cape Town shack. God has blessed me so much with the things that I have, and has blessed me still more with the opportunity to love people in poverty. I feel compelled to do what I can to help them, and am so honored that they would let me be a part of their lives.
"There is one who pretends to be rich, but has nothing; another pretends to be poor, but has great wealth." --Proverbs 13:7
No comments:
Post a Comment