This Is Their Normal

When our society returns to our "normal," may it be with a lasting dose of compassion for those who live without food, medical care, and education every day.   All the things we are afraid of losing match normal daily life in rural West Africa. Did you catch that?  Our great crisis is their everyday norm.

We can learn a lot from brothers and sisters who only know life without grocery stores, without medical care or hospital beds for the suffering, without easy education for the children, without toilet paper, without plans for tomorrow.  Our brothers and sisters in rural West Africa stare death and hunger in the face daily.....without letting it steal their joy.  Society is built differently when there is a collective understanding that none of us are promised tomorrow.  We are seeing that move within America as we make personal and corporate sacrifices to slow the spread of the virus and its impact on our neighbors and health care system.  Accordingly, there are two lessons we can learn from West African society that are applicable over here right now.

First, check on your people.  Living in a country where money is scarce and uncertainty is high, we learned friends are everything.  Malaria, meningitis, typhoid and other diseases in a place with little medical capacity for complications means they do not take for granted loved ones will have a long, healthy life.  The common phrase when seeing a friend is, "It's been two days!" They like to check-in with each other that often.  (It is the opposite mentality from our idea that "No news is good news.")  Coming from a Western mindset, all this checking-in with friends on a regular basis seemed to hinder productivity....until I could appreciate the richness in their relationships. There is no greater use of time and energy than pouring it into each other.  Work can wait when you don't know what tomorrow holds, check on your people.

Second, what you have is for sharing.  I have written before about my rationing our American food the first year.  I stored brownie mixes in my bedroom so that I could pull them out only when everyone present would appreciate a warm, gooey, sugary slice.  But as I watched the West Africans, I saw they were different.  Their immediate reaction to receiving a special food was to share it.  When we started to live by what we learned, sharing instead of rationing, life was so much better.  Rather than clinched fists, our open hands allowed us to give AND to receive.  We weren't expecting that.  We stopped rationing the brownies and started meeting Jesus in our meals.  We lived with open hands when we had little access to grocery stores so I can say it now: what you have is for sharing.

I am thankful to see our churches and communities coming together in the shared fight against COVID-19.  I hope that after the crisis passes for us, we will continue to be willing to sacrifice because our eyes are open and our hearts are moved for those who live without adequate health care, without nutrition, and without education for their children as their normal.