Dear friends in our supporting churches:
My work as a photographer often involves shooting images of people living through traumatic moments. Whether I'm photographing famine victims in Ethiopia or survivors of a military attack in Central America, or even Pentecostals worshiping in Cuba, my task is to get close enough to capture some of the emotion and drama that people are experiencing. Hopefully I'm not just a voyeur; I do this because I believe it's important for people in the north to understand the often harsh daily reality of people in the south. I interview and photograph people because it's a way for you to get to know them.
There are times when this is difficult, when tears keep me from focusing well. Concentrating on getting the f-stop right only partially distracts me. I often have to remind myself of the importance of the story, and my need to get it right. At times, hiding behind the camera can provide comfort and distance when the sounds and smells of pain could otherwise be personally overwhelming.
I just returned from El Salvador, where I spent several days covering the earthquakes that have ravaged that neighboring country. Once again, my camera served me well there as a shield against succumbing to the personal despair that would be easy to fall into when surrounded by so many thousands of families who have lost everything.
The one moment when my professional defenses broke down was while photographing children in a huge camp for homeless families in Santa Tecla. Several dozen kids were in a group painting pictures on the grass, part of a program of emotional recovery. Not surprisingly, many of them were painting pictures of houses. They'd lost their homes when the ground convulsed on January 13; here they could reconstruct them in all their glory, blending memories and dreams into a new dwelling. They carefully crafted roofs and windows, planted trees and evoked birds flying overhead. The sun shone and the clouds were soft and fluffy.
The oft-televised scenes from Las Colinas, the Salvadoran neighborhood where more than 600 houses were buried in January, have moved many in the U.S. to donate money to help their Salvadoran sisters and brothers. That's wonderful, and Lyda and I urge you to support UMCOR's fundraising in support of Salvadoran church organizations.
Yet, as we've often shared since Hurricane Mitch hit Central America 27 months ago, the causes of disasters are not simply the movement of plates under the earth or the falling of too much rain. Disasters are direct products of the injustice that makes societies vulnerable to the natural threats that have been around forever. In Honduras, environmental abuse and lack of authentic land reform were two major ingredients in what happened after Hurricane Mitch. In El Salvador, the Las Colinas disaster was the direct result of voracious urban development with blatant disregard for environmental concerns. Indeed, several church groups had played a prominent role in protesting the construction of mansions on the hills above Santa Tecla. When the ground shook, the hillside gave way and hundreds people below paid for the sins of the wealthy with their lives. In the countryside, where the destruction was widespread, the poor majority live in simple adobe homes that collapsed when the earth shook. The lack of a true agrarian reform leaves the poor extremely vulnerable; the only capital that many of them possessed was their home–which in many cases is now gone. Many rural villages look like a bomb fell on them.
Poverty is a permanent disaster that makes possible the periodic "natural disasters" that attract our attention on the television screen. Only by working for justice and environmental stewardship can disasters be combated. If not, they will only get worse. Since 1998, there are more environmental refugees in the world every year than political refugees. Disasters around the world are growing more serious.
A couple of days before I left on this recent trip to El Salvador, I was hiking in the woods above our house. I came across a small boy sitting in the trail, crying. I asked him what was wrong. He said he was hungry and there was no food in his house. I invited him to come to my house. An hour later, he showed up with his two brothers. We had a good meal together.
His name is Juan Carlos, and he's eight years old. But you'll never hear about him because the disaster he is living every day, the disaster of chronic poverty, doesn't make the news. But as long as there are children like Juan Carlos in the world who are crying because they are hungry, then disasters will continue to grow worse.
How do we who are citizens of the U.S. respond to this situation? In the past we've talked about supporting fair trade alternatives and stopping the most blatant examples of U.S. malfeasance in the region, such as the School of the Americas. It's important now to take note of the discussion going on about U.S. foreign aid. The U.S. provides less of its wealth to help the poor abroad than any other industrial nation. The official U.N. target is that donor nations transfer seven-tenths of 1 percent of their GDP in aid. The U.S. doesn't come close, providing less than one-tenth of 1 percent. The average for industrialized countries is about four times as much--with a couple of countries, like Sweden and the Netherlands, exceeding the U.N. target. In the 1990s, Japan provided more aid in absolute dollar terms than the United States. Many from the U.S. who have come to Honduras on work teams since Mitch have been surprised to find countless reconstruction projects funded by other northern nations, disabusing them of the illusion that their own country was exceedingly generous.
Of course, much of U.S. aid is political in nature, and designed to further trade that will ultimately benefit U.S. companies. Yet within the U.S. government's aid apparatus, important shifts took place during the 1990s, helping move a significant portion of aid away from supporting repression and towards encouraging the development of authentic democracy.
In the first weeks of the new presidential administration in the U.S., that discussion seems to have been halted. Already, reproductive health programs and AIDS projects around the world are feeling the conservative shift in Washington. U.S. aid dropped by an annual average of 6 percent in the last decade, and it looks like that slide will continue. And programs under the new administration will step back from development aid to emphasize charity in the worst meaning of the term: handing out surplus food, clothing, and medicine to the poor of the world while waving the U.S. flag.
As we watch the new images of suffering from El Salvador, let us ask ourselves about the reality behind the images, and challenge ourselves as churches and as a nation to respond in a way that will lessen vulnerability while increasing the capability of people at the grassroots to build sustainable communities where all of God's children can live in the houses of which their children dream.
As you know, Lyda and I and the kids will be traveling to the U.S. this year for "home leave." That will include visits to all of your congregations. The schedule is beginning to take shape. Conference coordinators in the Pacific Northwest and Oregon-Idaho annual conferences are setting up a schedule for Lyda in May and early June. I will visit churches in California and other states in late September and early October; we'll be in touch with you about those visits in a month or two. From mid-June to mid-August, we'll be getting medically checked-up in Atlanta and attending a mission personnel conference, and then vacationing as a family on the west coast, visiting relatives and remembering what those snow-capped volcanoes look like.
A detail: this year we'll be presenting a mix of images and sound using a computer-driven program, and we'll need a digital projector to show it. If your congregation (or workplace) has a digital projector that we could borrow for a few days, please let us know right away. If we could borrow a projector for a week from each of several churches, we'd be able to cover the whole itinerary.
As always, thanks for your prayers and letters. Several of you sent donations at Christmas, those were used to support CCD's construction of homes for Mitch victims.
Know that we also keep you in our prayer, asking God to strengthen your local ministries and hold you gently in God's hands.
Shalom,
Paul