Sara Shackelford's Blog
Being Messed Up / 10.13.09, 10:05 PM
Being here is messing me up. I don’t really know how to process everything I’m seeing on a daily basis…the poverty, the pointless bureaucracy, the education system. The problems are so overwhelming and the cyclical that I find it hard to know how to focus on what I CAN do or even how to think about it.
All the Mission Year teams did PROP on Saturday – that stands for Pauper’s Right of Passage; for us, it was a day long poverty simulation. We dressed in clothes we were given and spent the day downtown digging in dumpsters, asking for money/food, and talking with people who live in that situation every day. The day was eye-opening and really hard. To even sit on the street corner set us apart from the rest of society – we got a brief taste of what it’s like to have people look at you and quickly avert their eyes, to have them not look you in the face even when they do give you money, to have them refuse you food even when they’re holding a bag of leftovers in their hands. Many teams also saw the humbling reality that the most generous people on the street are the ones who live there. Several people only had food saturday because a “fellow” homeless person decided to share the little they had. My partner Jessica (who’s also from Memphis!) and I only had two people really speak to us all day – one was the smiling old man who gave Jessica a hotdog (wrapped in a tortilla, which was strangely good, but that may’ve been because that was all we ate) and the other was Bill, a homeless man who showed us more effective (and vocal!) ways to panhandle after making us admit we weren’t actually homeless. He also wrapped me in a long hug on the corner of a busy intersection while he prayed for us and thanked Jesus for loving all people.
So now I don’t know how to walk down a street, how I should, as a follower of Christ, love the people there. I discovered alot about the person I would probably be if I was homeless…at first, I felt bad about taking people’s money when I didn’t really need it, but as soon as I started really getting hungry, it didn’t bother me. I found myself becoming incredibly angry and bitter when I realized people had no problem telling us they didn’t have any food even as they held leftovers. I found myself realizing if I truly was starving, stealing or lying would be very viable options. I felt completely set apart from the world, like I didn’t even have a right to set foot in a store since I had no means to buy anything or in a way, to really even exist in that world. I know that probably doesn’t make alot of sense, especially since we really didn’t do the simulation for all that long. But the intense way we experienced those feelings in only that day made me only wonder what it must be like to live like that. So again, how do any of us walk down the street?
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