I want to address this blog to my friends who live in, so called, "2/3rd world" nations. I want to help you understand how it feels to me to face your needs and ask each day (or at least each time you face another crisis and reach out to me for help) "How do I compare my needs against yours? When will my needs ever win when yours will always be greater, more critical, more about basic survival, whereas my survival is rarely under threat?"

This is why it is easier for me to give to "Save the Children" or "World Vision" or "Child Fund" or any other reputable organisation with its fundraising based in in my world, my relatively privileged, secure, powerful, wealthy world.  Because then I do not need to face you. I do not even need to compare the range of my needs against the range of your needs. I can keep an ocean of invisibility and organisational process between your needs and mine.  I can look at my needs in isolation and decide what feels like a reasonable level of generosity. I can pat myself on the back and feel good at all the organisations I give to. I can go out to a restaurant for dinner, have as many coffees as I can afford, even upgrade my car, or, (if I own my own home) my kitchen. I can keep the scale of my needs and how I satisfy them safely apart from the scale of your needs and how you are, or are not able to satisfy them.

But I have chosen instead to befriend you. So I have built a bridge across that sea for us to freely get to know each other's joys and sufferings, each other's needs and how we are or are not able to satisfy them. And so this confronts me. It confronts my spending on things that I do not need to survive but that comfort me when sad, distract me when distressed, provide fun and pleasure as a relief from my work, the list is endless.

One way to view this is through the lens of Maslow's hierarchy of human need. The bottom layer are physiological or survival needs: "I need food, water, clothing, shelter, sleep." When those are met my mind turns to the next layer, safety and security needs: I'm going to part company with Maslow and suggest this layer says, "I need to know my food, water, clothing, shelter, and sleep will be there tomorrow and the next day, and the next week, month, year."  These two are sometimes called basic needs. Once they are met my mind turns to Psychological and social needs. "I need to belong and feel loved and accepted." Once I feel I belong, I need to stand out, to feel esteemed. I need my accomplishments to be recognised." And once all of these needs are met my mind turns to self-fulfilment needs. "I need to achieve my full creative potential.

If Maslow is right all these  are real human needs. The  difficulty is that your needs, my friends, are so often at the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy and you never seem to reach level two. Whereas my most serious threat is to my safety and security needs. I know I will not go hungry today. In fact I know I will probably never go hungry. I may worry about employment and how I will pay the rent or mortgage but that is as serious as it gets for me. And if I have been reasonably successful even these are not on my mind very much. My focus is on belonging and love, esteem and recognition, and personal fulfilment.

Now here's the tricky bit. If my call is to love you as I love myself, and you are stuck at the bottom of this need level, does that mean I need to stay there with you until we both are able to move on?  Or do I get to say my belonging and love needs and my esteem and accomplishment needs, are just as vital to me  and your survival needs are to you?" Because, in a world in which vast numbers are trapped at the level of survival needs, if those must always come first, then my needs may never become important enough. They may need to wait forever until your survival needs are  met.

I raise this as a question. I do not offer an answer. My question to you, my friends whose survival needs  continually confront me is how do you view my needs and yours? I had a holiday planned. It was important to me for reason I will not go into here. Yet faced with your survival needs I gave of my holiday savings to buy some of you food, to pay for surgery for others, and so on. Was I right? I almost made a different decision. I told you I could not help. But then I did help, knowing it could put in jeopardy this trip so important to me. 

This is where the rubber meets the road. Please help me see this as you see it.                 

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I  have been "AWOL" from this blog for a while. My own mental health took a nose dive for a bit at Christmas. And in responding to a number of desperate needs in poor communities I connect with I have found myself in a rather desperate financial situation myself. Except mine is not hunger or a life and death medical emergency, or being trapped at night in a town alone with no money to get home. Mine is a planned trip to Kenya in February. So faced with needs so dire that I simply could not place as "unavailable" money I did not need until I leave on January 30, I gave to save a critically ill teenager and then to others to buy food, and then to another take time of work when she was terribly ill and so it went on, until now I have everything arranged for my trip to Kenya but no money to take with me, no money to pay for the trip itself. 

These kinds of decisions are where the rubber meets the  road when, as those who are the beneficiaries of the terrible inequities of power and wealth in the world, we dare to befriend those who are its victims. Should I have made available the money I didn't need until February? Was this decision, or rather a whole series of decisions, wrong? Most of us build a secure wall around the things we consider our needs. What we need to face is that wall protects our privilege and that privilege stands in dire contrast to what others consider their needs. Once we take down that protective wall we can no longer hide behind it. We can no longer measure our "needs" with one ruler and others needs with a different one. We are faced with a call to live what we claim that every human being has the same dignity and worth as another. 

And now, having given what I am able, my heart is so heavy because the young  people of Extreme High  School whom I have grown to love like nieces and nephews face Christmas Day without even enough food to get through the day. I have given what I can but their needs are way beyond one person to support. I have done all I can to attract other supporters but I have failed in that. I'm not a fundraiser nor a marketing person. I once said to Kayemba I have all the love and none of the skills you need in a friend.

So, if you are reading this, PLEASE consider joining me. We need a friend for each of the 402 young people at this school. We need 402 friends who will go the distance and  increase support as cost increase there.  At  present I am one of a handful of people who support as we feel able. These young people will go hungry and starve if we don't change that. 

Some years ago (well 48 years ago when aged 19 and a Christian youth worker in Secondary Schools)  I met an inspiring and challenging Guyanan Christian called Morris Stuart. he travelled through the country visiting our Secondary Schools. He was the first black person I had the opportunity to get to know and he really did have an impact. At first sight he really did turn heads and evoke curiosity. He was educated in England and spoke with what might be called an "Oxford Accent." And he was an incredible communicator with a sharp mind.    

Morris related so respectfully and easily with non-Christians that his visit fundamentally changed the inward looking culture of the Christian groups in the schools. .Instead of meeting them behind closed doors in a classroom, he would ask the group to meet him instead out in the playground where he would engage with whoever gathered around with humour, humility, and respect.

One of his passions was the terrible inequity between rich and poor in the world. He would speak about "Voluntary Poverty" by which he meant that, as wealthy Christians who have choice we need to use that choice to go in the opposite direction from our culture, to live more and more simply, and to give way power to those who are powerless, to truly follow our Lord Jesus Christ.

A few years later I met another challenging Christian, a Southern Indian called P T Chandapilla. "Chanda" as he was affectionately called quoted St Paul who wrote these words to the Christians in ancient Corinth: 

"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich." (2 Corinthians 8:9)

Paul, a Jewish Pharisee, is doing something quite astonishing. From the beginning Christians have been inclined to "spiritualise" nature and the normal stuff of human life so as to avoid facing up to human realities  Here Paul does the opposite. He takes a Christian religious belief about Jesus (that, before he was the man Jesus, he was a divine being who had lived with and was part of the community we call God.) and argued that this being gave away all that power and privilege to become a "poor" human being so that we could become ":rich" and part of God's family. 

Paul then uses this to shame the wealthy Corinthian Christians into giving sacrificially to the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who were suffering severe poverty at that time. In part Paul is trying to heal a rift between Jewish and Gentile Christianity.

How might this also heal some ethnic and cultural rifts in our own age? In the words of Pink Floyd in my favourite album "Dark Side of the Moon" "With,  without, don't you  know that's what the fighting's all about." 

Voluntary poverty is a fundamentally different life pathway which, instead of aiming towards accumulating power and wealth, aims toward shedding both of these things and progressing towards the goal of .complete detachment from wealth and power.

Do we do so because these things are evil. No, not at all, it is the attachment to wealth and power that is evil, that perpetuates so much human suffering, and destroys human joy. It is an addiction. Addictions grow out of looking for something in the wrong place but finding there just enough of the real thing we yearn for that we keep looking in the wrong place until we can no longer let it go. Neither wealth nor power are evil in themselves. Evil is that which diminishes or takes away life. Attachment to wealth and power leads us to put the eradication of poverty and hunger into the "too hard basket" when actually the only thing hard about it is relinquishing our addiction to wealth and power. so we are free to give in away.  



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As I write this Extreme High School has no money for food this month. 402 students are hungry and there is nothing I can do.  My friends in Pakistan have devoted their lives to brining food, clothing and medical care to others. But they have insufficient funds to pay for their own medication for conditions which, without it, are life threatening and I cannot help.  Another friend in Kenya who has just lost his brother in a fatal car accident has been told his wife has Rheumatoid Arthritis. She needs treatment for this terribly painful and debilitating condition. He can't afford it, and nor can I. Another Ugandan friend was orphaned at about five years old when both parents were killed in a car accident. He lived on the streets with others until a woman who knew his parents searched for and found him and took him in. She died. Eventually he took in some of his street friends and formed a small "orphanage" which is more like a large family or small community. he was able to provide for them until bad weather destroyed their crops. In their case such a small amount of money can make a big difference that I have sometimes helped. However now they have only "posho" to eat. No beans to eat with it, no sauce to make it palatable. I am so short of money myself that I cannot even help with this small need.

It is so satisfying when we can express our love in practical giving that changes the experience of suffering of people we have grown to love and trust. And it is so difficult to stay present with them and say to one person after another,  "I'm so sorry. All I can do is pray.". 

This is a really hard part of loving people who are suffering. Changing their situation when we can is so wonderful. And we are rewarded with such gratitude.  Remaining in communication with them when we are struggling to meet our own needs cannot do anything to help is not an easy thing to do. Yet befriending people who are suffering without going into "fix it" mode, being present to people in their suffering without giving unsolicited advice,  this is where love begins. This is love 101. And, it is one of the toughest expressions of love there is. 

With all of my international online friends I began here because I took seriously the online safety principle of never giving money to people you only know online and have not met in real life. It seemed easier then when I could simply state that boundary. and say, "I can pray." I cannot give you money. And I cannot ask others to give you money." Those who respected it I kept corresponding with. Those who did not, I blocked.   Those who remained became dear friends and, over time, one by one, I decided I knew they were not scammers and, when I prayed for their needs I also asked, "is it time I become part of the answer to my own prayers." And a new journey began of (in the words of the World Vision motto some years ago) living simply to help others simply live.

However I simplified my life too much so that there was no room for miscalculation, increased costs, or unexpected medical or car bills. And now, while I have money in my accounts, I am significantly short of money I will need in tow months from now. So now I need to return to that first boundary of staying present to dear friends who are suffering at the level of basic survival and health needs, praying for them, maintaining connection with them, and not emptying what is left in my savings account. This is a truly miserable experience.  This is when loving others becomes its own suffering. 

And yet it is nothing to what my friends are suffering. They are suffering at a primal level and I am not.  It is likely I never will.  I am short of money but will not go without food, shelter, or health care. I am short of money in a budget but I am not hungry.  This makes it terribly difficult to say, "No" right now even though I know I must do so.  This is the misery. Frankly, I would rather I was hungry than to not be able to ease the suffering of my friends.