My needs and your needs

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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