When it comes to neighbors, choose wisely

Before I understood what it meant to love someone I had already developed a love that was so comprehensive, so thorough and beneficial that Jesus of Nazareth used it as a model of what love should like. He said that this love of mine should be extended to all of mankind. You see, the first person I ever loved was myself, and though I’ve never loved another person quite as well, Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus taught that we should care as much about the wellbeing of the guy next door as we do about our own. We should devote the same time, effort and resources to him as we do to ourselves. That’s what it means after all. We take such good care of ourselves because we love ourselves. If we love our neighbors the same way, we’ll take care of them just as well.

Who then is this neighbor that we are supposed to care so much for? Jesus shows us that it’s anyone that you are connected to, even if he is considered low, unworthy, untouchable (as have been the dalit in India, homosexuals in America, women in much of the world). If you can reach out and touch him (in any literal or metaphorical sense) then he can be your neighbor.

My neighbors are poor and dying.

When I moved to Uganda to “help people” I figured that my neighbors would remain in San Diego and Los Angeles, and they did, but they also showed up here. Thousands of them, many poor beyond any conception I’d ever had of the word, starving, dying.

Love them as I love myself? What does that mean in such a context? Sometimes I don’t want to know.

It’s difficult to consider what love means in the face of suffering. Love’s empathy has a way of taking the celebrations and sorrows of another and planting them in your heart. In this case there are more sorrows than celebrations. To love them is pain for me.

It’s also responsibility. I have neighbors in rags, in poverty, in morbidity – living in destitution and facing death. Jesus tells me to care about them as much as I care about myself. How much ought I to give?

The answers are not easy, in the coming or in the taking.

Uganda Dispatch #7: An Old Emergency

It's not easy to write about something that hurts to understand. But it's getting harder to keep quiet.

This is an emergency.

It's strange to think of northern Uganda's internally displaced persons (IDP) camps that way. After all, they've been around for ten years, their residents enduring the endemic hardships with the rising of each hot African sun. Walking through one of these camps today the languid bustle and smiling faces of the place will lull you into a calm indignation, an easy shake of the head.

But this situation is not calm. It is violent and turbulent, and accepted only through the slow execution of hope. Northern Uganda is a building whose base was set on fire 20 years ago. But no one came to put out the flames. Year by year, in fact day by day the flames climb up the sides and burn through the floors. Homes are destroyed, people consumed. For 20 years no one came. Now the building is in full flame and finally people see it; the world sees it. But even looking at the flames, at the people trapped, burning, dying, the world is saying things equivalent to, "We should give seminars on the dangers of fire," or "Let's start a program that, over the next 2 years, will teach them how to use a hose."

Can't they see that above all we need to put out the flames? We need to save lives! Whether a building has been burning for two minutes or two decades, it's still an emergency. The flames have different names in this case: names like poverty, hunger, disease, thirst; and their fuel sources have bigger, more controversal names like forced displacement, informed neglect, international apathy. But the point is to stop the burning.

To learn more about what you can to, start at UgandaCAN, and keep posted here on JamesTravels.com for upcoming projects that you can be instrumental in accomplishing.