Saturday, April 23, 2011

Happy Holy Sat

It's time for another round of exciting news in Mary's life! Yay! Wa-hoo! Ladies and Gentlemen, I got into graduate school. It's an MSc in Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoeconomy at a university in England. Just pretend you know what that field is. I have deferred my entrance so that I can accrue some of the necessary funds through more of the sweat and tears we call jobs...or in my case volunteer positions. This time I mean it though, guys, I'm gonna find something that pays me. I would love any prayers you could send my way on that front though, because the employment field so far has been just as disappointing as the last several go-rounds.

Getting into grad school is both a relief and a stress: it means that somewhere, somehow, if I can just make it through this year, there is a future waiting for me. In the meantime though I need to read up on the field and figure out what I want to do my doctoral research in and start contacting the appropriate people. But I'm going to try not to think about that too much until I have a job.

VIDES has been great, I love Austin and have worked with some truly fabulous people here. I have gotten to have my hands in a lot of development and communication projects, which has been really rewarding, and I have started to build some really nice relationships with the kids here. Unfortunately, as is the all too frequent refrain of my life, I will be leaving them soon. Lord, bless them as they continue to grow in wisdom and years.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Kitchen Soup

Today I went with two of the sisters to a local church's soup kitchen. It was just a couple blocks away and I have driven by it all the time without ever really realizing what it was. It is a short building made of white stone; the curtains are always drawn, the door is metal. The sign reads Austin Baptist Chapel and though they have a church service there on Sundays it seems the primary function is to feed the hungry, in the physical sense. 

When we entered the building I felt like we were going underground because the lights were so low, but once inside, I could see out to the street through the shade screens and the typical food-court style seating arrangements in front of me. We walked past the guests who had arrived early to the back of the kitchen and got suited up with gloves and aprons. We wrapped spoons in napkins. We prayed. We set out the food and make sure everyone knew their job. Mine was to put the bowl of soup on the tray and slide it from the "preparation counter" to the "serving counter." 

When we started serving the guests, I was struck by how many young people there were...and how many nicely dressed people. Young people who looked like students, older men eating with such refinement and care, faces that have not seen the streets for so long. Kids with laptops plugged into their ear listening to their jams. There were of course those who were visibly high, those with missing teeth and prematurely wrinkled skin, the long unkempt beards: the hallmarks of those who make their life on the streets. There were also a few girls with black eyes. These however were not the overwhelming majority, but only a portion of the diverse group whose lunch we handled. 

I have helped in soup kitchens before on numerous occasions but it has been a few years since I've done it regularly. So many of the people who came to eat looked just like me; I felt the counter was superficial: a barrier between my rich privileged life and their life of need, except that this time, I could easily be one of them.  

I graduated from college just in time for the economy to fail and have been struggling to find employment since. I have done a lot of volunteering and quasi-volunteering and I even went back to school for a brief moment. The fact of the matter is, if I did not have the strong support of my family and the friends who have helped me out with food and lodging, I would be depending on services like these for my meals. The savings I accrued from doing well in school and the little my quasi-employment has paid would be long gone and I would be trooping gladly over to the nearest soup kitchen. So much for being gluten-intolerant. I would just have to eat my bread and take the consequences. The service counter is a lie. Who serves who? We are all brothers and sisters.

I don't know how those who had cell phones or laptops acquired them and I certainly don't judge them for having them. Our society plays by different rules than a lot of the world and these things are pretty essential for finding employment or communicating with social services. I don't know where the young people came from or what their stories are, and I don't know about the older ones who ate with such dignity. All I know is that with the right combination of circumstances, any one of us could be grateful for that meal. 

Having said that, I need to say this: that the food we served contained far too much sugar (some of them got 3 donuts and a piece of cake) as it was donated in large part by local bakeries (farmers! where are you!), much of the food was wasted by those who received it,  and kitchens like these often enable cycles of simultaneous poverty and either addiction or materialism. But this is the hard truth we are called to live, and the line we are called to walk: Standing by what is right even when it is imperfect, and working for its improvement even when we face decades of negative social trends, and an increasing rather than a decreasing need for services we created with the hope that one day we wouldn't need them.