A Personal Journey of (some) Understanding

United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Article 25.

When I was a senior in high school, I first ran into the declaration. I remember reading it with awe and disbelief. I could not get my mind off of it for days. The entire UN had authored this, and voted for it. The former Soviet Union and China had abstained, but did not kill it. In this world of so much pain and suffering, this was our ideal.

The contradiction of it just burned in my heart, and I would get so incredibly bitter. We took part in drafting it and signed it. Those were our ideals once. For my entire life, I have heard people on every front declaring how we are the "greatest country on Earth". I often thought that this was impossible given that we have set ideals like this and then fail so miserably in working towards them. Nevermind 'working towards them', but we never even agreed among ourselves that we were going to even try to have those ideals in the first place! The great social reforms of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations never even hoped to take care of people up to those kinds of levels. It all sems to me, in retrospect, quite the opposite of greatness. It is in the realm of tragedy.

I remember walking on a street in a Brooklyn ghetto, looking into the eyes of the poor and destitute and feeling so much pain there. On moments when all my fear and arrogance were aside, and I really saw them, my heart would just break within me. So many felt like life had passed them by, or wished it would. There was a night in Santa Cruz that I spent frantically trying to find shelter for a kind woman and her children, just to get them out of the weather and fed just that one cold night. Tomorrow was to be a whole new battle. The pain of it all would just rend the soul of us who were there to help. 

John F. Kennedy once remarked that "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."  The very real implications of that worry me.

In the world today, 50,000 people die a day from poverty related causes - starvation, disease, etc. That is one death of an innocent person every 2.7 seconds.

I want to introduce to you Sok Mesa. He is a 9 year old child that I sponsor in Cambodia. He and his family are extremely poor, with no ability to survive unaided. His father works all he can, but his parents can not even supply adequate food, never mind provide Mesa with any sort of education so he can break the poverty cycle. They live in a wooden zinc-roofed house with one room. His father rides a cycloist - a kind of bike taxi with three wheels. He irregularly makes 3000 riels($0.78) a day, and to maintain a very meager survival, they need at least 4500 riels ($1.17) a day. Their community has no access to water purification facilities or any medical care whatsoever. I sought out a child to sponsor after I went to Cambodia to visit because that place had changed my life forever. I was fortunate enough to get paired up with Mesa. How old does he look to you? He is 13. Kids don't grow much when they are starving.

I had been in Thailand twice before, so I had seen a lot of poverty there. But nothing compared me for what I saw in Cambodia. I went there because it is amazingly beautiful (the most beautiful place I have ever been), but once there, I found the more important reason for being there. We would be walking around Angkor Watt, and there would be armies of children trying to sell things or just beg for money. At times, it would be so intense, that vehicles could not move because of the throng of children around them. It was absolutely heart wrenching. Here we were, 'rich' westerners, with a car and driver who was taking us all around. Their eyes were hard to avoid, and my heart could scarcely handle what was in them.

Our final day there in our first visit was the one that changed me forever. We had seen all of the Angkor temples, and our guide was going to drive us out to this village that was floating on this large lake. Being a hydrologist, I started asking about the water in the lake and so forth. It turns out that because of the entire absence of any form of sanitation, it was basically a stinking and nasty sewer. The villagers, of course, would drink it and bathe in it. I had all of the suggested vaccinations before leaving, but I still didn't want to tempt fate. And it was just gross!

Instead he decided to take us to a section of Siem Reip that was a big shopping area. One could haggle with people when buying things, but I never had the heart to because they had so little. Few of them tried to rip us off, but even if they had, I would not have cared much (unlike Egypt!). They needed the money so much. And here I was, a traveling college kid who was insanely rich beyond belief in comparison.

As soon as we got out of the car, we were surrounded with about five men missing legs (from all of the landmines) and a host of children, many of whom were carrying their infant siblings who were starving. I gave out all the money I had in my wallet, but that was all I had. So we were trying to walk down the street, and would be literally tripping over them. It was almost impossible to move without having to push aside street children and their mothers. We tried hiding in stores, and they would all stand there waiting for us to come out. Eventually we made it back to the car and LITERALLY barely got the doors closed. After a lot of honking, the driver managed to get the car out. My heart was absolutely broken.

We went straight back to our room, and I spent much of the rest of the day crying. There were so many, and there was so much pain, and I was powerless to make any difference at all. That is one of the most bitter feelings that I have ever known in my life. There is no way to describe just how hard that is. And it was not like these people were street thugs or anything like that either. All the Cambodians who we met were very kind and gentle people. They are the nicest people who I have met in the world on my travels (and I have been in 22 countries). Since they were so amazing, I had began to love them, and that made things much, much harder.

My friend who I was traveling with pointed one thing out which really helped me. In walking, we had passed again one of the legless men who I gave money to. Upon seeing me, he took off his hat and bowed to me. Cambodians don't bow like the Koreans and Japanese do, so this meant a real lot to both him and me. I had made a difference in his life, for that day, and I had to be able to take joy in that. It reminded me of a couple of things Mother Teresa had said. The first was, "If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one." It is so hard to be satisfied with just that, but if it is all we can do, then we must be. Somehow. The second was, "We cannot do great things on this earth. We can only do small things with great love." That one resonated deep within my soul, and I started feeling a little better.

Once I got back to the states, I began researching twentieth century Cambodian history. These poor people who I found myself loving had been through so much in the recent past. They had often been stuck in the middle in our conflict with the Vietnamese, with their country mined and their people slaughtered, and worse. Then in 1976, the Chinese supported Khmer Rouge came to power. Under their genocidal reign of terror, all people who were educated: teachers, doctors, those who spoke foreign languages, etc, were all massacred. The rest of the people were forced to leave the cities and live in forced labor camps in the countryside. Their motto was, "It is no benefit to save you, it is no loss to kill you." People who were poor workers or who disobeyed some order or another were killed or tortured without a second thought. Over two million Cambodians, all told, were murdered in 3.5 years. That was over 1/3 of the population of the country!

In 1979, the Soviet backed Vietnamese government invaded and (thankfully) took down the Khmer Rouge and occupied the country for many years. To add insult to injury, the US then recognized the Khmer Rouge as the official government for most of the eighties. Few of the Khmer Rouge leaders have yet to be tried. The Cambodian people have suffered so much. Their old wounds are slowly starting to heal, but all too often, only to have new terrors spread over their country. Perhaps the most insidious of these is the kidnapping and trafficking in children to make sexual slaves in Thailand. And yet they were kind to me. They laughed with me and smiled. They took good care of me.

Since that day, these things have rolled around in my head a thousand times. If anybody in the entire world deserved to be able to live with enough food to eat and clean water, it was these wonderful people who had been through so much and still smiled. On my second visit, I realized to my horror, that everybody my age or older had been a survivor of the Khmer Rouge's killing fields. The taxi driver. The man at the grocer. Everybody. Sometimes I had the courage to ask these people about it, and it seemed that every single one of them had lost close family. It was a land of millions of personal tragedies. And there was nothing anybody could do about it except cry with them. On this visit, I has able to visit some of the infamous killing fields. It was one of the hardest things that I have ever done, in many ways.

"It is of no benefit to save you, it is no loss to kill you"

- Official Motto of the Khmer Rouge

NOTE that the picture on the right is a close up of the tower seen on the left...

Article 3.

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

My thoughts often go back to a Hungarian born Jewish taylor who was a friend of mine when I was on my mission in New York City. As missionaries, we didn't have much money, and he would fix our clothes for free, and then sit and talk to us for as long as we would let him. He was so good to us, and had such a kind heart. I remember one day, the subject of the Holocaust came up. He got a very sober look on his face and asked me what I wanted to know. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. My dear friend had been through that unspeakable horror. The thought hadn't occurred to me before. I could barely talk, but managed to ask him, "where?" He was in Auschwitz. He had lost almost all of his family there. I could not ask him more, but just kept staring into his wrinkled face. I was struggling to come up with some words on consolment or encouragement that would not sound too incredibly stupid from the mouth of a 22 year old, missionary mantle aside.

In May of 2006, seven years after I bid farewell to my friend, I was able to visit Auschwitz, where 1.1 million of his fellows were murdered in a couple of years time. It was a place of factory murder, beyond comprehension. It was a cold, rainy day, that left a chill deep in the bones. But that was nothing compared to how frigid my heart had become. After entering through the gate through which all of the trains had come, we mournfully walked to the back where the gas chambers and incinerators had been. I stood before the spot where many of the ashes of Hitler's victims lay. I found myself pleading to God that such things would never happen again, with the full knowledge that we still hadn't learned better. Genocides had happened since, and instead of Cambodia or Rwanda, or any of the other places becoming the 'center of the universe', the world kept turning with people largely unable to look beyond the edge of their noses. My heart sickened. The truest way to honor those who died so miserably and painfully, would be to make sure it never happened again. Nowhere. To no one. Yet it had, and so few had cared. I brooded over what Elie Wiesel had said in his Nobel Lecture:

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."
-Dr. Elie Wiesel

In the picture above, the remains of a gas chamber and creamatoria complex are in the background. A pond filled with human ashes is in the foreground, with monuments to the dead in the front.

I stood on the somber platform where the cattle cars which were packed with innocent people were unloaded. I imagined my friend stumbling out of one of those cars, parched and barely alive, only to discover a new horror which was beyond all imagining. I thought of him as his family was torn away from him and led to the gas chambers, upon those very stones that I was standing on. I wondered if they were so dehydrated from the journey that they could not even cry. Did they know that death would almost seem a gift compared to camp 'life'?

My thoughts went back to Elie Wiesel, who wrote in Night:

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

The sheer evil of the place sank deep into my heart, and I lost the ability to cry. If all the buildings were removed, and the place plowed under, I swear that the evil stain would still be on it until the end of the world, and still passerbys would find their hearts harrowed up, without even knowing why. I shall never be the same again.

After my Jewish friend had told me about his being in Auschwitz, he started talking about how you have to forgive and move on. I was shocked. Forgive Hitler? He kept telling us that one has to have faith, and to walk steadily forward, regardless of what opposition may exist. There was no horror in his eyes as I studied him, just the conviction of a very good man who had survived the greatest evil humanity had to offer. I was very much humbled. Here I was, a missionary, teaching of Christ, and I could not imagine being able to forgive Hitler. I learned more than I can express that day.

I also had the privilege of talking for a long while with Alicia Appleman-Jurman, another holocaust survivor, and she was similarly amazing. I wrote a paper about that meeting, which is here. The one thing she told me that still haunts me to this day is how she can never forget all the hungry eyes of the children, and how her greatest joy is going into school and college cafeterias and seeing the children have all the food they can eat. She was one of those hungry children.

Article 18.

I have had the privilege of speaking on three different occasions with refugees from Tibet. Each of them helped me to understand so much more, and to realize how much I don't know. The first was a really nice man with whom I spoke in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001.  I, unfortunately, do not remember his name, nor what part of Tibet he was from.  His story was so unbelievable that I kept wanting to convince myself that he was making it up. One look at his eyes crushed my hopes.

He was starting to get religious and beginning to learn the teachings of Buddhas and the Dalai Lamas.  Somehow, and he still has no idea how, the Chinese authorities figured out he was getting religious and had started watching him. One night they came and took him to prison, where he was placed in a cell without any light whatsoever. There was no water or restroom facilities at all, and he was never allowed to leave. He was given very little water, and even less food. They would come in and torture him, hooking this thumbs up to electrodes for the great 'crimes' he had committed. He lived in this hell for what he thinks was a month before he managed to escape.

He then met up with some other refugees, and walked over the Himalayas into Nepal. The Nepalese government had already lost patience with the steady stream of refugees that came out of Tibet. As was common, the authorities waylaid them in order to send them back. He managed to escape from the Napolese, and finally reached India where the Tibetan Government in Exile resides.  He considers himself to be one of the very lucky ones.

It was a very strange experience talking with a man no more than five years older than me who had been through such things. I wished so much that he was making it all up. Later that night, he interpreted for me so I could talk to Ani Pachen, a Nun who was part of the resistance forces when China invaded Tibet.  He was right, he was very, very lucky.

Along with a group of fellow monks and nuns, she had done her best to face the invading Chinese military. They were simple people and had no real chance at all, yet they still tried to defend their families and homes. The Dalai Lama did escape, and that was what was the most important thing to many of them.

She had spent the past twenty one years in a Chinese prison wherein she was frequently tortured in truly horrific ways.  I was amazed that she had survived it all without dying. I could not believe that an old nun could live through all that. But what I will really never forget about that conversation was not her miraculous survival, but her warm and loving heart!

She was sitting there telling me that you had to forgive and fill your heart with love.  You had to have compassion. After all she had been through, she said nothing unkind about her former captors.  Her entire focus was on love.  I was absolutely stunned. Her people were in subjugation, her friends had been tortured to death, and she had been incarcerated for over 20 years, and she had no criticism of the Chinese.  I was awestruck.  I had always been one of the first to line up to criticize the Chinese government and their Human Rights abuses. 

In October of 2002, I heard a talk from Palden Gyatso, who spent 33 years in a Chinese prison and was only liberated through the efforts of Amnesty International. What he described was even more shocking than what I had heard before. In fact, the only personal accounts which I have heard that were more disturbing where those of Holocaust survivors, such as Elie Wiesel, who is one of my personal heroes. I could see his weathered face glisten with tears as he recalled those who were gone. One experience which he spoke of which I don't think that I will ever forget is how in a prison, one of his friends was sitting there one night, quite literally dyeing of thirst. He sat there in desperation, trying to save his friend's life by transferring saliva into his parched mouth. Everybody around him kept dying in prison because the Chinese would quite literally work them to death in slave labor camps to produce their cheap exports -- that we buy! As he spoke, the pain was palpable in his face. Here was another man who had suffered more than I could even survivors, such as imagine.

When he was finished with his talk, I asked him if he was able to forgive his tormenters, almost afraid of just how hard his heart might be. His response was simply that he wanted to be happy, and that holding such hatred in his heart would be against his religion and contrary to who he wanted to be. I extended my hand to shake his, and he embraced me in a huge hug, saying that with people like me who cared, that they could not fail in their mission to bring liberty and freedom to those who needed it so much. I found myself praying a lot that night to the Lord that his trust was not unfounded.

It is all of these values which are going to save this world.  Hatred and vengeance are one eternal round. M. K. Gandhi made the observation that,"an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."   People must have the courage and conviction to stand up and break the circle lest it consume everyone. That is such an easy thing to say, and I am sure that it has been uttered thousands upon thousands of times, but that is the only way. No matter how weak we are, and how feeble it is contingent upon us to do all we can. In his Nobel Lecture, Elie Wiesel said, with a combination of hope and pleading that,

"Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately."
-Dr. Elie Wiesel

I read so much of those who suffer so greatly from any of a thousand causes, and what leaders of nations do, or more appropriately, don't do, about it. I read often of how they instead concentrate on their own greed, pride, and hunger for power, and sometimes my face flushes red with rage, and the teachings of Christ begin to seem distant. I read of the apathy in the world, and I pace around my house relentlessly, literally flushing with fury. I struggle a lot with what to do with these feelings. I, in my own turn, have to fight so hard not to let my heart fill with hate and contempt -- because that is what my religion and my conscious require of me. I feel so powerless sometimes that it just consumes me with dispair.

A recent article struck a deep chord in me. It noted that, "Elie Wiesel is living proof that moral outrage at man's inhumanity to man doesn't require rage. There is no loud rhetoric when the 76-year-old Holocaust survivor talks about genocide in Sudan. There is no table pounding when he talks about the world's failure to stop the killing."

When I think of him and the others I have mentioned here, my mind goes back to one thing that Gandhi said, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." Yet when I read of recent Chinese crackdowns in Tibet, I huff and puff, blog about it, and try to remember the true power that is in prayer, which is all I can do. It is frustrating beyond all words. And I keep telling myself again and again that I must not hate the Chinese.

I have as long of a way to go as anyone else on truly opening up my eyes and heart to what is going on to innocent people on this little planet of ours.  I am trying to respond with humility and compassion.  I am trying to look beyond the confines of my own world, and past the end of my nose.  I am trying to truly realize and appreciate what a life of comfort that I live in, despite my serious, chronic illnesses.  I know that at this very moment, there are so many without hope, hungry and alone.  I know that nothing happens in a vacuum, no matter how much we may try to believe otherwise.  I don't do a very good job most of the time, but I know that as a Christian, and as a person, these things are the most important pursuits that I will have in this life. And not only to see, but to act. But not only to just act, but to act with love and compassion.

Again from his Nobel Lecture, Elie Wiesel proclaimed that:

"As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true.  As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs."

I have read a fair amount on different aid organizations, and their work. Included below are the ones that I believe to be the best and most responsible with their stewardships. I try to support them as much as I am able to. There are also two advertising supported click to donate sites on the internet that I have run across... thehungersite.com (and its siblings, which can be accessed from the same site) and care2 (which also has siblings).

Recomended Movies:

Recomended Books: