Poverty

It has happened again: after several months on the road, walking and photographing throughout the day in the less-than-moderate Middle Eastern heat, I’ve lost weight. I've lost so much, in fact, that on some days I feel a little frail, a little bit like I'm disappearing. And I can't say that I like that much, because I want to be whole.

But here's what I do like about my partial disappearance: in looking at my body—in seeing my scrawniness, my sagging pants, the ripple of a beating heart visible on the surface of my chest—I identify with the weak. I have joined their ranks, in a sense, and I share their brokenness. When I see the fit and strong, people whose pants aren’t sliding down and whose arms are connected to full shoulders, or whose faces are rounded by smooth and pampered skin, I feel an outsider. I even feel envy, and at times embarrassment and shame.

I also feel something very much like rage. Rage at the emaciation, the poverty, the disgusting imbalance that blights history and our own time. Rage at the lack of wholeness in people’s lives. Rage at broken bodies, at the audible sounds of hunger (if we pause to look and listen), at the hands on Wall Street and Main Street, in South Carolina and Syria, that move more to fatten themselves than to nourish the weak. Rage at the way that, just this afternoon, I witnessed a helpless old woman being abused by strong young men. She had cried out as they harassed her, yanking on her headscarf and mocking her, and the last thing she said to me was, “I’m sorry you are seeing this.” But I wasn’t sorry I saw it, for in seeing it my rage only grew, and there are things for which it is better to be enraged than ignorant.

It is partly because of rage that I do what I do, even though it costs me some of my own strength and mass. And what do I do? Though sometimes even I forget, when I see a weak woman abused on the street it comes back to me with the force of a slamming door in a hurricane. I photograph and write about our world, and I do it not because it pays well but because every street on Earth has people aching, and sometimes downright screaming, for wholeness. I do it because the Earth is full of the emaciated.
 
Photo taken and text written in Deir Ez-Zur, Syria (June 2010)

Paul Tournier (1898-1986), a Swiss physician who wrote books with titles such as The Whole Person in a Broken World, once said that "no one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person."

I don’t know what was going on in the minds of these two young girls in a village outside Bac Ha, Vietnam, but in the few minutes I watched them I did have a pretty good idea of this: their lives were fuller for their friendship. 

In November, on the steps of a church, I came across a man who reminded me more of Forrest Gump than a beggar.  When I asked if I could take his picture he was gracious in his reply and never once expressed interest in me giving him money.  Picture complete, we sat together a while.  Our sitting was mostly done in silence since within seconds I had run through the limits of my Spanish, but every so often he would sincerely say something I didn't understand.  He was gentle in both speech and movement, a simple man in the best sense of the word, the sort who reminds you that you wish to be a tender person.  I've always liked the line in As Good as it Gets where a gravelly Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt, "You make me want to be a better man," but it is a sentiment not confined to romantic relationships.  One can experience it in the most unexpected settings, even with a down-and-out stranger on the steps of a cathedral in Leon, Nicaragua. 

It was while sitting with this man that I thought, as I sometimes do, of Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran bishop who regularly irritated Right and Left alike.  Gunned down in 1980, his homilies still circulate in books such as the Violence of Love, reminding the reader of that terrible period in El Salvador’s history as well as challenging us with timeless, sometimes deceptively simple, themes.  It was 30 years ago this week, on Easter Sunday in a country wracked by poverty and oppression, that he spoke the following:

You that have so much social sensitivity, you that cannot stand this unjust situation in our land: fine – God has given you that sensitivity, and if you have a call to political activism, God be blessed. Develop it.

But look: don’t waste that call; don’t waste that political and social sensitivity on earthly hatred, vengeance, and violence.

Lift up your hearts. Look at the things above.
 

(If interested in more images from Leon, Nicaragua, I've posted a few black and white shots HERE.)