project by project

we are building a house. i am doing my job. today the plumber comes to hook up the gas for our house stove. today i enter a page of baptist churches into the work database, to contact for tutors. project by project we try to build our dreams.

today i learn that there are over 350 baptist churches in this city, mostly on the East side in neighborhoods where we found 5 for-profit businesses in a 2 mile radius. the blocks are filled with so many non-profits and public schools that pay so little, and they're the a large portion of the limited number of jobs available in the neighborhood. thank God for all the people here who have enough heart to staff all these non-profits and schools and churches, to accept their slice of the pie cut a little thinner.

so i try to recruit tutors so we can help more students get their GEDs so they can get jobs...where? i know that each day has enough problems for itself, and this job alone has its own problems for itself, but when i start thinking about the next step for our students, one arm's length beyond my own in the community, the enormity of the issues and barriers facing our impoverished neighbors start to come into focus and i want to back away, staggering.

and yet children here have more than one pair of clothes--unlike northern Uganda--and our roads and buildings aren't being bombed--unlike Lebanon. there's more sufferings and tragedy places in the world than we experience in Hough, each place with its own spiderweb of complexity, its own triumphs, failures and timelines of recovery. really, it's only compared to U.S. suburbs that Hough is at all lacking.