Ending poverty
Wednesday July 30, 2008
Solving poverty
Here’s the problem. Suppose you were immensely rich. And you wanted to do something, one decisive thing, to end poverty, disease, malnutrition, ignorance, apathy… What would you do?
That question came up with a friend who had recently returned from a mission to remote villages in Guatemala.
A modern hospital would do a lot, we agreed. It would enable people to receive treatment for accidents and for chronic diseases. Broken bones and dysentery need not become death sentences.
But it would not alter the conditions in the villages that cause people to need acute medical care.
Clean water would alleviate a lot of those problems. But without modern hygiene, parasites would still infest communities. And clean water would not remain unpolluted for long.
Hygiene training could eliminate parasites, reduce infections, lengthen lives. But it’s hard to maintain hygienic conditions without an ample supply of clean water.
Literacy would make a difference. It would enable people to tap the wealth of knowledge that has lifted other people out of the mire of poverty and illness. But what good is literacy, if you can’t afford to buy books or subscribe to magazines?
Especially if those newly literate people become prey for aggressive marketers of, say, pornography.
Of course, you could just throw money at them—the classic solution of affluent nations. And we all know how that leads to corruption.
No matter what single solution you think of, you’ll find that it is inevitably intertwined with complications.
Changing their attitudes
My friend argues that the ultimate solution is to change the people’s mindset. “You have to give them hope,” he said. “You have to help them see that they can change things, that they are not locked forever into the way things are right now.”
In Guatemala, he argues, people continue to suffer from a slave mentality. They used to be slaves of Spanish landowners. Now they continue to act as slaves. Of the Roman Catholic Church. Of military regimes. Of international corporations.
He sees evangelism as the means of changing that mindset. People who are trapped in superstition, who live in fear of civil and religious authority, need to know that God in Jesus set them free from the shackles of sin and submission.
That’s where we part company, ideologically.
I agree that a change of mindset is crucial. But I’m not sure his solution will really change things.
In Europe, it’s true, the scientific and social revolution started with the Protestant Reformation upsetting the status quo. But Greece achieved similar progress many centuries before, long before Christianity.
There are no simple solutions to complex problems.
Author Malcolm Gladwell argues we need to find the “tipping point,” the key element that begins to spread ripples through a community, until the whole complex community changes.
Maybe the Christian gospel could be that tipping point. But if it isn’t, those Guatemalans will live just as miserably as Protestants as they did as Catholics. Except that now they’ll also be outsiders in their own culture.
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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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