A New Definition of Garbage
I made a chicken for dinner earlier this week (man, do I miss boneless, skinless chicken breasts!) and after cleaning all the meat off the bird I intended to throw away the bones, fat and other remains. Yes, I know, some of you more talented chefs out there could turn those bones into a tasty soup base, but I didn’t have any of the other ingredients necessary even to attempt such a thing so I was pretty sure the chicken bones belonged in the trash. Dawit, however, was horrified.
To tell the truth, Dawit is horrified by much of what I and my American housemates once threw in the trash. When you grow up in a country so consumed by poverty and hunger it’s hard to see things go to “waste” (like empty food containers and styrofoam packaging), so the idea of throwing away “food,” however loose that definition, is over the line.
(In all fairness, it’s a constant struggle to prevent food from going bad here as the refrigerator isn’t nearly as cold as it should be and the food lacks the preservatives that we’re used to).
The solution: Throw the chicken remains in a pot, add all other left overs from the fridge (some veggies, rice and pasta from the days before, etc), lots of salt and boiling water and (whalaa!) you have soup for the homeless! Now sure, it wasn’t exactly soup that you would find in a nice American restaurant, as the “chicken” was largely fat and skin, but it added flavor to the veggies, pasta and rice and, most important in this cold, rainy season, it was hot. We then put the soup into a few empty food containers (like pasta sauce and jelly jars, which I have learned are most certainly NOT garbage), and Dawit headed out into the night in search of the needy.
Dawit didn’t have to search for long. He had intended to go to the bridge in Bole where homeless people typically gather at night (a short distance from our neighborhood), but he encountered so many people on the way that he never left the main road in front of our house.
We repeated this ritual last night, and it’s something that we hope to do every few days or so. But when Dawit got back last night he was upset that despite having taken more food than on the first night, he still didn’t have “enough” for all the people he encountered. In fact he had ran out of food even more quickly, having encountered even more homeless people.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? We never have enough to meet the world’s needs; whether it’s hunger, orphan care, poverty, or anything else. This inevitable failure has paralyzed better men and women than me. The way that I get past it (and it can be a struggle) is to remember that it’s not my job to meet all the world’s needs, or even one need, completely. My job is just to try, as best I can, to meet the needs that God puts in front of me, knowing that I will never “solve” even those problems on anything resembling a grand scale. For me, that need is orphan care. For Dawit, it’s helping the Jewish community. It’s different for everyone, but it’s always something and the solution can be as simple as rethinking your definition of garbage.
