May
06
2008
My Shoebox Story: Seeing "the Poor" as People
When I arrived back on Romanian soil in January 2001 (after spending a couple of weeks back in the United States for the holidays), I had a paradigm-shifting experience. I returned to the home of my village family.
When I walked in the door, the six-year-old girl greeted me, told me to wait, and then dashed back into the house for something. A couple seconds later, she reappeared, holding a shoebox filled to the brim with Christmas gifts. They had saved some gifts for me!
Just weeks earlier, I had finished a book by Franklin Graham about his Samaritan’s Purse organization. In that moment, it dawned on me that this family was just one of many that benefit! Suddenly, I remembered where I was and my eyes were reopened to the conditions of the country in which I was living.
I had begun to overlook the poverty and only see the people. And here I was in Romania, coming to grips with the fact that my Romanian family had saved a shoebox for me!
The shoebox incident showed me that I had begun seeing people for who they were, not where they lived. Before, I had always thought of Samaritan’s Purse and World Vision as doing work in Africa and in places poorer than Romania. When I imagined the people that benefited from those charitable organizations, I thought of the faces on the television commercials: the little boy with flies buzzing around, the mother holding her skinny baby to her breast, the emaciated teenager leading a baby brother. Although the television images are meant to shock us out of our complacency, they can easily desensitize us to the needs, because even if we see the faces, we do not know those people. We choose to help, looking past who they are to what they need.
On the day of the shoe-box incident, I saw things the other way around for the first time. Instead of seeing a face on TV, I saw the faces of the family I had lived with in Romania. I saw the faces of people I knew. People who laughed, loved, and cried. People who worked so hard, doing whatever was necessary to survive. People not so different than me. People belonging to another culture, people speaking a different language, but people essentially just like me in so many ways, especially regarding our common faith in Jesus.
From this point on, I viewed relief organizations differently. I began to think of the people they helped as people, not just as statistics or a picture on the television screen.