A Post From Christmas Past

The following is from a "Web Log" page I kept on the now-defunct "The Christian Independent" website while I was in Brazil. It seemed as appropriate today as when I first wrote it. The larger context included the rather surreal experience of sitting in a mall cafe enjoying a snack and reading in the paper about a boy who digs around the city dump for food to take home for his mother to prepare for him and his siblings. He goes out before dawn so his brothers and sisters won't know where their food comes from and be ashamed. Then, he cleans up and goes to school. This is real. This happens.

Merry Christmas, everyone. And...peace on earth.

____________________________________

December 26, 2002
Thursday
Entry 34

Christmas Dinner

Did you eat well yesterday? My big meal was actually on Christmas Eve, when we had a Brazilian-style barbecue at my house and invited family and church folk over. It was good, too good. I ate so much that I made myself sick, and had nausea and other stomach problems all Christmas Day. People eat a lot on Christmas: cookies, cake, meats and other good things.

Here in Uberlândia there were families that ate out of the trash on Christmas Day. This wasn't anything special. They eat out of the trash every day that they can find something edible. What some of them absolutely cannot eat they give to the pigs.

Poverty is bad -- really bad.

Perhaps it's the American in me that says we should rise up and do something about this. Certainly it is my Christian faith that would like to see the church do more. The problem is money. The majority here in Brazil is poor. Truth be told, it is centralized government and collectivism that keeps this nation poor, though the Brazilian people have been taught to believe that centralized government and collectivism are the cure for poverty and underdevelopment. So while the people sit around, passing the buck to a corrupt and thieving government, people continue to eat out of the trash. Men, women and children.

Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?