Travels to Tabod – Part II – The Hill

She began with the over-frequent “Sir,” and continued, “It is far.”

“I know it’s far. That’s why he’s probably in need. Can we make it there?”

“Sir, yes, but the trail is steep!”

A twang of fear shot through me. I was in shape, but maybe not the right shape. Could I make it? Who knows. It’s probably best to bluff: “I know. Can you take me there?”

And, perhaps hoping that I misunderstood, or maybe I would change my mind, she asked again:

“Sir, yes. But the trail is steep! Do you want to go?”

In many languages, repetition is a form of emphasis. In Hebrew if you want to say pure gold, you just say the word gold twice. It is especially whatever it is. I wonder if that’s true in Tagalog.

Fatimah didn’t look happy. She clearly did not like my answer, but I could not tell if it was simply a fear of hiking or if there was something else. I had been warned about such warning. People here don’t like to disappoint, so they’ll give some excuse for why you should or shouldn’t do something, without stating the true reason. I thought about this, but could see no immediate threats and I had a strong desire to talk to someone we might actually be able to help. And with some delay, I decided to answer: “Yes. I do want to go, if you can make it.”

The discontent in my guide’s face intensified, but she consigned herself to our fate. We were appointed another guide, someone who lived nearby, a real highlander. He started leading our group. And boy could he hike! I had a foot or two on him in height, and was barely able to keep up without jogging on the flat first parts.

The first part of the trail was hilly, but not terribly steep. My other guides were in the back of the line and lagged behind a bit. But after a coconut field, we made it to the edge of the jungle and the hill. And he didn’t slow down. Now, I’ve hiked quite a bit in the US in my day, but we have developed something that the Palawanos apparently have no need of: something called “switchbacks.” Instead of going straight up, the trails are angled so as to minimize the incline to something more manageable at the cost of increasing the distance. When I was a Boy Scout, I cursed them. Why can’t we go straight up the mountain? The answer is: because you can’t go straight up a mountain. It’s too steep for the average American. But not too steep for the average Palawano highlander.

It was just about like climbing a ladder. The trail was perpendicular to the elevation lines, and deviated around obstacles and between property lines, but ignored topography. Rather, it paid attention to topography but only to spite it.

The missionary who worked in the area once explained to me that a ‘steep’ trail was one where you could reach out your hand and touch the trail you were hiking on. I don’t think we had any sections that steep (I tried this and was 6 inches short), so I suppose it was an ‘almost steep’ trail. For the steep sections, there were foot holes dug out of the mud trail like a ladder that were quite sturdy. I thought about the trail when it was wet, and figured it must be impassable, maybe even for highlanders.\

After about five minutes, I was pouring with sweat, breathing hard, but keeping up. But then I looked behind, and couldn’t see Fatimah or her companion. I hadn’t thought that I’d be in better shape than anybody. Not wanting to get separated from my only means of communication, I knew I needed to slow down our guide. Knowing 3 words of Tagalog (none of them presently useful) and not one of Palawano, I tapped my not-looking-behind-him guide on the shoulder and gesticulated as best I could for him to wait. And I was apparently successful.

We stopped, and I got the sense that, if the humidity wasn’t around 100%, my guide wouldn’t be sweating. He certainly wasn’t breathing hard like I was. We didn’t have enough language to even have light conversation. So we waited. And the mosquitoes saw a target of opportunity. We were in a jungle now, and I remembered the anti-mosquito advice to ‘clear out all standing water’ and laughed inside: a billion leaves and puddles and holes were wonderful breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Fortunately and inexplicably, the mosquitoes were not aggressive. I’ve been in places where, perhaps for want of blood, the mosquitoes are ravenous: they will latch onto whatever arm you try to swat them with. With a bit of shooing, I was protected, but there were really enough to be described as a fog.

The other factoid that I remembered is that malaria mosquitoes (anopheles) only bite at dawn and dusk; it was just past 1pm. And I was taking my prophylaxis, so I probably wouldn’t get Malaria even if I was bitten. But, of course, Dengue is transmitted during the day. And there’s no prophylaxis for Dengue.

With those thoughts to comfort me, Fatimah caught up with us, and was exhausted. She needed to take a break. And so we four waited a while, kept company by the swarms of mosquitoes (which, I must admit, seemed to prefer my blood over the locals). My decision to wear shorts was now proving a bad one, as my attending to my legs made me aware of the diverse and noxious allergens that I had been exposed to while hiking; my legs glowed red in a psychedelic pattern of passing leaves and twigs.

Our guide didn’t seem to have a variable speed. There was hiking at full gallop, or there was resting. And so Fatimah and her companion caught up to us, and then rested, and then we bounded ahead of them again. After doing this for a few iterations, my guide pointed at the silhouette of a house on the hill. It was beautiful, peeking through the jungle after so long a hike. It took us maybe an hour to hike at this ‘pace’ from the group of houses below; with the steepness and the rests, I had a hard time estimating our pace.

Travels to Tabod – Part III – The Man

Travels to Tabod – Part I – The Journey

We arrived in Imulnod Proper, another of the areas we needed to scout out for our Malaria project. At about 10am and talked with the Rural Health Midwife, Fatimah, for a while. The three-room Rural Health Station was clean and well-organized. We talked a while about the medical needs in the area and the resources that were available. I thanked her and, after some discussion, she offered to guide me to the nearest sitio (village), Tabod, to talk to the people there. I was hoping to interview someone in their home to directly ask about the problems. I had talked to a number of people who were down from the highlands, but I had not seen anything that was not connected to a road. Tabod was across a river, and I was excited at the opportunity to ford a river and to leave the World of Rubber Wheels.

I’d like to consider myself a hiker, but if I’m honest with myself, I don’t think I deserve the title. I used to hike quite a bit, but that was a long time ago. Nevertheless, I was in fairly good shape, so I thought I could endure a good hike.

We arrived at the river, and for the first day of the trip, I wasn’t wearing my Chocos (I had a meeting at the hospital that morning which required shoes). I had hoped the river crossing would be near the end of the hike. But in obedience to Murphy’s Law, it wasn’t but a quarter mile from our start. I surveyed the river, and it was about ankle deep for 25 meters; no way across without wet feet.

The sun was hot, and I had forgotten to shield my poor gringo skin with sunscreen. So I did like the locals and used an umbrella. I had changed into shorts, and I was able to stay somewhat cool for the first part. A soaked bandana on the neck helped immensely.

And then, about five minutes after crossing the river, maybe half a mile from the clinic, I was told we had arrived. There was a beautiful grass house outside between a corn field and a field of mature and profitable coconuts. Why so close?

I was introduced to the family and we began talking on camera. After a few questions, I got the sense that this family was not my target. I asked about bad cases of malaria, and through a mistranslation, the mother thought I was asking about the worse malaria species. Which she knew. “Plasmodium falciparum.” The kids were well-nourished, clothed, and visited the clinic as often as they were sick.

Being in development work is strange. A normal, well-adjusted person would be happy with such a report. But it has been a long time since I was a normal, well-adjusted person. In fact, I’m not sure I was ever a normal, well-adjusted person. A part of me (the human part) was happy. But, with it, I felt disappointment. I could not help this family. This family didn’t need my help. This family didn’t need help. And praise God!

But my job, for better and worse, was not to look for joyous stories. My job was not to be optimistic. I needed to see if there were ways that we could help. And that meant not focusing the lens where there was a nice picture, but, if it could be found, on where the image was upsetting.

It sounds almost perverse. But I suppose all excitement about work against the effects of the Fall are sick. It’s the same perversion that we all have in medicine, hoping for an ‘interesting’ case and disappointed when a cough is ‘only’ a cold, or a fever is ‘only’ the flu. Our work would be more challenging if the cough were TB or the fever leukemia. I’d guess good mechanics, accountants and artists experience the same thing. They want to engage all of their skills at solving a problem, not just mindlessly changing spark plugs, collating simple sums, and painting what’s already been painted.

So I ended the interview after a few questions. I thanked them profusely, and they seemed happy to entertain me. And I moved on, explaining to my guides that I wanted to talk to someone who was poor. The Palawano guiding us knew just the family. We hiked another quarter-mile and got to a collection of several houses and a spring box. After stopping to rest, my guides asked the people there for directions. They explained, and the midwife looked concerned.

Travels to Tabod – Part II – The Hill 

Adventure in Amas – Part II – The Penglima

It was about a 10 minute tricycle ride. Tricycles are the preferred mode of transport here. It’s a motorcycle with a side-car welded onto it. They’re not standardized body kits, so every one is unique; different places to grab onto and different pieces of unfinished metal to avoid getting sliced on. Like most modes of transport in the developing world, tricycles are usually crammed to their absolute physical limit. On the three wheels and pulled by the small motorcycle motor, I once saw seven people.

The village was beautiful. There was a network of hand-made rice paddies that lay at the foot of this village built on a hill. Houses made from bamboo and woven grasses were scattered about. All the walls were made of woven grasses, and I thought that such work might be in the shape of a basket and sit on a mantelpiece in any first world residence.

We climbed up the hill, passing a group of about 10 young men playing volleyball (as best I could tell). We arrived at the top of where the houses ended with one last, big house. And indeed, that was what it was called in Palawano: kela’ng benwa. Literally, ‘big house.’ It was raised about five feet off the ground, with a bamboo ladder-style staircase leading up to it. At the top waited Undu Apul and his wife, the penglima of the village. I talked with Dale about the meaning of the word, and very literally translated it means roughly “one whose vocation is 5,” but with a bit more poetic license you get something like “right hand man.” Linguistics aside, he was the guy in charge.

I slipped off my shoes at the bottom of the stairs, and walked up into the kela’ng benwa. The floor was made from 1-inch-wide bamboo slats lashed together with about a quarter inch of spacing between the slats. The cool bamboo felt good on my hot feet. The shade of the thatch roof and bits of flowing air on the soles of my feet were quite nice.

I was invited to sit down, and the interview began.

In my dealings with the poor, there is often an extreme deference or shyness, especially around (rich) westerners. But such was not the case with this penglima. He answered me both boldness and energy, far more energy than a lot of 78-year-olds I know. The confidence he had was well deserved. He had been the leader of his 200-something person village for most of his adult life. His position is a quasi-hereditary one (the oldest member of the ‘royal’ family, not necessarily the son of the present leader; i.e. his nephew was next in line over his son), so there was no campaigning or reelections he had to worry about.

I opened the talk with a few general questions. One of them was, “What are the problems your people face?” I had been taught that open-ended questions are better in general at the beginning. It allows for more un-influenced answers and answers that you might not have been looking for.

His response? “We have no problems.”

Come again? No problems? One of the poorest communities in the Philippines has no problems?

I didn’t quite know what to think. Maybe he thought things were OK when they weren’t. Maybe he’s just telling me things were OK. Maybe things really were OK. Maybe it was my Western arrogance to think that people living in grass huts are bad off.

I didn’t know what to think, so I went on to other questions. I talked about his crops, the water supply, the people, ‘kids these days’ and everything in between. We talked for four hours in that bamboo-slatted big house. And over the course of the conversation, it turned out that they did have problems (as all men). They plant rice, but it gets torn up by wild boars. I knew about these boars. The boars are sometimes hunted and, by all accounts, are not very friendly. They try to raise chickens, but they get eaten by wildcats. “Wildcats?” I asked the translator.

“Yes. You know. Like cats, but bigger.”

I had been warned about the boars (and a week before heading home, about the cobras). But about wildcats, I had no knowledge.

I held out my hands approximating a house cat, “This big?” I asked.

“Bigger,” said my translator. I had a picture of a mountain lion in my mind and reflected that we should probably add “Being eaten by a wildcat” to the list of risks of travelling to Palawan.

“How much bigger?”

There was some dialog in Tagalog or Palawano. After a much-longer-than-should-have-been-necessary-to-describe-a-cat’s-size discussion, the council ruled that it was not all that much larger than a housecat. I revised my mountain lion to a bobcat and ceased my worries about being eaten. At least all at once. Or by only one ‘wildcat’ (after all, they could be like raptors in Jurassic Park). Whatever its size, it ate the chickens they tried to raise. I suppose it didn’t matter if it were the size of a mouse if it killed chickens.

I continued my questions. They plant coconuts, but they get eaten by rats. They climb up the trees, pick a coconut, eat through three inches of coconut husk, and then eat out the sweet meat inside.

So no problems. Except the boars and the wildcats and the rats. It was explained to me later that it was common to hide problems from new visitors as a source of pride. Perhaps it was like covering up the shameful parts of one’s society with a metaphorical fig leaf.

Toward the end of the conversation, he started mentioning his parents. Or what I understood to be his parents from the translation. After a while I figured out that it was indeed his parents, and their parents, and so on, and so on. I had always assumed ancestor worship was similar to polytheistic worship in that you honor a being that is above or separate from you. But the aspect I had not anticipated was how the ancestors were spoken of. It was as if they were familiar and still alive, passing judgment on the decisions of this, by comparison, youthful 78-year-old. The penglima thought they were presently disappointed in the present society because they had left the traditions and grown lenient on the laws, particularly those regarding sexual relations.

The young people were ‘eloping.’ They were not going through the somewhat bureaucratic process of first requesting permission to marry from both sets of parents, then with that approval, taking it before the penglima and the council of village elders for approval. Then, there would be the payment of the dowry that would also need to be paid. All of these steps were skipped by young people who, not unlike western boyfriends and girlfriends, just move in together.

Is there nowhere that this is not happening? These people, in a single generation, have abandoned (proper) monogamy. I’ve seen this everywhere I’ve gone in the developing world: the traditional beliefs are strict monogamy or at least strict polygamy. But the young people have pretty well given up on that and take their relationships about as seriously as westerners take theirs.

As we talked, the penglima told me the story of why they lived in Macagua. Around 40 years ago, he persuaded the then-highlanders to take their homes and migrate down to the lowlands. “Why?” I asked. He said with complete confidence, “Because of the salt.”

I had heard of migrations for a lot of reasons. But this one was new to me. I got this through a translator, so I thought it might be an un-translated metaphor. “Does he mean literal salt?” I asked my translator. There was some dialog between my translator and the penglima. Nope. Literal salt. “Why did you come down from the highlands for the salt?”

“Because there’s no salt in the highlands,” he replied, getting confused about my confusion.

And I suppose he’s right. Isn’t the need for salt obvious? Hadn’t it been traded in parts of Africa pound for pound for gold? Isn’t a proper salt balance critical for human health? And isn’t salt hard to come by in a highland jungle?

So yes. An entire village packed up their things and moved to be closer to where the salt was. He explained that, of course, there were other benefits to the lowlands like markets and medicine. But mostly they moved for the salt.

As the sun began to get low in the sky, we said our goodbyes. As we were doing so, he shook my hand enthusiastically and kept repeating a word. My translator said it meant, “Nephew,” and explained, “He now considers you his nephew and hopes that you will visit him again.”

 “I hope so,” I said. 

Adventure in Amas – Part I – The Captain

It was our first day in the “provinces” as it is called, and we were ready to go. The provinces is the word used for the rural parts of the Philippines, and is perhaps an appropriate one. Like in most developing countries, there is a stark contrast between the wealth of the city and the poverty outside of it. In the capital cities, it seems there is a convergence to Western prices for food and lodging. And so it is somewhat accurate to draw a line between Manila and not-Manila; the city, and everything else (though I have heard there are several up-and-coming cities that have quite as high a standard of living as Manila).

Our first stop was in Amas, a Barangay of Brooke’s Point municipality in the province of Palawan. We arrived at the government complex where there were a dozen or so small buildings dotted a few acres of shaded grass. I’ve seen this rough plan in Kenya, and think it is far superior to the traditional office building, and I suppose, the result of a powerful government and/or cheap land. We were looking into working on Malaria, and our first stop was the Rural Health Microscopist, to see how Malaria was diagnosed.

The microscopist took a blood sample, and with as proper a procedure as can be, stained and smeared it, and viewed it, twisting the knobs on the microscope with an ease that comes with much practice. “No parasite seen,” said he after searching the slide. I would find out later that these “Barangay Microscopists” were villagers who received a month-long crash-course in diagnosing malaria. They look at malaria cases all day long, every day. And as they say, practice makes perfect. Well, not perfect. But pretty darn good. The Barangay Microscopists give the laboratory technicians (2 year post-college program) a run for their money. They are tested on occasion, being given ten known “cases” to examine. Villagers with experience do better than the educated without it.

I didn’t know all that then, and so I patronizingly watched the Barangay Microscopist examine the slide. “Isn’t that cute?” I thought, “He’s trying.” I suppose it is the prejudice of a schooled person to think schooled people are more important than the unschooled. But I should have believed what I already knew: experience, not letters, makes a person good at something.

We visited the Amas Barangay captain after this, and had a good interview with him. We sat around a table with the diffuse light of a cloudy day flowing in through the windows. Despite the limited funds available to a Barangay Captain, we were served refreshments: Coca-Cola and saltine crackers.

I’m not sure what the selection of refreshments communicates. Were we white visitors, so presented with the wondrous fruits of our homeland? Or was this considered the best? Or was this was all that on hand for our unannounced visit? In any case, it is unfortunate that high glycemic index is used to wash down even higher glycemic index, even if it be only on special occasions. Causes for the rise of diabetes in the developing world are not hard to find.

After hearing what we were planning to do, I stared asking questions about the problems in Amas. I was looking for work to do; if he told me there were problems, it meant we’d have work to do. We could come back. If there weren’t, then we smile and go home. I probed in various areas: health, education, economy. And in each of them, there were indeed problems. When I proceed robotically (as I am wont to do) from question to question, I forget how burdensome it must be to call to mind and to speak the multitude of problems, especially to a visitor. It seemed a sense of shame accompanied this social nakedness.

After listing all the problems, I was beginning to get excited about the opportunity. But the captain must have thought his Barangay’s case hopeless, “So do you still want to work here?” I smiled warmly and with sincerity said, “Yes. Yes I do.”

We finished the interview and decided to move on to one of the sitios (villages). We went to Macagua, and Dale left me with Norlita as he had things to attend to in town.


Adventure in Amas – Part II – The Penglima

Philippines Travel Blog

I spent most of last month in the Philippines on behalf of Rancho Community Church, the church I grew up in. There were reports of a very high child mortality rate and I had been sent with Rancho’s missionary to Palawan to see if anything could be done. To tell the end of the story first, we did find a great need in Malaria and have hired a Filipino team to begin addressing the problem. While I was there, I had time to write down two of the many incredible experiences I had, and will post these here. I hope you enjoy them!

Adventure in Amas – Part I – The Captain

Adventure in Amas – Part II – The Penglima

Travels to Tabod – Part I – The Journey

Travels to Tabod – Part II – The Hill

Travels to Tabod – Part III – The Man

Degenerate Cultures, Cave Men, and Civilization

The now-dead script of Palawan

Experience in the Philippines

I recently travelled to the Philippines and found out about the Palawano people. My church in Temecula is hoping to help with the material needs (starting with Malaria). My guide here was a missionary who had spent the past two decades mastering the language and even developing a written language for the people.

When we arrived in Manila, he showed me some of his books. In one of them, I saw a strange lettering and asked him about it. He said that that was the way the Palawano used to write. There were a precious few old people who knew the cuneiform-like script. But none of the middle aged or young people were being taught it like they had been in the past; the culture was becoming illiterate. They forgot how to write. For thousands of years, they could write. But over the course of the past few generations, they forgot. One of the major things that defines human civilization is the ability to accumulate knowledge and communicate by text. It wasn’t just lacking in the Palawano, but it had been present and now was lost.

The tribal leaders I’ve talked to seem convinced that their ancestors are disappointed in the way things were being handled. It’s sort of an ancestor-worship version of the American complaint about, “kids these days.”

I noticed the same thing about the Kurians in Kenya. They remembered being able to make baskets, but only a few presently remembered how. They had memories of original music and dance, but the present is just a shadow of the past; it stands tall on the horizon behind, full of power and authority.


The Ancients

I think back to the wonderful stories of the ancient peoples. This theme comes up in good Fantasy and Sci-Fi books. Atlantis, Chtullu, the Numenorians, the Jedi are all ancient. The message is that the olden days were pretty much better in every way. And then there are these unexplained artifacts in the modern world: the Great Pyramid with its math, ancient cities with indoor hot and cold water, swords with aligned carbon nanotubes. Even the physical feats of old mountaineers, of arctic explorers, of Roman legions and of European knights are hard to believe. We describe the generation that fought WWII as the “Greatest Generation”. We are certain that olden-days people could do stuff that it would be challenging or impossible for us to do today.

I was shocked when this idea was validated by GK Chesterton in his masterful historical apologetic for Christianity, “The Everlasting Man”  (free text). Chesterton argues for the moving of the Sprit of God in pagan man (!) and then His animation of the Church with her power and vitality. The book opens with an account of primitive man. While having no argument with the biological evolution up to humans as humans, he argues that there is no evidence for evolution of human institutions. The idea of a development from rude tribal organization to more civilized ones is utterly without empirical foundation.

(I’m about to quote the 1925 work directly where Chesterton describes tribal or indigenous people as ‘Savages’. Be aware that this is the word used in 1925 from a root meaning ‘woods’ and is not a statement about the people’s humanity or worth. It would be inaccurate at this point to recite the catchy line from the Disney’s Pocahontas song: “Savages, savages, barely even human” ; I’m quite sure that Chesterton has a higher view of their value than any Modern who uses the politically correct ‘indigenous people’.)

If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon. Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men are thinking about modern savages.

...

But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and well informed people quite as probable that the experience of the savages has been that of a decline from civilization.

...

It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it.

But this is in contrast with the ‘scientific’ account of our past: a gradual climb up from lower life forms. I say ‘scientific’ because the account is eminently not experimental. It’s part of a worldview and valid insomuch as we think inference valid. But as Chesterton points out, we never observed prehistoric people. It is an astounding feat of extrapolation to impute people who lived 5000 years go with the characteristics we observe in tribal peoples presently.

Decline
The scattered bits of evidence I’ve observed are that tribal cultures are in a state of decline, not stasis (and yes, I did say ‘decline.’ If you object to the use of the word, please, I invite you to write an argument that one cannot make a value judgment on “illiteracy”. Once you’ve done that, you might begin to appreciate the value of writing). And if we are to extrapolate (always dangerous), we should do it based on the albeit small bit of data we do have. And the data I have directly observed shows a downward slope. If we extrapolate this back a few thousand years, we arrive at something like Numenorians and the Great Pyramid, not cave men.

Before I am accused of being a racist, let me flesh this out a bit. If there was not a decline, then illiterate jungle-dwelling people were always illiterate jungle-dwelling people. If there was, then who can know what civilization was once present. Perhaps dialogues greater than Plato's were written, or art that surpassed the Renaissance, or benevolent governance to rival Athens or Philadelphia. If there was a decline, then these cultures might have been comparable in these fields to our own. But if there was not a decline, then they are only equal when there is no value; if we allow relativism to equate the Mona Lisa with a finger painting or Notre Dame with a mud hut, then these cultures are equal. But if there was a decline, and their history was lost, there really may have been an astonishing culture in the past. If we desire to aid them, we don't have to give them the choice between the Western Way or misery in their present state of poverty. We can re-awaken the memories of their own glorious past, beyond the reach of written history, and have them truly develop without simply mimicking the good and bad in the West.

Perhaps they were in stasis for a long time. But if so, why now? Maybe it’s because of population growth. Maybe it’s because of Western influence. Maybe 5000 years was just too long to write (wouldn’t you get tired after 100 generations?). Or maybe something bigger and more mystical is happening; maybe it’s because 2012 is coming up, or maybe it’s the End Times, or maybe it’s in preparation for the next Hegelian step. Or maybe it has been a constant decline from a glorious civilization that could stand against Babylon and Egypt, and after millenia of the candle burning down, the flame of writing was finally snuffed out.

On Food Banks, The Mafia, Free Lunches, and Love

Introduction

I have recently been thinking about Food Banks, and specifically food banks run by churches. For those unfamiliar, a typical food bank collects donations of usually canned foods from the community. Some amount of this food is distributed to anyone who shows up on a given day, typically on a weekly or biweekly basis.

I once heard a similar organization argue thusly, “I think food is good. And there are some people out there who don’t have it. So, being that food is good, we get the food to the people who don’t have it and so do good.” Food banks are great because we all know what hunger feels like, and how wonderfully relieving food is. We picture the single mom whose deadbeat husband left her alone with 5 children. She’s just lost one of her two jobs and is not able to make ends meet. So she goes down to the food bank to feed her son Tim, a boy we might fancy is a lot like Tiny Tim: incredibly cute but hungry and on the verge of starvation. His mother has lost a lot of weight because all the food she can gather goes to the kids. We hope that our can of Pork N Beans goes to her.

OK, so maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But here’s the core of the story I stand by: we want to help people 1) who are not bad people, 2) who are working as hard as they can and 3) who need this aid temporarily to get back on their feet. In other words, when we give a can to a food bank, we have in mind something like the single mom; we don’t give cans hoping to help support the 23-year-old guy who lives in his Mom’s basement playing video games (Call of Duty, most likely).

Food banks have expanded to the point of now reaching 37 million Americans in 2010 [1]. Only 2% of Americans are underweight [2]. Even if every one of those was underweight because a lack of food (and not from age or disease), there are still 80% of those who get food from food banks (10% of Americans) who have enough calories.

So my question is this: do the recipients of food bank food meet our ideals? And if not, so what? Admittedly, this is a very crude analysis that leaves a lot out [3]. But I just want to raise the question: are food banks accomplishing what we want them to accomplish? Are the recipients who we want them to be? And if not, so what?

I have three major concerns with the food bank model. First, that it helps some bad people. Without doing any screening, food banks may be, for all they know, feeding Al Qaeda cells with their food. Second, that it is free. Those who can work, ought to work; food banks don’t ask for work. Third, that it rarely helps. The whole point of the food bank is to help people, and blind handouts are more likely to create dependency than actually improve the ultimate lot of the people they purport to help.

Many of my concerns were suggested or supported by an essay written by the second richest man and possibly (IMHO) the greatest philanthropist who ever lived: Andrew Carnegie. The essay was entitled “Wealth” and Carnegie argued that millionaires should donate most of their money to worthy philanthropic projects before they die. But he is careful to define ‘worthy’ and describe many of the ways giving can go wrong. I’ll be including quotations from his essay throughout mine. Here is one to begin with:

“These who, would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.” – Carnegie [4]

Problem One: Food Banks Help Bad People

“He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in alms-giving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue.” – Carnegie

As is very clear from the Moral Law and explicit in the Bible, we’re not supposed to help bad people. Proverbs warns against joining up with sinners, “My son, if sinners entice you, do not consent” (Pro 1:10)[5]. Proverbs says: “But to the wicked, God says…When you see a thief, you join with him” (Psa 50:16,18). Paul instructs us: “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove [them]” (Eph 5:11). But it’s not just bad people that we need to avoid giving to. It’s also rich people: “Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth, or gives to the rich, will only come to poverty” (Pro 22:16).

My first concern with the food bank is that is has no safeguards against helping bad people. And I mean ‘bad’ people here very broadly. It helps people that are not good, are not working hard, and/or are not likely to ever stop using the food bank. The line-waiter in the average food bank isn’t questioned or asked about his condition or why he needs the food. An Al Qaeda member might need to support his local cell. An Italian mafia member may want to defray his gang’s food expenses.

But even beyond these exaggerations, there are other kinds of non-ideal food targets. Does the food bank want to support a drug addict’s habit? With less money going for food, more can go to heroin[6]. Does the food bank want to allow a 23-year-old living in his mother’s basement to continue to not look for a job? His mom won’t kick him out and now he has all the food he needs to keep playing Call of Duty. Does the food bank want to supplement the $60,000 income of a single man? He doesn’t have to buy groceries and now can afford a payment on a 7-series BMW instead of a 5-series.

With these three cases, the food bank has supported addiction, laziness and greed. Surely we would decry an organization that bought heroin for addicts, taught laziness to the youth and bought nicer cars for the already rich. But this is in effect what food banks are already doing. An organization, like an individual, ought to seek to do good and avoid evil. In food banks, almost no efforts have been made to avoid this evil.

Suggestion One: screen the people. Find out if you’re giving food to people you want to give food to. If you find out that you aren’t, set rules on who gets food.

Problem Two: Food Banks Are Free

“Neither the individual nor the race is improved by alms-giving.” – Carnegie

Men, if they are capable, ought to work. This is as clear a Moral and Biblical principal as one can find. God declares in Genesis, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Gen 3:19). Paul, in describing the payment due to elders explains, “For the Scripture says, "You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain," and, "The laborer deserves his wages”” (1Ti 5:18). When he hears of men in Thessalonica not working he is outraged and declares, “For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2Th 3:10). Even the poorest of the poor were expected to do work. In Leviticus, God establishes the law of gleaning; during a harvest, the reapers were forbidden from going through the field a second time to pick up what had fallen in the first pass. The poor were then allowed to themselves labor in the field, ‘gleaning’ the fallen grains for their food: "And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, nor shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God" (Lev 23:22).

It is certainly true that some are incapable of work. There are those who are physically or mentally disabled who cannot earn enough to support themselves. There are people who have, like Job, been hit so hard by circumstance that they might be worthy of a direct gift of food. But these are few in number, and in our society, have some significant assistance by other governmental programs (e.g. Medicaid and Social Security).

This leaves us with able-bodied men and women not able to work. This state of non-work is a very difficult place to be in psychologically. Your independence is gone; you have to rely on others for your food. Your dignity is gone, because you are no longer contributing to society. And then you have to stand in line like a child in a school cafeteria waiting to be fed whatever slop the cafeteria happens to be dishing out. And the sting is even sharper when you remember that a year ago, you were standing in line at a buffet in a fancy hotel for a trade show before you lost your job.

Nobody wants to stand in a food line; it’s shameful. The food bank treats everyone as a cripple; it treats people who could earn their way in life as if they couldn’t, and thus further damages their waning confidence. It teaches that capable people not using their talents are worthy of reward. It teaches that some people, selected by their bad luck, are special and don’t have to obey the same rules or live up to the same expectations as everybody else. It teaches people that there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Suggestion Two: Do not give out free food to capable people; require them to do some work for their food. Doing work is ennobling; it helps to make a person virtuous. Specifically, it helps build the virtue of diligence and fight the vice of sloth (laziness). Laziness is an easy sin to fall into when you’re not working; diversion can become quite an addiction. Suggestion Two will also help solve Problem One; work is an excellent screen against bad people.

Problem Three: Food Banks Alone Don’t Help

“…the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise…forms best calculated to do them lasting good.” – Carnegie

The first commandment is to love God. The second is: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mat 22:39). I think the biggest failing of the food bank is that it fails to love. Love entails many things, and is an incredibly important part of the human experience. But here I will only focus on two aspects of it: relationship and benefit. Whatever else it is, Christian love must be relational, and it must have the best interest of its object in mind. Food banks, as far as I can tell, are neither.

They are not relational in that it is mostly a system. It is a charity factory maximizing the number of meals served, shoveling food in the mouths of the poor like coal into a boiler. Nobody knows the people who get the food. Meals are given, they are not shared. How many poor people have been entertained in the homes of the food-bank donors? Even the volunteers of a food bank rarely have any relationship with those getting the food. How can we say we love people who we do not know?

Second, we fail to love our neighbors because we fail to do what is best for them. A box of food is not the solution. At its very best, it is stopgap measure. Most people who show up to a food bank need more than food. Nobody wants to go to a food bank. Some are unemployed; they need help finding a job. Some are addicts; they need help out of addiction. Some are depressed or anxious; they need to be given hope and soothed. Some are in spiritual darkness; they need the Light. Some are just downright lonely; they need someone to talk to.

Suggestion Three: Get to know the people standing in line, and try to help them out of their bad situations; show them love. This will be incredibly hard and take a lot more work, prayer, and manpower than shoveling food does. It will probably take a lot of people and partnership with a lot of other organizations. There are many buried talents standing in line at a food bank; figuring out how to dig them up ought to be one of the major functions of the food bank. These skills of the poor are like fields, and if properly dealt with, can be productive: “The fallow ground of the poor would yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice” (Pro 13:23). Love, at least Christian love, can transform what is presently a dehumanizing process into a life-giving one. Truly, “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it” (Pro 15:17).

Conclusion

Food banks are a very well-funded and well-supported segment of American charity. They have great potential to do good in a powerful way. But as it is, there are three major ways in which they are prevented from doing it. Firstly, they make few efforts to avoid doing evil. Secondly, they treat able-bodied people as if they weren’t. Thirdly, they don’t aspire to help people permanently. But these habits are not inherent; the model doesn’t need to be killed to be effective. The first two can be solved by simple screenings and work requirements. To solve the third problem, it requires a bit more. Actually it requires a lot more. It requires that people be treated like people, that relationships with poor people be forged, that the personal concerns of people be addressed, and that the best interest of the poor actually be pursued. In short, it requires love. Even if we can finally declare and loudly proclaim the end of hunger by efforts in the food bank, but we had not love, we would be a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. (1Cr 13:3)
References

[1] http://www.usatoday.com/news/sharing/2010-02-01-hunger_N.htm

[2] http://apps.who.int/bmi/index.jsp

[3] The simplistic analysis at least leaves out: there being more to nutrition than calories, the slow rise of underweight proportion, relieving the pain of hunger pangs independently; the difficulties of unstable food supply (i.e. lack of “food security”)

[4] http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html

CARNEGIE, ANDREW. “WEALTH.” NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. No. CCCXCI. JUNE, 1889
 [5] All Bible quotations are from the ESV.
 [6] I don’t think it’s automatically wrong to give food to drug addicts. However, I do think most people would consider it a problem and so I mention it here. If all three problems were addressed, especially the third one, I think a food bank could be an incredible gateway out of addiction and should give food to drug addicts.