Key points:
- News from around the world carries personal significance, prompting concern about friends in different lands.
- For retired United Methodist pastor the Rev. Mel West, family includes people in places as diverse as Ukraine, Haiti, Nicaragua, Russia and the United States.
- When we turn on the news and know it is about our family, then we are seeing the light, he writes.
Photo courtesy of the Rev. Mel West.
Commentaries
Each day, the news that comes into my home is not just “world news.” It is news of my extended family, and it carries me through the day as I think of those connections. Let me explain.
In 1989, I retired at the age of 65. My wife, Barbara, and I were still in good health. For 20 years, I had developed and directed The Office of Creative Ministries for The United Methodist Church in Missouri. I had worked in cooperation with some of the amazing faith-based non-governmental organizations that had come from the church. Barbara and I decided to give the balance of our active lives to those NGOs that were doing exactly what our church and faith had told us to do.
We served actively on the international boards of Heifer International, Habitat for Humanity (with the late Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter), Alfalit International, ECHO, Rainbow Network and SIFAT (Servants in Faith and Technology). We started Mobility Worldwide, The Sewing Machine Project and helped start The Global Market.
We traveled in 26 countries to evaluate and assure quality work and maintain relationships. We lived and ate with some of the recipients, went to a wedding, and did those things together that made us family.
So when world news comes to me, it is so often also family news. It impacts those with whom my heart is entwined.
Methodism founder John Wesley said, “If your heart is as my heart, give me your hand.” World news is so often about those with whom I “hold hands.”
Here are some examples:
My baldheaded children
When news comes of the possible bombing of nuclear plants in Ukraine, I wonder how many of those beautiful, baldheaded children I met in Moscow lived. And for those who did, do they still have their stuffed animal?
In 1994, I visited a large, 1,200-bed children’s hospital in Russia. It was bleak and foreboding, children, ages perhaps 4 to 12, lying on their backs, bald, staring at a plain ceiling. They were just some of the children affected by fallout from Chernobyl. My heart reached out to them, and they and all the similar children in Russia and Ukraine became family.
I came home and told Barbara, and we announced a Stuffed Animal Project to The United Methodist Church at large. Some 16,500 stuffed animals flooded in from every state in the U.S. Barbara checked each one for loose buttons, and we sent them off for Father Christmas to deliver.
A year later, I was in Moscow with the president of the Organization for World Peace. When I mentioned the animals, he responded with great enthusiasm. “That was a wonderful thing,” he said, “because it was for our children.” It was family for him, also.
Sadly, now the news I receive about my family from that part of the world is not good news.
My walking family
In 1986, my family enlarged in an unusual way, and I got news from that group almost daily. I joined a group making a 1,000-mile walk for Habitat for Humanity from Americus, Georgia, to Kansas City, Missouri. Our purpose was to raise a million dollars for Habitat and to promote it. We walked the “blue highways” through small towns, shouting “No more shacks” and staying in high school gyms, churches and public campgrounds. Former President Carter started us off and met us in Kansas City.
Here is a part of my family with whom I walked for 50 days:
Pedro Castro Lopez, native, Guatemala.
Bishop Ben and Alice Ogwal Abwanag, Anglican Church, Uganda.
Mongu Etoque, Nitu Kumba and Papy Macquanzi, Zaire.
Angelino Chipana Aliaga, Bolivia.
Hugh O’Brien, Ireland.
Sogano Memema, Papua New Guinea.
Azariah Rajaskoraroa, India.
Jesse Infante, the Philippines.
Zenon Colque Rojas, Peru.
We walked, ate, worshipped, slept, showered and talked for 50 days and nights, and became family. When I read or hear the news from their parts of the world, I think of them and wonder how they have fared.
My table family in Haiti
In 1987, Barbara and I were traveling in Haiti with Dr. Arturo Cabezus, president of Alfalit International, evaluating the mission of Alfalit and recruiting volunteers. As we started one morning, he said, “We are going to visit one of the poorest of our volunteers but also one of our best. We will arrive at about 10 and she does not know we are coming. But we must not stay for lunch. She is very poor and we do not want to embarrass her.”
We were greeted warmly and she immediately said, “Now you will stay for lunch!” She and Dr. Cabezus entered into a friendly discussion about that and the meeting began. I was seated so I could see into her little kitchen and out the back door into a small backyard encircled by an 8-foot-tall block fence. I saw a woman come into the kitchen and begin to work. Then I saw several food pots appear on top of that fence, and the kitchen worker gathered them up.
At noon we sat down to a bountiful meal, which I was asked to bless. I did with a new understanding of “blessedness.”
Today as I hear news of Haiti, its political unrest or tropical storms, I remember my last family meal there and pray them well.
My Sioux brother
In 1978, as a part of my volunteer work with Heifer Project, I recruited the donation of 176 quality Angus beef heifers for the project on the Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. During an evaluation trip, I was riding with a recipient, Thomas J. Hawk (“Tommy Hawk”), in his used, but in good condition, two-row Ford pickup. His family had received seven heifers and a bull.
“Tommy,” I said, “what difference has it made to your family to have received the animals?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said. “My wife and I have three children all in school. Before we got the cattle, all we could afford was an old, one-seat pickup, and we had to pay high interest on it. Two children always had to ride in the back, rain or shine. That’s not good for ‘chillens’. After we got the cattle, I went to the bank, and said to the banker, “I need a loan to buy a decent pickup.”
“He said, ‘Tommy, what collateral do you have?’ I said, ‘Mr. Banker, I’m a cattle man.’ I got a good rate on the loan, and now our family goes to town, all inside this pickup, and with pride.
He went on, “Before we got the cattle, when fall came we went to town, and my wife was able to buy a new coat for the oldest child, and new shoes. The others had to wear hand-me-downs. That’s not good for chillens. Now we come to town in pride, all inside our pickup, and with some new clothing. That’s the difference it made.”
I have his words on tape, but each time I see or hear news of the Sioux, or South Dakota, it is of my family, and I am part Cherokee.
Look at my new shoes
In the year 2000, I began to work with Rainbow Network, an NGO in one of the poorest Latin American countries, Nicaragua.
We had doctors working daily in the countryside. I was there following a doctor, he in his Jeep and I in mine. A woman came from a side trail and stopped his car. She handed him a baby, which he examined on his hood. She left and he came back to my vehicle, and said, “You go home and send these folks some shoes. That baby was vomiting up worms.”
At that time, beginning our mission, both children and adults in Nicaragua were heavily infested with parasites. They infest those who walk barefoot on soil inhabited by animals. (As a barefoot boy in Missouri, I took vermifuge to control parasites in my body.)
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I came back to Missouri, told that story, and our church put a 40-foot container on our parking lot. Within a month, we had 26,600 new and gently used shoes, which we sent to Rainbow Network. Several months later, I was back in Nicaragua at one of the community centers. I felt a tug on my pants leg and looked down to see one of the most darling of little girls, perhaps 5 years old.
“Señor,” she said, “look at my new shoes.” And she walked away wearing a new pair of shoes that sparkled.
News of Nicaragua makes me think of that little girl I call “Maria.” I wonder, did she marry a decent person? Did she get an education? She is family.
My family at war
In 1995, I directed a team of eight persons from Alabama to go to Kromy, Russia, to turn an abandoned building into a center for children. We went to build bridges of trust, love, appreciation and understanding, using the building project as a means. For a week, we worked together, plumbing, painting, carpentering, cleaning and pouring sidewalks. We ate and swam together in a nearby small lake.
I asked the mothers there, “What do you want for your children?” Almost with one voice, they said, “An education and no more wars!” Now when I hear the news, I worry about that part of my family. Are their children in Ukraine fighting their cousins?
When do we know we are family?
A Jewish proverb asked, “When is it the light of day? Is it when we can see a camel coming and know that it is a camel and not a donkey? Is it when we can see a palm tree and know that it is not an olive tree? When is it the light of day?”
The sage answered, “It is the light of day when you can see someone coming and know that it is either your brother or your sister.”
It is the light of day when we turn on the news and know that it is news of our family. If we realize that, we have “seen the light.” We are an “enlightened” person.
The author Archibald MacLeish speaks to this in a beautiful passage, which I have adapted with a few word changes here: “To see the Earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, sisters and brothers in the bright loveliness in the unending night — brothers and sisters who see now that they are truly family.”
West is a retired United Methodist pastor in Columbia, Missouri. The founder of Mobility Worldwide, he has been honored for his commitment to humanitarian work.
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