Before Soul Survivor Week A, where I took part in the Slum Survivor challenge, I was guilty of this, and was quite content to lead my life uninterrupted by caring for people hundreds of miles away. But this week I have seen that God calls us to care his heart breaks over the injustice faced by his children, and as we aim to change more into his likeness, the issues that concern God must be the issues that concern us.
The deal for the week was this; build yourself a slum out of chipboard and tarpaulin and live in it for 5 days, with a limited diet and a limited kit, including just one set of clothes. Every day we made paper bags and sold them to the cafe teams on site to earn rupees so we could buy our dinner of rice and dhal [boiled lentils with added spices], which was pretty unappetising. We also made musical instruments and childrens' toys out of scavenged items, sold them to the delegates and exchanged the pounds for rupees. This process was incredibly frustrating. The caf teams were really harsh to us and would either turn us away telling us our bags were rubbish, or pay us ridiculously badly, and the food prices and exchange rate from pounds to rupees changed every day. The point was to imitate the problems faced by people in poverty when they trade. It was one of the most demoralising things I have ever done. When you're tired and hungry and wet and cold, surviving is enough of a struggle already, without having to fight to earn money.
More than one billion people in the world actually face this frustration every day as they struggle to support themselves and their families, and if we don't do something about this number, it will have doubled by 2030. In our society we all buy things without even thinking about the effect, but our choices have serious consequences. By supporting unethical companies with our business, we are unavoidably involved in their actions. Before Slum Survivor I didn't consider myself anything to do with the unfair trade around the world this was probably because I didn't want to! But whether we like it or not, our actions and our choices influence the lives of other people, people who are God's children and made in his image. Unfair trade is a cause of poverty, and so by buying unfairly traded products, we are defiling the creation of God.
We were given a challenge every day, so that we would engage with the issues which people living in slums face. On the fourth day at 9am our instructor Carrie ran up and told us that we had 5 minutes to evacuate the slums and get all of our stuff out, because a flash flood was coming. After a mad rush, we got everything out, and a sigh of relief was audible we were safe. However when Carrie was talking to us, we jumped round as we heard an almighty crash, and saw a 'flood' (JCB forklift truck) destroying our slum. The entirety of the boys room and kitchen were flattened; all of our wood and cardboard was smashed up, and the place was a wreck. We were completely gutted. We had spent hours building the slum and it had finally began to get a bit comfortable, as after 4 days we'd scavenged cardboard to insulate it and put carpet down. As well as obliterating our shelter, the flood washed all of our food and cooking equipment away. It was such a horrible feeling, just being utterly and completely destitute. I know it was just a little hut built out of chipboard, but when you don't have very much, and the little you do have gets taken away from you, it destroys your world.
In this country we have insurance and we have back up plans and there is help available, and if for some reason something does go wrong in our lives, there is always an alternative. But if you live in a slum and it gets destroyed, that is it, you have nothing. We literally had nowhere to go. This was the low point for all of us we hadn't eaten for 24 hours, we had to rebuild our shelter, and we didn't have any prospect of food until we finished the following day. Yet all the time in the back of our minds we knew that we could go home to our families and roofs and walls and fridges and warm beds, while all over the world there are one billion people who live in slums every single day of their lives and have no hope of going home, because the slum is their home. We knew we were in a simulation, but for the one in six people in our world who live in a slum, this is reality.
The biggest thing I have come to realise and the thing which utterly breaks my heart is the fact that for people living in slums, nothing is guaranteed. Everything they own can be swept away in seconds. Traders can refuse to buy their products. They can contract disease so easily. And they are so, so helpless. They have no insurance, no rights, no medicine. They have no voice. But we do, and we are called by God to be a voice for the voiceless. We have an enormous privilege to be able to speak out. We also have an enormous responsibility, and it is not one which we can ignore if we want to see his Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. The kingdom of God is the end of suffering, the end of brokenness, the end of injustice. If we want to see this happen, then we need to see the world through God's eyes, and to have his heart for the poor. A phrase we often hear is 'passion for your name'. If we continue to live ignorant lives, contributing to unfair trade and poverty around the world, then we are standing for injustice and poverty. God is everything that is fair, everything that is just, and everything that is right. Passion for his name means passion for the things which are close to Gods heart, and so we need to defend those who are defenceless, intercede, and speak up. Have your heart broken for the things which break Gods heart, because now is the time.
I signed up for Slum Survivor ready for a challenge. I wanted to be challenged by God to depend more on him. I wanted to be challenged to survive. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to learn to work in a team. I wanted to struggle, and I wanted to succeed. I thought that once all of my comforts were stripped away, I would get closer to God and have a deeper experience of Him. All of my expectations were about me; about my desires and my life. Of course God doesn't always (or even often) follow my plans, and so in actual fact my Slum Survivor experience hasn't been about me and my relationship with my God. It's been about him and his relationship with the poor. And as we come into his likeness, his heart for the poor becomes our heart for the poor. For better or worse, there is now no avoiding the fact that there is more to my life than MY life.
