Poverty and Parking Meters
By Susie Snyder
Fact: Parking meters earn more in an hour than 70% of the world’s population
Fact: 1 billion people go hungry every day
Fact: 3 million people die every year from HIV/AIDS
Fact: In 2006, the world spent over $900 billion in arms
Statistics like these are designed to grab the attention – and although I don’t think that shock tactics really get people interested in poverty and oppression these days, it’s still worth a try. I guess we’ve just seen so many pictures of starving kids on TV and are so fed up with the guilt-inducing clipboard-wielding charity fundraisers lurking on every street corner that we switch off. There’s always another cause and another problem, more people dying, more dictators being born. Yawn. Nothing ever seems to change.
I went to a conference in Johannesburg in March, looking at what Anglican churches across the world were doing to address global poverty, development and HIV/AIDS – and I have to say that I didn’t go with high hopes. Anyone who’s heard anything about the Anglican Church recently will know that all we seem to be able to do when we get together is talk about gay sex. Yawn. So my only hope was that the whole thing wouldn’t disintegrate into another liberal v conservative, America v Nigeria slanging match with the English delegation just trying to keep a low profile. I was pleasantly surprised.
About 450 of us from countries as diverse as Fiji, Burundi, Mexico, Pakistan and Australia really got down to discussing what we were doing to progress the Millennium Development Goals. We were already doing quite a lot, it turned out, and we talked about what else we could do and even made concrete action points. Oh, just in case you haven’t heard of the MDGs [a survey has shown that most of the world’s population hasn’t] – they were produced by the UN for the Millennium, and are supposed to be achieved by 2015.
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership
The Archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, hosted the conference, and we had a range of speakers – including from the UN and the UK’s Department for International Development – and the usual round of seminars. We also had the chance to visit local townships: I went to Sharpeville, where church members offered painful, extraordinary first-hand recollections of the massacres there in 1960.
I came away with a few serious questions. To start with, how can we really engage with the MDGs in a meaningful way? Most of the issues they address are struggles in the least developed countries of the world, especially Africa, and I did feel like a well-meaning but rather useless onlooker at times. We’re quite good at giving money, and that’s important, but that’s not really the same as getting our hands dirty and working in an HIV clinic. In the last edition of N16, there was an article ‘Think Global, Act Local’ and taking that idea on, I wonder what we could do here in Stokey? Perhaps we could do something to support refugees and asylum seekers – they’re a presenting face in the UK of many of the problems the MDGs are trying to address. Or maybe we could buy more Fairtrade.
For another thing, what kind of ‘development’ are we talking about? Global warming is a massive problem – and so development can’t mean simply industrialisation any more. If the planet is going to survive, development can’t be about Africa, India, China and South America turning into ‘mini-me’ US economies. One speaker pointed out that ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’ come from the same Greek word – oikos – meaning household. And our ecology and economy need to be in harmony if we’re all going to flourish in our world ‘household’. But, here’s the dilemma: what’s the alternative? Do we have a right to stop other countries developing rapidly in the ways we did over the last two centuries?
And then finally, of course, there’s the ‘faith’ question. What role have faith communities got in development and justice? Can we add anything or are we just dabbling amateurs? I guess it depends how it’s done. We run the danger of meaning well but not having the first clue what we’re doing: we’re great at responding immediately to poverty and deprivation, but sometimes it’s all a bit ‘sticking plaster’ in approach and somewhat lacking in expertise. And we need to be clear that we’re not involved in order to convert people, which is a suspicion often voiced by ‘secular’ humanitarians. If we’re working in partnership with NGOs and others and thinking about what we’re doing, faith communities have huge amounts to offer and can be very effective – as stories at the conference made clear: stories about thousands of malaria nets being distributed, AIDS/HIV clinics, agricultural and handicrafts co-operatives, school feeding programmes, projects for abandoned and abused children. The church is an international network and an institution outside government which is trusted and respected in almost every corner of the world. Church communities have grassroots contact with millions of people every week and loads of committed volunteers, passionate about justice – people who roll up their sleeves in places where lots of organisations don’t or can’t. And at the risk of being predictable, I’ll end up by saying that I think the spiritual stuff is really important too: faith communities do something vital in voicing that there’s something more in life than the struggles of the ‘now’ – and that every individual matters in and beyond all the crap.
Susie is curate at St Mary’s Church. See www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html for more on the MDGs. |
