Do no harm

    The Hippocratic Oath has doctors promising to first do no harm. Those words have been one of my heart’s cries since I decided to move here. I heard and hear story after story, statistic upon statistic detailing the ways well-meaning missionaries and aid and development organizations and other countries’ policies have contributed to the mess Haiti is in today. While I am so far from qualified to comment on most of those issues, I believe the complaints and concerns are valid. It is one of my biggest fears that I will only contribute to the problem. Occasionally I wonder how I could not, since it can look like almost every attempt to help ends up harming this people and this country.

     Thanks to my general love of learning (read: nerdiness) I have been reading books and articles and websites on poverty relief and development and missions done well. The experts talk about not giving things out for free when it’s not an emergency situation, how that’s a way of reinforcing dependency and taking opportunities from the community to support their own. I believe they are correct. They know a lot more about these things than I do, but here’s the thing. None of them are medical. When they run the risk of communities and neighbors not stepping up the consequences do not feel as dire.  

    So, once again, I sit in my questions. There is a little boy who is two or three or four years old depending on who you ask, whose mama has died and who appears to be pretty malnourished. Do I get involved? There are no malnutrition centers nearby that I know of and I have not been trained in proper malnutrition treatment, nor do I have any relationship in place with his family. Do I just leave it then, and hope he does not come down with an infection? Or do I take responsibility for intervening and the many unforeseeable consequences? Then there is the boy with asthma who talks to me about his asthmatic episodes and missing school because of them. His family appears better off than many others in the neighborhood and they know he is sick but have not to my knowledge taken him to the doctor. So, do I step in? If I do, what am I communicating about their parenting and decision-making? If I do not step in, how do I look him in the eye when he talks about his experiences? Compounding all of this is my overwhelming awareness of how much I do not know about these families and this culture and loving well within it.

   So, I pray that God’s kingdom would come and His will be done on earth as in heaven. And I pray for mercy and grace, so much grace. I ache for the brokenness in this place and in my own heart. I ache for the ways I contribute to their poverty and my own and I pray some more. Friends, will you join me in these prayers for wisdom and discernment, for little boys with empty bellies and broken lungs and for God’s kingdom come?