Slumming It

My brother Matthew came back to New Zealand from the Philippines and stayed with us, Matt and his wife and two boys, Joshua, seven, and Noah, five. My crazy brother, according to my wife. Jane doesn’t approve of Matt and isn’t comfortable with him staying with us, “But hey, they’re family,” I reminded her.

“Yeah they are,” she agreed, “and I feel sorry for their kids. And they wouldn’t have anywhere else to stay. They wouldn’t be able to pay for accommodation anywhere.”

Jane accepted the situation as though we had no other choice. Matt is not crazy, just a bit extreme, and some would say in a good way. Some would even call him a saint. He’s a full on Christian with a passion for social justice and wanted to help the poor. Lots of Christians have a passion for social justice and for most that means supporting good causes, financially, and for some it’s field work. But for Matt it meant living amongst the people he was trying to help, living with the poorest of the poor and sharing their poverty. He joined a missionary organisation called Mercy Ministries and went to the Philippines, and ended up living in a slum in the outskirts of Manila.

Matt was always a man of extremes. He was pretty wild in his youth and liked to get drunk and get into trouble. He was also quite smart, still is I suppose, but you can be smart and foolish. He went to university for a couple of years but he dropped out and went to live in the Coromandel in some remote hippie commune, smoking cannabis and taking whatever other drugs. He was into Eastern mysticism in those days but then he left all that behind and went to Bible School, which is where he met Chrissy. He tried to convert me, early on when he became a Christian and he was all full of the religious fervour of the new convert.  He joined an evangelical church and eventually calmed down a bit and went on to become a pastor. I thought having kids would have changed him, made him more sensible and responsible. But then he decided to become a missionary and live a life of voluntary poverty.

*

Matt and Chrissy were on furlough, taking a much needed break as they were exhausted by the hardship of their life in the slum, and trying to meet the needs of the desperately poor and needy people that constantly came to them for help. While they were back in New Zealand they were also getting medical treatment for Noah. Both kids had had treatment in the Philippines for parasitic worms but Noah was still suffering pains in his stomach.

Jane quite liked Chrissy but didn’t really warm to the kids. Not that she was cold or unkind but she never hugged them.  She’s never had kids of her own and just isn’t very maternal. But I think maybe she was put off by the parasites issue. They’re nice kids, very polite. I took them to the playground down the road, which was new experience for them. Jane was a bit stressed already with the busyness of her teaching job and at the time we were also getting ready to move into our new place. The build was nearly finished, finally. I’ve learned from experience that building projects always take longer than you think and end up costing more than you think, and we had really blown our budget. Still, we’d get well over a million on our old place and our rental was giving us a steady income.

 We’d started packing and we were getting rid of some of our stuff. Jane was going through our wardrobe, sorting out clothes to give away to the Sallies and some that maybe Matt and Chrissy could use. Not the winter clothes of course; they’d have no use for those in the Philippines. “What about these?” she said, holding up some of the clothes she hadn’t worn for a while. “They’re too good to give away,” she said. “I’ll put them up on Trade Me.”

*

On their first day with us, Matt and Chrissy put the kids to bed soon after dinner and then Matt went to bed himself, as he was feeling so tired. Chrissy stayed up for a while and talked a bit about their life in the Philippines, about the many hardships they endured and she confided that she’d had a miscarriage a few months before. We sympathised of course and Jane said to me later, “It’s tragic but maybe a blessing. It might have been more of a tragedy to bring a baby into the dreadful conditions they were living in.”

 I’m glad she didn’t say that to Chrissy. Chrissy also confided tearfully to Jane that she didn’t want to return to the Philippines, to the slum they were living in. The second night, after the kids had gone to bed, Matt and I went to the games room to play snooker. He used to be pretty good but he hadn’t played for a long time and had lost his form. I really just wanted some one-on-one time with him for a serious discussion.  We also had a few whiskies, which helped to lubricate the talk. He hadn’t drunk alcohol for years either and I wasn’t sure if he would, but he was taking a break from his life of asceticism. Between shots, Matt’s gaze drifted along the walls to the framed degrees and awards I had garnered in the course of my career as an architect. I had challenged Matt to a game of snooker but we both knew I was going to challenge him on what he was doing with his life and his family.

Start with a positive comment I thought and then cut to the chase. “The work you’re doing with the poor is very commendable,” I said, “but you really shouldn’t be putting your family through it. I mean if you want to live in a slum that’s your choice, but your kids don’t have a choice and you’re exposing them to hardship, disease, danger. It’s just irresponsible. And Chrissy doesn’t want to go back.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t really want to go back either.”

“Then what the hell…?”

“Not my will but His be done,” he said, piously. “It’s God first, not family first. I won’t put family, home, security, anything above God. If you put anything above God, that’s idolatry.”

“That’s so misguided,” I said. “You’re not called to sacrifice your family. Your first obligation is to your family. Charity begins at home. Anyway, you could serve God in other ways. You could go back to being a pastor of a church here in New Zealand. With your credentials you’d have no trouble finding a job as a pastor. That would still be serving God, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t you rather live here, back in New Zealand?”

“I’m not called to a life of comfort,” he said.” I’m called to a life of service, to serve the poor in the Philippines, to be poor with the poor, as Jesus was.”

“Matt, you’re not Jesus, and besides, Jesus didn’t have a family to look after.”

“I know I’m not Jesus. I’m not deluded. But I can still be Jesus to them, to the poor.”

“You’re throwing away everything the poor want for their families,” I said. “If they could get out of the slums they wouldn’t look back.”

To which Matt replied, “I would count that as a success … if they did it honestly,” he added as an afterthought. “One of our Filipina converts absconded with money he stole from the Mission and from his own neighbours. He was one of our most trusted workers. He was even a pastor in the church.”

“Did you report him to the police?”

“Yes, but I don’t think I’ll ever see him again.”

“How do feel about that?” I asked.

“Disappointed. Betrayed.”

“What would you do if you did see him again?”

“I’d demand the money back.”

“Would you forgive him?”

“Yes, if he repented.”

“See, now that’s one of the problems I have with Christianity,” I said. “A guy can commit sins, commit crimes and be forgiven and still get into heaven with a clean slate. Where’s the justice in that? What about individual responsibility?”

“He still has to answer to God for his sins,” Matt replied. “We all do. But there’s no hope for any of us without forgiveness. When you face judgement, do want justice or do you want mercy?”

“Well, I might be a sinner,” I said, “but I’m not that bad. I’m not a murderer or a thief. According to your thinking a guy could be a mass murderer and still get into heaven.”

“Where sin abounds, grace abounds.” Matt had an annoying habit of quoting verses from the Bible.

I tried another tack. “Don’t you think you’ve done your bit?” I said. “Let someone else carry on the work, some single guys who don’t have their own families to look after.”

“I have to go back,” he said. “My work isn’t finished.  I have to go back and correct my mistakes. If I leave now I’ve failed. I will have failed the people I was trying to help. I will have failed God.”

Matt’s story was taking an unexpected turn. He had not long ago written that he felt gratified that their mission organisation was succeeding in lifting people out of poverty by dispensing interest free loans to start up income generating enterprises: small shops, sari sari stores, selling milk, selling fish, raising chickens; helping people who would never get loans from banks and could otherwise only go to loan sharks who charged huge interest. And he had planted a church with a growing congregation of appreciative parishioners.

“I thought the work was all going well,” I said, “and now you’re saying it’s a failure.”

Matt tossed back the remaining whisky in his glass and sighed. “We’ve stopped the loan scheme,” he said. “It was dividing the community. And the church, well, it was mainly ‘rice Christians’, people attending to repay our generosity. There was only a handful of real Christians, people who had understood the Gospel message and taken it to heart. I’d been foolishly counting the numbers in the church as a measure of success.”

Matt’s demeanour had also changed. He seemed disillusioned and despondent. “You’re obviously unhappy,” I said. “Why keep putting yourself through it?”

“Happiness isn’t the goal,” he said. “It’s not a priority. God’s not interested in my happiness. I’m not called to be happy. I’m called to serve.”

“So what’s the plan?” I asked. “You say you’re going to go back and correct your mistakes.”

“We’ll take the focus off evangelism for a time and stop giving handouts. We need to get the community more involved, to work together to help themselves. The Mission can still fund the projects but the people have to take more responsibility.”

It made sense but I could see this was a compromise for Matt. He was an evangelist at heart. He wanted to save souls, to give people a better life after death, not just before death. He was convinced he was on a mission from God and I gave up trying to reason with him and get him to take account of the cost to his family. Matt was beginning to find his snooker form and won the last game, after which we retired to bed.

The rest of the week passed reasonably calmly, though there were some uncomfortable moments, for me anyway. Apart from the mission organisation that Matt worked for, he also sponsored poor children in the Philippines through another Christian aid organisation called Tear Fund, The Evangelical Alliance something. He never asked for money for himself. He was determined to be self-supporting and it was an article of faith for him that God would supply all his needs. He asked Jane and me if we would like to sponsor a child through Tear Fund and he started explaining that you just pledge a monthly donation, but Jane cut him off and said “No thanks, we’re not interested,” just as she did when someone was trying to sell her a product or a service she didn’t want.

Matt stayed in communication with the Mission, renewed his visa and got the health issues sorted. Before they departed at the end of the week I slipped him an envelope of money. “For your family,” I said.

He thanked me and I said, “Don’t mention it. No really, don’t mention it to Jane.”

*

When we heard from Matt and Chrissy again they were more upbeat and chatty. The new strategy was working. The community was working together. They weren’t giving handouts, except in extreme cases, like when a hungry couple who had been in a war zone turned up at their doorstep with a malnourished child. They had nothing so Matt gave them some money from his own pocket, maybe the money I gave him. Then he took them to one of the community leaders to get them settled among the other squatters in the slum.

Matt also said his kids had received an education on how the real world works and he was making plans to return to New Zealand at the end of the year to give them a chance to complete their education. Finally he was looking beyond his own obsessions, I thought, and making decisions for the good of his family. I wrote back and said I was pleased that things were going well for him but things were not going so well for Jane and me. In fact, we were breaking up. With that bit of news I signed off and said, “Cherish your family, mate.”