Ordinary Hunger

by Global Ministries | published on Oct 10, 2014

John Campbell-Nelson – Indonesia

Greetings from a beautifully green if somewhat muggy Timor. We are in mid-rainy season here, and the rice is growing behind the house and the peanuts and lentils are coming along nicely in our garden up the hill. As I was walking to a neighbor’s house yesterday I couldn’t help but notice that nearly everyone has a better looking crop than we do. Despite our best intentions, and despite the labors of seven Timorese young people who live with us while they attend school, there’s no disguising the fact that we are “gentry” farmers. Our lives don’t depend on what we grow, and our garden shows it.

John Campbell-Nelson – Indonesia

As we were planting the rice two weeks ago, I was dutifully inserting seedlings into the mud exactly eight inches apart, when our neighbor came over to help. She waded right in and began planting at roughly the speed of an expert typist. It was the tortoise and the hare, except the hare worked all day without pausing for the fabled nap, and the tortoise got a cut on his foot and had to quit early to wash the mud out of the wound. Well, it keeps me humble, which is pretty much the whole point. In a status-oriented society you have to do things that work against your assigned status (Reverend Doctor, in my case) if you want to form a real community.

In the life of the church here the time between Christmas and Easter is a bit like summer in the United States. It’s a time to clean your desk and catch up on your writing projects, because you can’t do much in the congregations. Once it was because the roads were impassable during the height of the rainy season, but there is enough asphalt now that transportation is no longer the issue. It remains the case that farmers are too busy in their gardens this time of year to take time out for workshops and seminars. What they grow now will determine whether they eat or go hungry in the coming year. For many rural families, last year’s crop is nearly used up and this year’s crop is still a month or more until harvest. It is that time of the year called lapar biasa, “ordinary hunger.”

I remember reading about it 25 years ago when we were getting ready to leave the United States for the unknown land of Timor, in a book that was already 25 years old at the time; it was the title of the first article we wrote about Timor, and those of you who have been reading our letters over the years will no doubt remember it as a recurring theme. I find myself writing about it again because of the weird way in which the situation has changed, yet remains the same. Here’s what brought it to mind:

Isak La’a, a friend and former student, has been a pastor on the south coast of Timor for the last 15 years. Nearly every year in the last decade, there has been either a flood or a drought. During that period he has become something of an expert on emergency relief. A few weeks ago he sent me a text message from his cell phone saying, “We are flooded again. Please inform the Synod. Pray for us.” The Synod sent a truckload of rice and drinking water within two days, and Isak contacted the regional government, who also delivered emergency aid. So the people have food for the time being, but they have lost their crop for the season.

Several things are new here. Thanks to the cell phone, we knew about it right away. We didn’t need to wait until the flood waters went down and Isak could get out to travel to Kupang and tell us. And thanks to the asphalt, we didn’t need to wait until the roads had dried out in order to get a truck in. Formerly the aid would have come from Church World Service, but CWS in Indonesia has become “professionalized” and no longer relates to the church here (it runs a high-gloss supplementary feeding program with funds from the European Union). Now, thanks to GMIT’s relationship with the mission program of a wealthy Chinese denomination in Java, the Synod has resources with which to respond. All these things (except CWS) are more or less changes for the good.

What hasn’t changed is the pattern of flooding and drought and food shortages. “I had a revelation,” Isak told me last week. “With a few check dams and adequate drainage canals, the government could solve our flooding problem. Why haven’t they? Because disaster is a project. Every time we have a flood, they get money to provide aid. They keep most of it, so why would they want things to change? We need to stop accepting aid from the government and demand that they fix the problem.”

Several million residents of Jakarta are having the same thoughts about now, as the flood waters recede from nearly 70% of the city. You probably saw it on the evening news. “Uncontrolled development” is most often cited as the cause, but that is largely a euphemism for corruption. There are plenty of controls, but they exist largely to provide the occasion for a bribe. Jakarta suffers these floods every few years, and it seems that each time they get worse.

Looming over it all is the specter of global warming. This will probably be the year that climate change enters the vocabulary and the thinking of even the most remote villages in Timor, even if it hasn’t yet reached the White House. In a place like Timor, where getting a crop at all depends on planting at just the right time, climate change turns food supply into a lottery.

So these are my thoughts during Lent this year. Given the food supply, a Lenten fast would be superfluous for many Timorese. They understand well enough that Lent is a time of penitence. What worries me is this: How can there be a penitence broad and wide and deep enough to turn us away from global warming? Or, as Isak put it, how can we move from corrupt aid to fixing the problem?

Well, my post-Easter letter is guaranteed to be more cheerful. Karen is just back from six weeks in Liberia with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there, Katie is applying for graduate school in agriculture at UMass, and Sam is sweating over immunology and biochemistry at Earlham.

Shalom,
John Campbell-Nelson
John Campbell-Nelson is a missionary serving with the Evangelical Christian Church of Timor. John serves as a professor.