Tag: poverty

What I wish I’d known when I was 13

Experience is something young people can’t have. It’s impossible to teach, learn from a book, or borrow from another person. Experience – good or bad – is what we discover during life’s journey. And, if there’s an advantage from being older, you’ve a lot of experience.

My mind started thinking about that after I came across a photo of me when I was 13. It was a semi-official picture taken at school, probably to have a photo of me in my file. I know exactly when the photo was taken because there’s a poppy in my lapel, which was the custom around the time of Remembrance Day each November.[1]

I look young, and untroubled by issues that concern adults. However, I began to wonder what my 13-year-old self would like to have known but didn’t. Were there things it would have been good for me to understand at age 13?

I’d like to have known that one day I’d have a girlfriend

I’m starting here because girls are exactly what this 13-year-old boy was bothered about. Girls were no longer a nuisance. In fact, they had become rather interesting.

But, at 13, and with only a brother, girls were a mystery to me. How could you know if a girl liked you, and what should you say to her? If only everyone was fitted with a light and when two were attracted to each other their lights would go on. But we hadn’t been fitted with lights, and the mystery remained for a few more years.

By my later teens, though, I had a wide circle of friends, and my breakthrough realisation was that getting close to a girl was less about attraction, and more about being interested in each other, about really getting to know someone, enjoying being together, sharing ideas and plans. Then, one Sunday evening, I found myself walking up a road in Edinburgh chatting to a girl who was more interesting than anyone else. Decades later, now with children and grandchildren, Alison is still more interesting than anyone else.

The 13-year-old me would have been so much more at peace if only I’d known that would happen.

I’d like to have had a career goal

Some know the work they want to do from an early age. Perhaps their ambition is to be a ballerina, an international footballer, win a Formula One championship, do research that wins a Nobel Peace Prize, invent world-changing technology, write block-buster novels. They’re good thoughts, but most will disappear when faced with massive challenges. Some, however, will dedicate themselves to a particular career path, and get there. They’ll be great doctors, top scientists, own a profitable business, or become a member of Parliament.

But I had no idea what I would do for a career. When I was eight or nine I thought I’d like to be a bus driver, or become an Automobile Association patrolman who rode around on an old style yellow motorcycle with sidecar looking for members whose cars needed rescue.[2] But these were just a child’s idle dreams, not serious career goals.

At 13 I had no idea what work I might do. However, when I was 15, my school ran a careers evening with spokespeople describing their work. One was a police officer, and he highlighted all the different specialities that existed within policing. The wide range of options appealed to me, so later I read up about police service. Then I found a problem. In those days the minimum height for men to enter the police force was 5’8”, and in my area even higher at 5’10”. I didn’t think I’d reach either of those heights, so abandoned that plan.[3] When I was 16 I began to think about leaving school,[4] but had no idea still about a career.

I’ve mixed feelings now about that lack of a sense of direction. A career goal would have motivated me about my school work, and reassured me about where my life was headed. Yet, without a particular goal, I was open to any possibility, and that may have been helpful. In the end I began in journalism, became a church minister, then led a large international mission agency, and finished by being President of a seminary in the USA. I changed my work (not just my employer) several times, something that is now considered normal. I was ahead of my time.

So, though I wish I’d had a career goal, the lack of one did me no harm. I was flexible, and accepted change when it presented itself.

It would have helped if I’d had confidence in my own abilities

When I was 13 I was moderately good at rugby. I could tackle, catch and pass the ball, and kick it well too. I was also good at cricket, not so much as a batter but as a bowler and fielder. Somehow I could flip my wrist to make the ball break sharply left, completely confusing batters as the ball zipped past and hit their wickets. And, because I had fast reactions and virtually never dropped a catch, I relished every chance to be a slip fielder.

But sport was simply enjoyable. It was a pastime, not a passion nor a career goal. What was supposed to matter to me aged 13 was my academic work. But, in that area, I had every reason to be modest with my expectations. My teachers were equally modest in their expectations of me. When I was 13 the set curriculum I had to study covered a wide range of subjects, including physics, chemistry, biology and Latin. When I was 14 I was allowed to narrow my schedule. I dropped all the sciences and Latin with the approval and relief of my teachers. After another year I was due to take national exams. My teachers wouldn’t present me for the German exam since I was bound to fail. And fail was exactly all I achieved in three subjects, French, Maths, and Arithmetic. My only successes were in English and history, and I passed those at a higher level the following year.

But, with that track record, I had no confidence in my abilities. I never imagined I could be admitted to university, and no-one ever suggested I should try. In fact a career advisor advised me to start work in a department store sweeping the floors, and perhaps I could work my way up to being a store manager. I swept that idea aside, but he was not the only one with low expectations of me in those early to mid teen years.

For a while that was discouraging and unhelpful. Yet, looking back, it may have triggered a desire to prove them all wrong. Which was probably the best response.

I wish I’d understood that not all people are good

I grew up in a loving family unit with two parents and a brother. Nearby were aunts, uncles, and cousins we saw regularly. Our town was relatively crime free, big enough to have shops for everyday needs but small enough that traffic jams were unknown. I walked or cycled to school, came home for lunch, and, when daylight allowed, spent evenings playing football or cricket with friends. During summer holidays from school I’d play golf in the morning and cricket in the afternoon, and when I wanted a change I’d play cricket in the morning and golf in the afternoon. I had a very privileged early life.

The only downside is that it was also a very protected life. When I was 13 almost all I knew of the ills of the world was that I should never go off with a stranger, that a girl in my class had died from a serious illness, and a boy had fallen from his bike in front of a lorry and been killed. But I didn’t know of anyone dying of cancer, anyone getting divorced, anyone without food, anyone committing a major crime. My parents would watch the news on TV, but, as far as I was concerned, bad things happened far away. I had a sheltered existence.

That resulted in an unhelpful innocence, a naivety that everyone is kind and good and no harm can befall you. Of course we must not make children fearful or untrusting. But – as with many things – I wish there had been an age-appropriate way of making me aware that bad things happen in this world.

From my later teens and into my twenties I was a journalist with a national newspaper. That gave me a rude awakening to tragedies and evils. I attended car, rail and plane disasters where mangled bodies were pulled from wreckage. I sat through murder trials, such as the killing of a 15-year-old girl by beating and strangling.[5] It shocked me that one person should so violently and deliberately end another person’s life. There were cases of gang warfare, often drug related. Some politicians were considered corrupt, others attention-seeking. I attended court sessions and local government meetings which were supremely tedious. Some of my colleagues were deep in debt, unfaithful in their marriages, addicted to alcohol, or dying of lung cancer. Of course there were also ‘good news’ stories, but I was used to them from my upbringing. It was the ‘bad news’ that jolted me into a broader understanding of the world.

It would have helped me, certainly by the time I was 13, to have learned something about the harsher sides of life.

I could have known more of how poor most of the world is

My Aunt Milla – whose working life was mostly as a community nurse – rarely spent much on her housing. During two periods she lived in run-down tenements. The first had no toilet facilities inside the building. None at all. Instead there was a small hut out the back which contained a simple toilet. No wash-hand basin, and sometimes no toilet roll, only torn sheets of newspaper which were guaranteed to leave their mark. Day or night, perhaps in pouring rain, the ‘need to go’ was an unpleasant adventure into the outdoors to use the ‘privy’. Milla moved upmarket with her later tenement living. There still was no toilet in the flat, but there was one on the ‘half-landing’ (so named because it was up some steps from the level of flats just below and down some steps from the level of flats above). Since there were two flats on each level, the toilet might be shared by four households. Perhaps queues were avoided only by exploring for ‘vacancies’ at toilets on other half-landings.

These were poor facilities – unhygienic and inconvenient – but were common in many towns and cities, and not just in the UK. We often stayed with my aunt, and therefore used the outhouse or half-landing toilets many times. At home we had indoor plumbing, but I knew many lived with facilities like my aunt, so never thought of her situation as poor or bad. When I was 13, I had no idea at all that most of the world lived in very much worse circumstances.

Almost 30 years later I visited remote desert areas of Pakistan, sleeping overnight in tribal villages. Toilet facilities? The far side of the sand dunes. In a mountainside village in Nepal, there was an outhouse for toilet use, but it was no more than a small enclosure around an open hole with charcoal six feet below to (unsuccessfully) deaden the stench. In a remote Congo village I thought that children were wearing dirty and torn t-shirts as play clothes, then realised those t-shirts were their only clothes. There I also met a mother with seriously malnourished children, hoping for help from medical missionaries. I saw many small houses with damaged roofs. I was told: “There’s no longer anyone skilled in repairing roofs. When people don’t have money to buy food, no-one pays to have their roof repaired.”

I could multiply these stories, but won’t. The hard truth is that a large part of the world’s population live in poverty. I never knew that when I was 13. As children grow up, and gradually decide on lifestyle and career priorities, shouldn’t those priorities take account of world need? In affluent countries, we shelter children from harsh realities. That’s understandable, but should they not know billions are less well off, and their needs may matter more than our comfort?

I wish I’d known what I needed to do for God to become real in my life

God was never absent from my life (nor is he from anyone’s), but when I was 13 I didn’t relate much to God other than with some prayers. My mother told me several times that she made a special commitment to God when she was 13. That commitment coloured everything she did, and a lot of her time went on supporting church activities and helping neighbours. So, when I became 13, I imagined something might happen in my life to make me a Christian like her. Nothing did, and as the next few years passed I wondered if it ever would.

What I’d failed to realise is that I had a responsibility to reach out to God. I was waiting for God to invade me while, in a sense, he was waiting to be invited. That did all change when I was 18, and I’ve written about that before (https://occasionallywise.com/2021/02/20/serious-business/).

It wasn’t that I was ignorant about the Christian message. I just needed to respond to it. Thankfully I was only five years beyond 13 in doing so. But, if I’d known sooner, my life would have changed much earlier.

–

Writing this blog post about what I wished I’d known when I was 13 has kept generating more thoughts than I’ve recorded here. Perhaps I’ll set them down another time. And one day I may also write things I’m glad I did know when I was 13. That seems just as important a subject.

I’d encourage you to think what you wish you’d known when you were younger, and what you’re glad you did know. You might be surprised about your conclusions.

[1] Fighting in World War I ceased at the 11th hour of the 11th month in 1918, commemorated annually throughout Commonwealth countries ever since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

[2] There’s a good photo of an AA motorcycle and sidecar here: https://www.theaa.com/breakdown-cover/our-heritage-vehicles

[3] Actually I did reach 5’8” but my interests by then lay elsewhere.

[4] In Scotland, the school leaving age was raised to 14 in 1901, and though from the 1940s there were plans to make the minimum age 15 that was never made law. The minimum age was set at 16 in 1973.

[5] The case set a new legal precedent because the accused was identified by having left unique bite marks on his victim’s body. See https://www.dentaltown.com/magazine/article/7528/the-biggar-murder-some-personal-recollections

Not the world as it was meant to be

It was 1997, and on my first evening in Calcutta (later renamed Kolkata), I walked with an Indian friend through the streets. It was an eye-opening experience.

Families were settling down for the night under flimsy shelters. Parents wrapped babies and little children in sack-like material to insulate them from the cold as they laid them down to sleep on the concrete sidewalks.

I was shocked and disturbed. I asked my Indian friend, ‘How long until these people have a proper home?’

He smiled. It was my first time in India, and my ignorance was obvious. He answered gently but clearly. ‘Alistair, in the sense you mean they will never have a proper home. The parents – like their parents – were born here on the sidewalk, grew up here, as will their children. They will never have any other home.’

Deeply troubled I went back to the villa where I was staying. In the middle of the night I woke suddenly. A storm had broken over the city, and my shutters were banging and I could hear rain pouring down. I was safe, dry, and comfortable, but I knew those parents and their babies were lying out there in the street with nowhere else to go, and no way to get dry until morning when the rain would stop and the sun come out.

Deep in my heart I sensed God saying, ‘This is not how I meant my world to be, and this is not how it has to be’.

A few years later I was in an African country where two liberation movements had fought a brutal civil war. After visiting rural villages, four of us drove for hours on dusty roads back to the capital. Half way there we stopped to stretch our legs. I needed relief of a different kind, and walked back up the road for a little privacy. One of my friends shouted after me, ‘Use the ditch, but don’t go across it into the bushes’. Why not? Because this was Angola, and that land could still be covered in mines.

No wonder, then, that in the early 2000s almost a third of Angolan children died before they were five, and overall life expectancy was less than 40. Not how the world was meant to be.

To the north of Angola is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, another of the world’s poorest nations with many lives lost due to disease, malnutrition and armed combat. I flew into villages in clearings deep in the Congo jungle and along the Congo River. (See also blog ‘We do what we can’, February 27, 2021)

I visited a school in a village, hundreds of miles from any large settlement. At most there were two or three classrooms. Teachers were doing their best for the children. But they had no books and no teaching aids. Just a board and chalk. The pupils sat on planks of wood set on wooden stakes. The desks were the same construction, just with a wider plank. What you wouldn’t realise from my photo is that several seats and desks were broken and the children were holding the planks in place while I took the picture. No school my children attended was like that.

In a settlement by the Congo River I was shown around a hospital. The operating theatre was very basic. The state of the operating table wouldn’t matter to an unconscious patient. But what mattered for the surgeon was that the operating light hadn’t worked for two years and couldn’t be repaired. I asked how they operated with no light. ‘We pull the table near a window and do our best by daylight.’ No operating theatre where I was treated was like that.

I saw an incubator where a tiny, premature baby lay. The incubator looked old, but had to be useful. It wasn’t really. The incubator didn’t work, and couldn’t be repaired. It was only a convenient small place to lay a premature baby. One of my children had jaundice when born. The incubator in which she was put wasn’t like that.

In another Congo hospital, I met a young boy who was seriously malnourished. His grandmother had walked with him through the jungle for three days to get help. No-one knew where his parents were; most likely they’d died. ‘Can you help him?’ I asked a doctor. He shook his head slowly. It was too late to save the boy. All they could do was make him comfortable. None of my children looked like that little boy or was beyond help like him.

I felt distressed taking these photos, and disturbed now just looking at them again. I also feel angry. This is not the world as it was meant to be, and not the world as it has to be.

So, who am I angry at?

At all of us who are complacent while others suffer    I include myself. Every year I give a percentage of my income to alleviate world poverty and for other causes, but I know my lifestyle is one that billions in this world will never have. That troubles me. I know that personal giving by any of us can’t solve world poverty. We could never give enough, and aid alone won’t resolve the complex reasons behind the poverty of many countries. But is it not true that our focus is on ever more comfortable lives for ourselves? How can that be right? I will keep urging myself and others to give careful thought about how we live and how much we spend on ourselves, compared to how much we give so others can at least eat. The measure of caring isn’t pity but what we do for those in need. Mahatma Gandhi said: “Live simply so that others may simply live.” Wise words.

At my own government    Let me explain my point with a little imagination. In your town, six families have lost their main income earner. One parent in each family now holds them together, but they need help. You’re generous, and you promise to support them until the children are older. But a storm blows your roof away. You have money to pay for the roof repair, but the cost has eaten into your capital. You want to replenish your reserves fast, and you do that by cutting the amount of support you give to the already impoverished families. Now they don’t have enough to eat and they can’t pay their bills, but you can rebuild your funds quickly. Their needs were sacrificed for your benefit.

The analogy isn’t perfect (no analogy is) but it’s uncomfortably similar to how the UK government has responded to the financial cost of the Covid-19 virus by cutting the overseas aid budget. The nation was giving 0.7% of national income in aid, but that has now been reduced to 0.5% – a drop of about four billion pounds. The government says that because the pandemic damaged the economy, the aid reduction will help restore public finances. So, let’s be clear what that means. We spent more than usual on health care and support for those out of work – which was right to do – and now we’ll restore our national wealth by taking money away from the poorest people in the world. Yes, we’re really doing that. Of course the UK should put its finances in order, but: a) if you look at the big picture, the UK is still among the very wealthy nations of the world; b) it’s hard to see any morality in restoring a strong financial position by making the poor poorer.

At other governments    Poverty has many causes. Historically, much wealth was taken from nations by colonial masters whose goal was to enrich the mother land. Even now, unfair contracts continue to blight some nations as other countries and large corporations want control of their minerals.

But poverty has plenty other causes too: discrimination against ethnic groups; incompetent and unstable governments; wars that kill civilians, devastate crops, and create millions of refugees; poor infrastructure and systems for trade; inadequate education, especially of girls; low provision of healthcare, clean water, safe working environments.

But, unquestionably, corruption is a major cause. In 2020 India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, said ‘dynastic corruption’ was now a major challenge for the country. Where corruption persisted from one generation to the next, the country was hollowed out like the damage of a termite. It’s not just India where corruption is rife. In many places paying a bribe is just a cost of business, or how you get a favourable judgment in court. I’ve seen that most blatantly in Asia and Africa, but I’m not foolish enough to think corruption doesn’t happen in western countries too. Who is it that never benefits when there’s corruption? The poor. Their land is taken, and the affluent thief can pay off the police or judge while the poor farmer has no resources to regain the land. Corruption is a deep-rooted evil across much of the world.

I probably sound angry throughout this blog. I am. This is not how the world was meant to be or needs to be. Nothing described here has to be this way.

If my photographs or anything I’ve written is disturbing, I hope the evidence of desperate poverty moves all of us to make this world better. You may have seen the slogan ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Often that’s good advice. But if our reaction to desperate need in the world is that we do nothing and just ‘carry on’, then literally billions of our fellow human beings will suffer. That cannot be right. That’s not how the world was meant to be.