Loving the excluded

Worth thinking about:

1) Stan and Mari Thekaekara work with tribal peoples in the Nilgiris Hills of India. Their reflections on visiting a number of projects in inner city areas of the UK are reproduced in a report from the Centre for Innovation in Voluntary Action:

"On arriving in the UK, it is difficult at first for a visitor from a Third World country to immediately perceive that poverty exists at all. Everyone was better housed, clad and fed. Everyone seemed to have a television, a fridge- some even had cars- all items of luxury for the majority of people in India. But as the week went by we began to see beyond the televisions, refrigerators and cars. Amazingly, similarities between the people of Easterhouse* and Paniyas of the Nilgiris began to emerge. Though the face of poverty was completely different, the impact was exactly the same. - cited in Ingrid Hanson, Faces of Poverty: The State of Britain in the 90s."

-Tim Chester, Good News to the Poor

*Note:
A district of Glasgow, Easterhouse lies to the east of the city centre- the settlement came to be associated with high unemployment, poverty and deprivation. In the 1990s the Greater Easterhouse Development Company was formed to help attract industry to the area.

2) When Christ said: "I was hungry and you fed me," he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; the hunger to be loved. Jesus experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.

-Mother Teresa