question 4: seeing poverty everyday as you are now is different than workign in a poor neighborhood and going home to your apartment or dorm room at night. as one former Puleo student said, you go to bed hearing it and wake up smelling it. you see it every time you walk down the street. your awareness of suffering caused by poverty is much more acute and personal now. how is this experience of poverty influencing your understanding of God? some say that it's impossible to believe in God in the face of such suffering, while others say it's impossible not to believe. does it make sense to say that God is present in the suffering, even if God doesn't do the Exodus every day, or is this inadequate? could coming into contact with poverty help you understand your own poverty and your need for God?

response:
what a rough question. i admit í've been procrastinating, trying
to think of someway to answer this thoroughly, without oversimplifying
or making it overly complex but it's deficil. does it make sense to
say that God is present in the suffering? first i think we need to
define suffering because there is a difference between poverty and
suffering. in the campo this past weekend everyone was poor but they
were smiling, the pictures ryan took of his family give testimony to
the fact that those kids were happy, sometimes the situation gets ugly
and kids are undernourished or malnourished or the dad is an
alcoholic, etc, etc but i think it is very rare that suffering is
inflicted upon someone from the outside. obviously poverty is a
different thing, it was the mere chance of being born into a poor
family, in a certain part of the world that made them poor, the
structures that are systematic in their creation of those who don't
have, it could have just have easily been me without the opportunities
just like i did absolutely nothing to deserve the things i've been
given. there's a difference between the bad hand you've been delt by
life (or vice versa) and how you respond within yourself. i think
it's a very western idea to assume pain should be avoided and even
eliminated from one's life. so i guess that's my first point, that i
didn't make very well, that poverty does not equal suffering all the
time, nor are people who suffer necessarily poor. so if the question
is do i see god in the poor-i say absolutely yes, God was poor and he
called the poor to him, offered them salvation from their oppression
and liberation from their tears. where else would God be? in the
rich? if one sincerely could answer yes to that question than i'd
question what Jesus, what god they were following. but if the
question is do i see God in poverty, i'd say no. poverty is ugly,
it's dirty, it's smelly, it's cruel, it's scary and it's the fruit of
greed and sin and selfishness so how could God condone it let alone
have caused it? poverty itself is nothing to be romanticized because
it sucks, really sucks and it takes away a person's dignity and their
voice. but on the opposite spectrum excessive, disgusting consumerism
it could be argued does the same exact thing. so do i believe the
theology that we were learning yesterday in regards to some sectors of
the Pentecostal churches that you are poor because you don't have
faith, that you aren't blessed because of some hidden sin or defect
you possess and that the wealthy of this world are favored by God,
that they deserve everything God gives them? i think this is not a
god i want to know, this is not the god i find in Nicaragua or within
myself. it comes across to me as one of the many justifications for
horrible situations that the few wealthy want to maintain at the
expense of the rest and i still can't figure out why this greater
majority of people believe themselves to be bad, to be sinful? my
family is still trying to convert me to Jehovah’s witnesses but their
world view and view of human nature is so ugly and so harsh that i
can't help but wonder what they see of their own reality that i'm
missing? perhaps they see only the poverty and not the ´poor with
spirit´, the ones who smile and even though they have very little they
still have something that we are missing in the first world. so i'm
pretty sure i still have a lot to learn, and i'm afraid i'm not making
much sense or writing that understandably but who really understands
God, who understands why there is suffering in the world? you can ask
a million different people with a million different answers but if you
ask me i'll tell you i don't know, not completely, because any other
answer would be a lie, i see my family and they think they have the
entire truth, that they are Jehovah’s chosen ones and it's scary. i
don't know why the world is the way it is, i don't know why some
people were given shity hands and why others choose to ruin their
lives but i do know that the God i believe in is a humble servant, the
god i know doesn't side with the rich elite and make up reasons why
they have some kind of manifest destiny. and sometimes bad things
happen to good people but perhaps it's all a matter of perspective. i
think without coming into contact with poverty one has very little
chance of truly knowing this god; rather the god these people see will
be the classic enlightened english gentleman and somehow everything
gets wrapped up in personal sin and salvation and there is no
realization of reality, especially this reality of the poor. so once
again it comes down to perspective. i feel like i'm in the perfect
place to gain the perspective that i feel we need in the states, that
something about the way we live is drastically wrong. so maybe i
answered the question, maybe not but i'm going to go on asking it
either way.