Eyes Opened

I overdosed on films through the weekend at this year's edition of Docfest in Belleville. I managed to prepare for worship and our annual meetings, attend a portion of a Kente Presbytery event on visioning, lead worship and one of those meetings, and still fit in a bunch of great docs. 

One of them was Slums: Cities of Tomorrow, a really thought-provoking film about the realities of approximately one billion humans, or one in seven inhabitants of this planet live. While the very term slum is highly charged, these are often complex communities with their own forms of organization. Governments tend to want to git rid of slums when they are perceived as an embarrassment or problematic because they are next to impossible to service with basics such as sewer and water. But the alternatives, including grim apartment blocks where there are no parks or spaces where gardens or chickens can be raised are hardly better. Slums allow residents to be entrepreneurs in ways that structured housing can't.

There are books such as City of Joy and Behind the Beautiful Forevers which help us to understand that along with abject poverty in slums there is hope and a spiritual core for many of the residents. In the Slums film an illiterate single mother in Mumbai, working as a maid, carefully grooms her children in the morning and walks them to school. She is proud that the teacher of her son is surprised  to discover that his top student lives in a slum. Her life is devoted to their progress out of these circumstances.

The filmmakers also go to a tent city in the United States where people who were hit hard by the recession have set up a community. County officials don't want them there but the man who is a combination of mayor and sheriff and pastor of the 75 to 100 residents works diligently on their behalf. There is even a church tent where he holds simple but meaningful services with prayers for their everyday needs. One of the women describes the people who live there as refugees, and we know that the God of the bible has a heart for refugees and the dispossessed.

I came away with my eyes opened, which is something Jesus encouraged.