Exodus From Hunger (15 page)
Read Exodus From Hunger Online
Authors: David Beckmann
Tags: #Religion, #Christian Life, #Social Issues, #Christianity, #General
When I arrived, people were gathering at a huge oval table in a private dining room. Over the course of the evening, more people joined us—Trevor Neilson and Joe Cerrell from the Gates Foundation, Bobby Shriver and a couple of his friends, the person in charge of marketing for U2, colleagues from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Episcopal Church, and a reporter from
Time
magazine (who soon after wrote a cover article titled “Can Bono Save the World?”).
We talked about how to strengthen U.S. political support for progress against global poverty. Bono and Bill Gates had spoken on a conference panel together that afternoon, and we expected that Bono might join our conversation. The discussion went through dinner and into the night. Finally, sometime after 1 a.m., Jamie received a call: “B” was on his way. I guess rock stars don’t keep the same schedule as preachers. Bono finally arrived at about 2 a.m., and that’s when I figured out what the meeting was about. He was trying to convince Bill Gates and his foundation to support advocacy for Africa. He argued that the Jubilee mix of celebrity power with grassroots, faith-based advocacy could sway U.S. policy.
The story of Bill and Melinda Gates’s involvement in global health is stunning in itself. They were considering ways to “give back” some of the billions of dollars Bill had made at Microsoft when they read an article on an obscure disease called rotavirus. It was eliminated long ago in this country, but was killing half a million children a year in the developing world. They couldn’t believe such a plague had not received the modest funding needed to make the cure available in poor countries.
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That started Bill and Melinda’s transformational involvement in global health. They established the Gates Foundation in 2000 and focused their early grants on vaccines that could have a big impact among poor people around the world.
Initially, they had no interest in public-policy advocacy. They had lots of money; why get involved with government? But the couple soon figured out that U.S. government funding and policies are crucial to the gains in global health they want to achieve. Bono’s conversations with them about advocacy helped make the case. The Gates Foundation ultimately provided substantial support for the ONE Campaign, Bread for the World Institute, and other advocacy groups.
In 2006 I received another cryptic e-mail. Patty Stonesifer, the CEO of the Gates Foundation, invited me to a meeting with Bill and Melinda at the New York Public Library the following Monday. It turned out to be the event at which investor Warren Buffett gave $31 billion to the Gates Foundation. The gift was made simply, without much fanfare. Buffett handed Bill Gates what appeared to be a short, signed contract. When Bill Gates passed it on to someone on the foundation staff, he just smiled and said, “Don’t lose that.”
I thanked Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates for their extraordinary generosity. I said that their example is even more important than their money. Lots of Americans used to think that investing in poor people was throwing money down a rat hole. It’s hard to maintain that cynicism when the world’s most successful entrepreneur and investor both invest in poor people.
I had already been in touch with several of the Buffett family members. My wife grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, a few blocks from the modest home where the Buffetts lived for many years. I sent an e-mail about Buffett’s gift to his grandson Howie, who was starting graduate school. It would have been understandable if family members preferred that some of those Buffett billions remain in his estate for them, but Howie wrote back, “This has been the proudest day of my life.”
A growing number of other wealthy people have become involved in the cause of global poverty, often including advocacy. These philanthropists are part of a broader trend in U.S. giving. Public giving to U.S. charities that help poor people overseas has expanded, and the importance of advocacy is now widely understood. When I talked about advocacy in the 1990s, people often reacted quizzically. Today more people understand that advocacy should be part of our response to poverty.
At Bread for the World, we are especially thrilled that new doors have opened among Christians of all varieties, Jews, and Muslims.
Historically, evangelical Protestant leaders discouraged church involvement in politics. But evangelicals became more involved in politics in recent decades, partly because political conservatives organized in evangelical churches. Jerry Falwell, a television preacher, founded the Moral Majority in 1979. He encouraged many conservative Christians to register to vote and get involved in politics. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed founded the Christian Coalition in 1987. The Christian Coalition organized conservative Christians to make themselves influential in the local committees of the Republican Party, and they distributed 40 million election guides in 1994, mainly at churches. Conservative Christian voters contributed to the growing strength of the Republican Party in the 1990s.
Some conservative activists and the press exaggerated the extent to which organizations like the Christian Coalition represented all evangelicals, and many evangelicals became uncomfortable with how they were being portrayed in the media. Evangelical leaders such as Ron Sider, Jim Wallis, Glenn Palmberg, and Daniel Vestal helped evangelicals see the connections between biblical faith and justice for poor people. Evangelical denominations such as the Christian Reformed Church, the Evangelical Covenant Church, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship have become very active in promoting advocacy for hungry and poor people.
Rick Warren is the pastor of Saddleback Church, a California megachurch, the leader of a network of churches across the country, and author of a best-selling book,
The Purpose-Driven Life
. His wife, Kay, was gripped by an article she read about AIDS, and she and Rick later traveled to Rwanda. They were led by the Spirit to a much more active concern about poverty, especially global AIDS. This “second conversion” made Rick a credible representative of a broad cross section of the religious community in the presidential campaign of 2008. The two candidates agreed to have him do back-to-back interviews with them on national television.
Bill Hybels is the pastor of another influential mega-congregation, Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. He and his wife, Lynne, have experienced a similar awakening, and, like the Warrens, understand that faithful discipleship should include advocacy. They have focused especially on global AIDS and world hunger. They have also reached out to people in need and diverse ethnic groups in their own community.
The AIDS epidemic in Africa engaged many evangelicals in advocacy for poor people. World Vision, an international development agency with many evangelical donors, surveyed evangelical churchgoers in 2001 and found that they didn’t want to help people with AIDS. Many thought AIDS was divine punishment for promiscuity.
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But the leaders of World Vision, to their great credit, decided to make AIDS their organization’s top priority anyway.
Franklin Graham (the son of Billy Graham) convened a Washington conference on AIDS, and Senator Jesse Helms agreed to speak. President Bush’s White House was in close touch with conservative evangelical leaders, and some of these leaders used their access to argue for a response to AIDS in Africa. Michael Gerson, an evangelical who was President Bush’s speechwriter, made the case for a presidential AIDS initiative from within the White House. The international AIDS program that President Bush launched has reached 2.4 million people with life-saving medicines and another 29 million people with testing and counseling about HIV and AIDS.
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Many people in the current generation of college students and young adults are eager to become involved in social change, including advocacy for poor people, and this is also true among young evangelicals. One reason is that many church colleges now send their students abroad. Also, many young evangelicals are discovering what the Bible teaches about social justice. When I talk about the Bible and poverty at evangelical colleges and seminaries, students often come up to me afterward to say that they want to commit their lives to justice for hungry and poor people.
GYUDE MOORE
Gyude Moore, now thirty years old, grew up in Liberia (in West Africa) and came to the United States for college. He is living out a promise he made as a teenager.
Gyude (pronounced JOO-day) was one of seven children of a government official. The family was relatively well-off, the children went to a Catholic school, and they even owned a car—an early-model Mitsubishi Lancer.
When Gyude was fourteen, civil war broke out in Liberia. Because of his father’s position, Gyude’s family was a target for the rebels and had to flee repeatedly to Ivory Coast. Each time, they had to walk thirty miles to a refugee camp on the other side of the border.
When Gyude was sixteen, his mother gave birth to twins—a boy and a girl. Shortly after, the violence got worse again, and the Moores had to make the trek to Ivory Coast. Gyude carried his baby brother, named Blo (which means “earth”). His mother carried the baby girl, but she was too frail to make the trip. Before the family reached the border, the baby girl died.
Gyude’s voice still breaks as he describes his mother’s grief and his own powerlessness. His mother didn’t cry until late that evening in the camp. She tried to muffle the sounds of her grief so she wouldn’t wake the other children. But Gyude heard her.
That is when he made his promise. He swore—to himself, to his mother, to God—that if he survived the war, he would grow up to be a “big man” (the term used to describe an important leader in Liberia). But he wouldn’t work for social status or wealth just for himself and his family. Instead, he would fight the causes of poverty and war, the conditions that led to his sister’s death and his mother’s suffering.
Gyude believes that God has taken him up on that promise. He finished high school in Ivory Coast. At some point he saw a brochure about Berea College in far-off Kentucky. But Gyude was involved with a group of charismatic Christians and was “on fire for Jesus,” and he enrolled in a Baptist seminary back in Liberia. He studied there for three years and planned to pastor a church, until nearby fighting forced him to quit seminary.
Gyude remembers going out on his back porch on a very dark night to pray. He told God he was trying to make good on his promise, but didn’t know what to do if he couldn’t finish seminary. In the dark of the night, he remembered Berea. It was an answer to prayer.
When he went inside, he told his younger brothers that one year from that date he would be studying in the United States. They laughed at him, but the next day he went to a store and bought a suitcase. Gyude filled out an online application to Berea College, and they accepted him. On the day he applied for a visa, only two of forty-one applicants received visas. It all seems miraculous to Gyude.
As a student at Berea, Gyude joined an Oxfam America training program for young leaders of activism against global poverty. In 2003 he invited me to speak at an event he organized. He had single-handedly recruited more than three hundred students from colleges throughout the southeastern United States.
The most moving moment of the event was when Gyude stood up during a “hunger banquet.” Students were asked to read descriptions of the evening meals of hungry people in different parts of the world, but Gyude put down his paper and said, “There is really no point for me to read this made-up description. Not long ago, I was this hungry person. The night before I went to apply for my visa to the United States, all we had in the house to eat was rice. My brother was cooking it, and he was a horrible cook. He burnt it, so he had to keep adding water to make it edible. It never really was edible—just burnt rice with so much water that it became soup. But we ate it, because that was all we had.”
After college, Gyude joined Bread for the World’s staff as a grassroots organizer. He recalls his first visit to Capitol Hill. He specifically remembers the echo of his brown shoes as he walked the marble halls of a Senate office building: “I realized that when I was in Africa, I accepted things that happened to me like I accepted the weather. But suddenly I was here, talking to some of the most powerful people in the world, trying to influence the economic policy of the most powerful nation in the world. In that moment I went from powerless to powerful. Often, U.S. policy has a greater influence on us in Africa than we have ourselves.”
Gyude left Bread’s staff to pursue a graduate degree in foreign affairs at Georgetown University. His focus of study was fragile states. He was also elected to the board of Bread for the World.
Gyude is still dealing with serious family problems. After he left for the United States, his little brother Blo joined the rebels in Liberia. Gyude felt guilty, saying that Blo always lived in his shadow and joined the rebels because he wanted to be good at something. Like many other rebels in Liberia, Blo became addicted to heroin. Through IV drug use he contracted HIV/AIDS and ultimately died from the disease.
Gyude’s income at Georgetown was his fifteen-thousand-dollar annual stipend. But he stretched it to help support a baby daughter, Ade, and send money back to family in Liberia. It was vastly more than anyone in his family back home earns. Many members of Gyude’s family wanted him to stay in the United States. “When I was admitted to the United States, many people in my family saw it as their redemption,” he says.
But Gyude has returned to Liberia to serve on the staff of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman head of state in Africa. He helps to write some of her speeches. After his years in the United States, he’s struck by how few Liberians are well-educated—and by how challenging it is for the senior people around him to govern the country well. He is tracking two projects for the president—the airport and low-income housing estates.