You can never be too careful when you travel. You can go in search of disease and poverty and stumble upon holy ground. And you can find resilience, courage and faithfulness that will inspire you and challenge you for the rest of your life.
And:
And it is hard to imagine how the philosophic abstractions of modern liberalism, all those calculations behind the veil of ignorance, can motivate a flesh and blood passion to sacrifice for the good of our flesh and blood neighbors. This is not to deny that purely secular accounts of human rights are possible, but it is fair to say that they are under considerable stress and questioning, even by those who wish the philosophic project well. […] As societies lose the intellectual resources to sustain the morality of human rights, the religious justification for those rights will play an ever more important role.
And:
I’m sure that many of you have had the experience of trying to help someone and finding that they have more to offer you than you could possibly give. Several years ago, I was in Kampala, Uganda, in a refugee community on the side of a steep hill. Most were women and children who had fled from up north, where a brutal cultish rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army had killed large numbers of the men.
Many of the women had terrible stories of rape and violence. Some of the boys I talked with had been kidnapped by the LRA and trained as soldiers, forced, I was told, to do terrible things such as murdering family members and neighbors in their home village so they could never return. The center of the settlement is a steep walled open pit mine.
The women support themselves by getting rocks from the pit and breaking them into gravel with small metal hammers. Each day, they add to the pile for several hours. After Hurricane Katrina on America’s Gulf Coast in 2005, these women, many of them HIV positive, somehow collected $900 and sent it to the American Embassy to help with relief efforts.
When I visited them and thanked them on behalf of our government, I have never seen a group of people more proud of themselves. I was given a handwritten note that read: We want to express ourselves that we are the richest in the world. We are not poor. We are free. We also want to love others truly.
Generosity of the poor is often more impressive than anything we give them. And we should be honored to take their side and humble enough to learn from them.