Here are a couple of poems that I (Susan) wrote inspired by our time at the Feeding Center. Thank you for your continued prayers for the 660+ men, women and children who are served each day by this ministry of hot food.
Sofia
7 months ago.
Sofia discovered that a new beginning was growing within her. Excitement and joy competed with the sorrow that life with her ill husband imposed.
6 months ago. Sofia’s stomach churned in the early morning. A reminder that soon there would be yet another mouth to feed.
5 months ago. Her husband’s ever-worsening symptoms coincide with her ever-expanding belly and she waits.
4 months ago. The difficulties increase as her fears about the future deepen. There is no work. There is no food. There is no hope.
3 months ago. The worst happens. A visit from death and the family that should be growing larger loses its Father.
2 months ago. Her pleas for hospitality go unanswered. An unmerciful landlord forces her eviction into the cold, dark streets of Addis.
1 month ago. Her toddler son asks the questions for which she has no answers. When is Daddy coming back? What is there to eat today? Why?
Today. Sofia slowly travels the cement walkway that leads to lunch. Exchanging her ticket for a bowl of injera and wat. All that she’ll receive today to share with her wiggly 3 year old and her unborn child.
Now it’s my turn for questions that go unanswered.
Where will she go to deliver this new baby? What will happen to them? Why?
The Feeding Center
Group after group they come
Women and their children
The sick, the poor, the lame
Blind, orphaned and alone
Wearing their entire wardrobe at once
The sum of their possessions in the bottom of a twisted plastic bag.
First order, and then chaos
Now noise, and then quiet as food placed in front of them makes its way into their empty places.
All the same, and yet all different.
A bit of onion broken apart, some pepper seeds or pieces of garlic waiting at the bottom of a blue plastic bowl. Story after story of heartache, hurt and suffering among the young and the old alike.
Injera.
Torn, folded or rolled above or below the steaming wat.
The only meal they’ll see today or the only meal they’ll see this week.
Up from the cold cement benches
Bowls empty
Up the ramp and out
Or maybe first what passes for a bath at the cold-water spigot
Making their way back to the street and to the world that looks at them every day without seeing them.
Not a chance for me to turn around or to turn away and then it comes again.
Another wave of people. More stories, more suffereing, more need.
The scene repeats itself.
4 times each day
6 days each week
660 x 6 x 52 = 205, 920
No, that’ can’t be right.
Is it over yet?
The last arrive.
No more injera.
Just a piece of bread and a platter of leftover scraps on the ground like a dish of food I might set out for my dogs.
Gathered around it are the squatting men, 10, 20, 30 of them.
Dipping.
Dipping their bread together as they share this communal meal.
It is almost too much… this relentless suffering.
Look!, There’s Jesus
Matthew 25:40 “For whenever you did this for the least of these, you did it for me.”
