The Places Where the Bus Won't Stop

  Almost two years ago my sister and I went on a ten-day Caribbean cruise. We saw a lot of beautiful places, but what I want to talk about for a moment for the places that were not so beautiful. The dirty places, the sad places, the broken places…the places where the bus won’t stop.

  Because we were traveling with my grandmother and her then-boyfriend, we didn’t go boogie boarding, scuba dive with sting rays, or go off-roading on four wheelers or anything like that. We went on lots of bus tours, which were air-conditioned, full of information, and relatively interesting most of the time. I always kept my sunglasses on in case I fell asleep, though.

  But the day we were in Costa Rica there was something different about the bus tour. As the bus driver wove his way quickly through city streets to get us to the scenic routes where he could point out incredible, enormous bird nests, I watched the streets below us. They were filthy, the sidewalks literally stacked with garbage and filth. A homeless man sat in the middle of it, staring into space, barely glancing at our bus as it passed as though he already knew we didn’t really care about him; as though as he already knew we wouldn’t stop.

  And of course we didn’t. No one on the bus had paid that much money to stop and talk to a homeless Costa Rican man, give him a few bucks, and share their love with him. They wanted to sip alcohol and eat fresh fruit in the shade while a live band played for them, as they waited for their boat ride down a river to view the sloths and howler monkeys.

  I don’t believe there is anything wrong with boat rides down muddy rivers to listen to wild holwer monkeys yell their words we can’t understand into the thick, hot air of the jungle. But I do believe there is something wrong with overlooking the homeless people on the street corners, sitting amongst garbage and dust, letting time and wealthy people pass them by because they know neither care what becomes of them.

  On that boat ride, once we got there, we passed house after house on prime, riverside properties. The nicest of these houses with water-front views were sheds compared the rather small,  hundred-and-some-year-old house my family currently lives in. We passed houses built of pieces of sheet metal. Tiny boats were tied to moors of old car tires lodged in the riverbank. The nicest houses had walls of stone or cement, with actual windows instead of just narrow gaps in the metal most houses were built of.

  But to the people that lived in those houses, they were not impoverished, they were not poor. Those were the NICE houses, the BIG houses, the houses for those who DO have money.

  What then does poverty look like? It looks like us.

  I think we are the poor ones. We who “don’t have the money” for the children that are starving literally to death as you read this, but who can always afford another coffee, burger, pair of shoes, or the newest cell phone- we are the poor. We are poor in love, poor in compassion, poor in generosity. We are rich in dollar bills that stain our pockets green, and poor in the qualities that would mark us as human.

  We don’t want to stop at street corners two feet thick in trash. We don’t have time, we say; we haven’t cash to spare, we say.

  I hope you don’t feel guilty when you read this. I hope you feel moved, inspired, and determined to love in new ways, to give with new abandon. But I don’t hope for a world full of feel who beat themselves up every time they go through the Starbucks drive-thru; I do hope for a world full of people who open their wallet for a homeless person or pull out their checkbook for a charity. I hope for a world full of people who will take the time to introduce themselves to the man at the bottom of the freeway exit ramp, who will pray for someone in a grocery store, who will hand their lunch to someone who needs it more.

  I often think I don’t have money. I work two part-time jobs, neither of which exactly pay a lot. My car is almost as old as I am, I don’t have designer clothes, and I have to watch how much I spend on food. But see… I have a job. I have a paycheck, and a car, and clothes, and food. These are the things that I HAVE. I am not in want.

  And so every time I think twice about giving, I HAVE to, because I never want my money to be so precious to me that I don’t want to give it away. Most families in this world live on two dollars a day- I am by no means poor in dollars, and I hope and pray that my riches will accumulate in the form of new love, compassion, and selfless-ness, not digits in my bank account.

  Think about the places where the bus won’t stop. Think about stopping there.