The Year 2065
Oftentimes when we are moved to help people who are victims of struggling and suffering, it’s because of an eye-opening experience. A photo or video strikes out, or we read an article, and the abhorrent conditions ignite a previously dormant spark of compassion. But those abhorrent conditions, so shocking to the new eye, are the day-to-day experience of those who live in them. Long after the picture fades from our memories, that child is still living in that hut. That mom is still working that farm. That baby still has those flies swarming around its lashes.
Poverty is more than just lacking food for today. It’s your family lacking food for two generations. Your father has never known the dignity of stable work. Your mother has never had the security of a loving husband. You’ve never been expected to finish school. What does it feel like to live like this? How can we possibly develop the empathy necessary to love from so far away?
Immersing in their culture is a powerful gateway to experience a bit of what the poor experience every day. Yes, the students we serve are up against material poverty. But the hardest obstacle is not a poverty of things, but a poverty of hope. This is a poem by Ugandan poet Peter Kagayi, and in it he unpacks what the poverty of hope feels like in an erudite, eloquent, and challenging way. He, a native of poor Uganda, imagines what life will be like in 2065, roughly 50 years from now. It’s not an easy read, but then again, neither is the life of the poor easy.
In 2065
Nothing will have changed that much,
Except I will be over 70 years
The roads will be the same
The politics will be the same
Kampala [the capital city] will be the same
In 2065 nothing will have changed that much,
Except I will be over 70 years
And I will go to Mulago [hospital] to cure my rheumatism
And the doctors will say there is no cure
And the boda- boda [motorcycle taxi] man at the stage
Will recommend to me a West-Nile witch doctor
And I will go to my grandson’s school like my grand-father did
And I will be turned away, for old age will be something forbidden.
The president will be the president we have today,
And in a wheel chair he will give the Nation Address
Only his son, then a field Marshall, will read it on his behalf
And he will talk on his behalf
And he will rule on his behalf
In 2065, nothing will have changed that much,
Except I will be over 70 years.
And Makerere [the university] will be on strike and Major- General ‘Something’
Will order open-fire on the students
Because their demand for fried beans
Will be a threat to the security of the State.
And U.R.A [political party] will be taxing the air we breathe,
The many times couples kiss,
The fart we excrete,
The words we speak
And the way we die
And will determine those who go to heaven
And those to hell
And tax their corpses differently
In 2065 nothing will have changed that much,
Except I will be over 70 years,
And teachers will be begging on the streets to feed their families
Their wives will sleep with tourists to make a decent living
The syllabus will be the same shadow of what colonialists left behind
With systems too archaic and too alien to offer anything essential
And the students will remain cabbages and potatoes
And the ratio of the jobless to the job-hopeful
Will remain nine to one
And like that life will move on,
And like that nothing will change.
In 2065 children of eight will be using contraceptives
Children of eight will be going to night clubs
In 2065 children will not be children
They will be eating fellow children for breakfast and for break at school
And they will not wash their hands and will offer you a hand-shake.
And we will be the people in that future
Built from a present that promises not much
Except ageing
We will be there hoping to die soon.
It breaks our hearts that this is the mindset that many of these students grow up in. Poverty is hopelessness, but thriving is hope. This is what we stand against with every child that is welcomed into Solid Rock and every dollar that is raised. We stand against hopelessness. Yes, the children and families we serve can use a new bed or a bag of beans, but more than that they need hope. Stumbling, imperfect though we are, we want to be a participant in ending hopelessness.
“…if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday” Isaiah 85:10.
Our sacrifice of money or time or prayers can, and does, create hope. The encouragement of a teacher builds hope in each student that they really can graduate. Education for children builds hope in each mother, that one day their child will be able to provide for their own family. Our dream is that in 2065 the students who graduate from Solid Rock will be 55 and still be able to say “I have a full life ahead of me.” Most of all, it will be them who will look around and say “how can I bring hope where there is none?” If poverty is believing that in 2065 nothing will have changed, thriving is believing that the best is always yet to come.
