The Dweller

I met him on a trip to a place I’d never been before. Along with the culture shock I was met with so many strange faces. Looking back, his is the one that I remember because of his thoughtfulness, his honesty, and his faithfulness. We first met his smiling face on a trip into the most impoverished neighborhood I’d ever seen. People living in squalor, most in one room houses, stared at me as I walked by with a group of people who definitely didn’t fit in. We turned a corner and shook hands with this man, and he invited us to his home. It was just around the corner, in the neighborhood. 

He grew up hundreds of miles away in another area of the country. That meant that coming to this city came with a change of culture, language, and, of course, people. There were other men and families who had come to make a difference in this community, but all of them lived on the outside and came in to serve each day. From out the outside, they financed the building of the school, but from the inside, this man brought the children to it. They hired teachers to make a difference, but he was the one that made sure the kids had uniforms so they could go. He did the backbone of the work in the neighborhood and he led the way not as an accomplished leader or a great orator, but as a humble servant. 

He took us around and introduced us to he people who lived there, his neighbors. Each narrow street held a memory, and each open doorway a smiling friend. 10 years he’d been in this neighborhood, loving the people, and doing what he could to help them. The life he’d chosen, however, kept him impoverished along with his neighbors, and I know that he would often go hungry to help the people around him survive. 

One afternoon he took us to the home of a local family he’d befriended. We sat there with them for a minute and people crowded around us to hear what we had to say. (I’ll let you in on a secret, I didn’t have anything to say, I was young and dumb). A woman walked in and put her baby on my lap, and said something to my new friend that I couldn’t understand. After a few uncomfortable minutes, I handed the child back to her reluctant mother and we left. I asked him what she had said when she handed me her kid. He told me that she asked for me to take the child back to the U.S. with me, to get her out of the life she had there. It was in that moment that the weight of him choosing to live there set in; that he chose to live in a place where mothers try to give their children away.

What strikes me even now is one simple thing that he did: he chose to live there. I knew enough about the culture he’d come from enough to know that he didn’t have to, but that was the kind of person that he was. I wish I could tell you his name, but it wouldn’t matter if I did; you'd never find him. He lives in a two room hole in the wall in the middle of no where, loving whomever asks for his help. What matters is not that you know his name, or that he is honored for his work. What matters is that those people know who they can turn to for help. They have a secret person in their neighborhood, helping to make it a better place.