How clear-sighted we are—how benevolent! Until we arrive, of course, and see the reality.
Men and women working in the mission field are supposed to sort out their own notions before they try to foist them on others. But in my experience, when they arrive at their posting, they become—if they are worth anything— more confused than anyone else around them.
So do try, Ralph, not to burden yourself with a compulsion to be better than other people. Just do your best, can’t you? I am aware that this sounds like a nursery nostrum, but it is the only advice I can give. You say you doubt (or Anna doubts) the power of the individual to achieve anything. But what if all the individuals give up? There will be precious little then for the people you are trying to serve. God will not provide, you know. You need not think it. His method is never so direct.
Every day brings a fresh problem to solve. Some people might argue that if you had a settled faith, you would not experience such turmoil. Myself, I have never believed in settled faith; there is always some emergency, God- given or otherwise, to undermine whatever certainties you have established for yourself. You could not take on, uncritically, your father’s beliefs. You have had to find your own way. Conflict is not, in itself, a sign of lack of faith. It may be a sign of—dare I say itspiritual insight, development. And at the very least—if what faces you is only a mental conflict, and an administrative problem—it shows you are beyond thinking of the world as a simple place, where good intentions are enough.
As for your problem about the blankets—of course you must go and see the people in their own houses. Has it occurred to you that the blankets may be a pretext? The people who apply to you may need far more than blankets, but find it difficult to draw your attention to this fact. And it may be that not all their needs are material.
Yes, Ralph thought, laying the letter aside; but who am I to diagnose these needs?
Anna came in. “Am I interrupting you?”
“No. A letter from James.”
“I’ll read it when I’ve a minute.” She wanted to tell him the news. The play group children were going to give a concert. A ladies’ charity from Jo’burg had donated a secondhand sewing machine, and Anna would make costumes. She had been already to beg remnants from Mr. Ahmed, on Nile Street.
For the next week, the machine’s whine cut through his evening. Rain drummed on the roof, and the streets ran with red-brown water.
One week on, he found Anna running her hand, covetously, across a roll of cloth: it was a soft, limp fabric, a paisley pattern in a faded, near-mud green. “Mr. Ahmed sent this,” she said. “It’s got a big flaw in it. But I wouldn’t mind—I could make wonderful curtains, if I could get some thick lining material. I mean,” she added, “if I could persuade Mr. Ahmed to give me some.”
“Why don’t you do it? You’ve nearly finished the costumes now. You could start after supper, if you’re not too tired.”
Anna shook her head. “We have curtains already, don’t we? Lucy Moyo sewed them with her own hands, those purple efforts with the sunbursts. The Sunday-school teachers had a collection among themselves to buy the material.” She looked up. “Is it wicked to care about the way things look?”
“Of course not.”
“But the way people feel is more important, I suppose.”
So that was the end of the paisley curtains. Anna cut three yards off the bale, where the flaw showed least, and made herself a flowing calf-length skirt, gathered softly into the waist. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” Lucy said. “Such a good seamstress you are. If you had your outfit made in Paris it couldn’t fit you better. But that fabric— shame, so dull! Still, we must use what the Lord provides.”
Anna smiled. The weather cleared. Each morning the sun woke them, slashing through the inch where the curtains didn’t meet.
Ralph wrote to James:
How do you live? What is the proper way? The idea is gaining ground—and I find it is not without its appeal— that you should live like the people you work among, that for a Christian that is the only way. Why should you have more money and more comforts than they do? How can you mean anything to them, if you keep yourself apart?
And yet, I can see that the idea might have disabling consequences.
He thought of Koos, with his dinner of mealie-pap and gravy.
I am not sure I am brave enough to try to put it into practice.
James wrote:
Do you have so much, Ralph, for people to envy you? Do I need to tell you that you are 7,000 miles from home? (You might, I realize, think it not much of a sacrifice—but let me tell you, if you do not miss us, we miss you, your sister and I, and we talk of you very often.) In one breath you complain to me of your life, your hardships and frustrations—and in the next you complain of your luxurious standard of living!
Suppose you join the people you work among, and move into a lean-to in someone’s backyard. What conceivable good will it do to anyone? It may make you feel better, for a week or two, but are your feelings the issue? When that life becomes unbearable—as it quickly would—you could escape. It would be, at best, only a well- intentioned experiment. The people around you cannot escape; there is no term put to their sentence. And so, you see, any gestures you might make in the direction of the equality of man are an insult to them. You are free to go, and they are not.
You have your education. You have your white skin, in a country where that means everything. Even the resources of your well-fed body mark you out as different. How dare you think you can become one of them? Privilege cannot be undone, once it has been conferred.
Ralph put his uncle’s letter in the drawer. Again he thought of Koos, trying to scrub his skin away.
“I had another talk with Dearie,” Ralph said to the doctor. “Anna had a talk too. We keep wondering if we should just grab the baby one day and bring it down to you, but that doesn’t seem fair on Dearie, she’s an adult after all. Or maybe you could come up to the mission. Though I don’t know how we’d get him away from Dearie, for you to examine him. She keeps him fastened on her back the whole time. As far as I can see, he’ll die there.”
“Promise her an injection,” Koos said. “That’s my last offer.”
“For her, or for the baby?”
“Both,” Koos said. “Let’s—what’s the expression?—let’s push the boat out. The people here, they love
