People everywhere - in the streets and the shops and the rain, crossing the street without even looking to notice the sea of taxis bearing down on them. The air smells like car exhaust and people and fried food and coffee. The people are multicolored, but still somehow I do not fit. The practical cargo pants and rain jacket and sneakers are out of place among suits and shoes that could feed a family for a year. Cell phones and earpieces and sunglasses and coats. No one will meet my eyes. No one accidentally brushes against me in the crowd. There is no friendly idle conversation. Each person is alone. I am alone. I am a stranger. I am not here. I do not exist.
There is a homeless man in the doorway of a classy hotel, wearing all the clothing he owns, sleeping in oblivion. The rough red rash on face and hands marks unwashed and untreated skin; the sign and upturned hat next to him mark an unwanted man.
"Help. Homeless. HIV positive."
There is nothing in the hat. No one can see him. He is alone in the crowd. He too does not exist.
I couldn't help but step outside myself for a moment and compare this city with the one I have recently called mine, the bustle of Freetown, Sierra Leone.
It is a pressure cooker of people: hot and loud and close. People push up against me from all directions, sellers call out and advertise their wares in 4 different languages. There is a small hand in mine. I look down to see an unfamiliar child grinning up at me, calling me Auntie, wanting to touch and to play and to question, joining us with five other friends as we are carried along with the people. The men look and whistle and suggest and propose. The ladies call and smile and ask about my health and wonder aloud where my man is. A poda-poda (bush taxi) side mirror whizzes past, just missing my shoulder as I step off across the open sewer. There are no cracks, no spaces, no room in the flow of traffic and people to just slip through, and everything smells of trash and goat and human body odor and cooking oil and soap. It is a city of war refugees-turned-residents, an unexpected population explosion that stayed, a casual stream now at flood capacity.
I am different. I am the funny colored one. The one who smells strange and has shiny straight long hair and doesn't wear a bright-colored lappa with a baby snugly tied in back, who speaks English with an American accent and not the usual Mende or Temne or pidgin Krio. But I am known and accepted, welcomed and protected.
"Massy Sheep", they call us, with a light in their brown eyes that maybe wasn't there before. "Massy Sheepa! Sista! Come, please, is ma yay (eye)...ma leg...ma pikin (child)." Even just walking to the market, in civilian clothes, we are still known. There are so many who need help and good food and clean water and medical care. Too many who have lived for years waiting for a miracle. For the outcast and the hopeless, too often we are their last hope.
Two cities, two continents, two worlds. One impersonal and individual and alone, the other personal and noisy and filled with life. Both still have the outcast who call the streets home, the needy who call out to be heard.
Do you hear them? Can you see the value of a person behind the filth and the mask and the deformity and the smells? Will you see enough to come close and touch, to meet the hopeless when they need it the most?
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Matt 25:34-40
