teardrops and chicken bones

"I rush home from work, grab all my notebooks, and rush to night school. It's so hard to focus on what the teacher is saying because all I can think about is what I'm going to make for dinner, whether we ran out of onions or if we still have a few, what I'm going to feed my kids for breakfast, what I'm going to send with them for lunch. How am I going to pay next month's school fees for my kids? Did my husband find work today? The teacher calls on me and I have no idea what she's talking about because my head is full of worries--there's no room for learning. Then I get home and rush to make dinner. If there is no food and no money, I go to the nearby shop and ask for just a little oil and shiro powder, telling them I'll pay them for it tomorrow."

She is my friend, and this is how she describes her average night. In another conversation today, a friend told me her daughter is upset before school because other kids bring other kinds of food for lunch and all she ever brings is bread. She was crying for one banana. And at home her mom cooks vegetables in a dry pan--no oil, no eggs, no meat, no dairy because it's all too expensive.

I talk to my friends as I watch prices go up on oil, on meat, on vegetables, on fruit, on transportation. I watch the Ethiopian birr decline in value. I watch people ask for raises and ask for loans and ask for mercy.

And then I make dinner for my own family--chicken pot pie, one of the boys' favorites. I pull out the cutting board and start pulling the meat off the leftover pieces of roasted chicken from last night. A pile of bananas sits right behind the cutting board. And somewhere amidst cutting the meat and seeing the bananas, my mind is filled with the conversations of the day and my eyes are filled with tears. And I nearly bend my fingernails back trying to scrape every last bit of meat off the bones. How can I leave any bits of chicken on the bones when I've heard what I've heard today? Have my tears ever dropped on chicken bones before? They have now.

I don't know the answers about the inequities, about the economies, about the needs. I know we're called to love, and I know that Jesus's heart for the poor reaches far. So I try to love and pray and care and give, but some days none of it feels like enough--like a drop in a bucket of injustice. And I never know if I'm on the right side of it all with the choices I make and the ways I give and the ways I don't. It's heavy and it's hard, but for them way more than it is for me.