Charleston, WV

by Kim Tomaszewski

Thursday afternoon we heard several speakers from John XXIII Pastoral Center one being Father Les Schmidt who focused his talk to us around Psalm 11:3. I’m not sure if he was simply informing us or doing this on purpose but he made a point of saying that he was using the NRSV translation. This is what I normally use but for a travel Bible I have an NIV translation that I had with me. Father Schmidt read Psalm 11:3 as “If the foundations are crumbling what will the righteous do?” This line really struck me and so I went to my NIV to underline it. However, my translation read, “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

What does this say about responsibility? About the privilege of choice?
This morning we talked about the themes of Ruth and the relationship between these and coal miners here in Appalachia, as well as with the poor in general. Specifically we discussed the notion of having (or not having) choices when you’re poor. Ruth is dependent on Boaz for survival for the next generation, for her well-being, as well as for her mother-in-law’s. People who work in manual labor are thought of as expendable but they must work in the coal mines –dying early and cruelly, working in terrible conditions, forced from education into labor, and often times bringing your family into this line of work to face the same- in order to support their family; in order to survive. What is the difference in hearing “What Can you do” versus “What Will you do”?

This has been the crux of my experience with the Poverty Initiative – being presented with information, hearing people’s testimonies, experiencing the poor, and then being asked ‘ok, now what will you do about this?’. We must understand our responsibility to one another and to ourselves as connected to one another.

One last thing on this. I went to undergrad in central Pennsylvania. If I leave this trip with nothing else it will be the dichotomy of how immensely poor this region is but how few people are homeless. We have seen the working poor and this is exhausting to think of how we cover up our employment ratings, how Wal-Mart is the largest employer in West Virginia (driving out Mom and Pop stores and then making the same people work in their business or buy from them because of no other options), and other such infuriating things. We have addressed our stereotypes of the poor being lazy, etc. These people work with low or no benefits, awful pay, and long hours. And still, we stereotype them and place the blame elsewhere so we can live without guilt. (That was said to us at some point this trip but I can’t remember by who).

The relationship between my college and the community it was in was not a positive one. We were middle to upper class white students who did not appreciate the working poor that supported our late night Wal-Mart runs, our deli stops after the bar, the town that we called “ours” for our four years spent there. A local professor last night who spoke to us said “It is great that you want to help and that you give cans of food, but if you really want to make a difference, say hello to the cashier”. It is this element of responsibility that I come back to - Of understanding who is around us in our community (our state, our country, our world) and then also acknowledging our connectedness to them. What will we do, as the foundations are crumbling?