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Author: joelwitwer

This is my Job.

This little lady is one of my favourite sassy kids that have come through the hospital so far. Her name is Mary and she first came to us in 2008 with hydrocephalus literally crushing her brain. She’s been here on and off over the last five years and is here, this time, to have her clubfeet (a byproduct of her hydrocephalus) treated. It’s been a long journey, but she’s almost finished!

Another one of our friends, Emmanuel, was playing with my camera while Mary and I were making faces and playing.

**She’s not actually flipping me off. We were doing the whole E.T. finger thing and I just wasn’t paying attention to what finger she was using …

Downward Mobility:

consciously choosing to not pursue climbing the ladder of the American dream. Smaller living spaces, simple living, done with reconciliation and relationship as the goal.

For the practitioners (of downward mobility), the people who are trying to live this out, in one or two or twenty very small ways; to the people living with mice and cockroaches and bedbugs, those with neighbors who slam doors in their faces or cook them a lovely pot of curry; those who lay awake at night thinking about violence and abuse and neglect and grief; for those with one coat or one bike or pots with no lids; for those who work all day with little or no recognition, who hang out with the mentally ill and the lonely and the brusque; for those who love the urine-soaked city streets and the quiet rural poor; for those that cook big pots of lentil soup, who leave the doors unlocked, who see the world as big and broken and offer up what little you have, the tiny, laughable loaves and fishes of your life, your privilege, your face, your body, your hands and face and smile, day after day after day, in the neighborhoods far from where you grew up:
I love you.
May the peace of Christ be with you, wherever he may send you.

 – taken from D.L. Mayfield’s ‘A Few Words on Downward Mobility’

He stands there on the lonely corner. A caulk gun swings loosely in his hand. He gazes upwards at the gently falling drizzle as a stranger approaches from behind. Without so much as a glance to display his intentions, the stranger dips, fires the gun, and moves on. The lone man remains on the corner. Bewildered. He looks around for the perpetrator, then down and contemplates the caulk drip dissolving in a puddle at his feet.
From a small shelter across the street, I am the only witness.