“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

-Arundhati Roy (Indian activist and author)

“I learned from the lepers that leprosy is a disease of numbness. The contagion numbs the skin, and the nerves can no longer feel as the body wastes away. In fact, the way it was detected was by rubbing a feather across the skin, and if the person could not feel it, they were diagnosed with the illness. To treat it, we would dig out or dissect the scarred tissue until the person could feel again. As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness.”

- Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, but we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside…but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”

- Martin Luther King Jr., “A Time to Break Silence”(April 4,1967)

“The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them away.”

“evil can be opposed without being mirrored…oppressors can be resisted without being emulated…enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.”

- Ibid., 111

Every day i wake up and it feels like this is my home. It’s an eerie feeling that i’ve been here so much longer than nearly two months…

It’s like for a brief moment, i lose sight of where i came from or what it was like there…

But when i’m able to reminisce on my previous point of view, i’m able to remember how when i saw those infomercials on fighting poverty or watch scenes from movies like “Slumdog Millionaire”, seeing that type of poverty put me in disbelief. It was like those people were so far out of my reality that they failed to truly exist or register. “People don’t actually use or go into that dirty of water, do they? There’s no way that people really survive off one set of clothes…There’s no way that that type of poverty can exist in the same world…”

Since i’ve been here…my eyes have witnessed what didn’t register in my head.

i guess I had to see to believe.

i’ve seen those rivers like in “Slumdog Millionaire”, and people don’t just use them to wash clothes or bathe in them…they drink from them too…even if someone just peed 10 feet away.

Walking through Redlight, you see the tin shantytowns – those 5x7 worn-in-tin “shelters”. And they are no longer just something for Will Smith to roll over in his hummer like in “Bad Boys 2”, but have become a place where i get the opportunity to see the face of Jesus in the little boy who lives there - with red dirt covering the single holy-worn out donated t-shirt he owns, sweaty and smelly…but smiling hear to hear.

“In the poor we meet Jesus in his most distressing disguises.”

- Mother Teresa

In Redlight, you can find that type of poverty that had me in disbelief. It opens your mind… this poverty is not just here – it’s everywhere

in the midst of Redlight

When i first arrived, i was shocked at the differences between the world i had just left and the one i had just arrived in. i couldn’t believe what these kids lived with – what i thought was so little - what seemed to me, with what i had, to be less than nothing.

But now i understand why they’re always happy – what they are so grateful for…

The longer i’m here, the more i feel like our compound is a 5-star resort for schoolboys rather than a mission for the poor, oppressed, and war-strucken children of Liberia. To the people from the country, these boys are spoiled rotten.

They have 3 meals a day (which are not always cassava – what most of the country subsists on).

They have a “bed” (a mattress that’s dusty and thinner than your thickest sweatshirt), when most sleep on the ground or on a pallet of palm branches.

They get an education.

They have easy access to not just one but two wells instead of depending on the “not-so-clean” rivers or bodies of water.

The longer i work in the fields, the more i feel as though i’m just passing time in a tropical paradise rather than laboring in the African heat.

The more i see the rest of the country, the more grateful i am for pulling from a well instead of wishing for running water.

Taking a break in the cassava feilds

haha looks like Clarence wants to be superman...digging a whole in the "garden"


drawing water from the well at dusk...and always smiling:)

The more time i spend with these kids, the more i understand the delicacy of eating bugs.

YUM. haha Charlie

When i first got here i couldn’t grasp why these kids were so happy and grateful for what appeared to me as NOTHING…but now i get it…to them – they have EVERYTHING.

“jump in the mucky mud

get your hands filthy love

give it up love…everyday

all you need is

all you want is

all you need is love

all you need is

what you want is

all you need is love”

- “Everyday” Dave Matthew’s Band

“Whenever people talk about injustice, usually there is a cloud of guilt looming over them. Joy and celebration don’t usually mark progressive social justice circles, or conservative Christian circles, for that matter. But the Jesus movement is a revolution that dances. Celebration is at the very core of our kingdom, and hopefully that celebration will make its way into the darkest corners of our world – the ghettos and refugee camps, and the palaces and prisons. May the whispers of hope reach the ears of hope-hungry people in the shadows of our world.”

- Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution

“what’s so wrong with being happy?

Kudos to those who see through sickness.

She woke in the morning, She knew that her life had passed her by,

and she called out a warning,

‘Don’t ever let life pass you by.’

I suggest we learn to love ourselves before its made illegal

When will we learn? When will we change?

Just in time to see it all come down.”

- “Warning” Incubus

i pray that you all might have the faith that i lacked...That you may believe the truth of the poverty in our world...They are here and as real as you and me. i pray that you understand that they share the same feelings, desires, emotions, pains and yearnings as you. But by some "chance" or divine providence, they were born into the 3rd world when we were born into the 1st. Nothing will ever change unless people who are able do something about it. So i pray we may find the Courage, Wisdom, and Faith to be all that we can be, and help a world that is in definite need of it - whether through prayer, time, or talents - giving yourself is a beautiful thing.

i hope everyone is doing well as always! Pray for patience, understanding, joy, compassion, mercy, generosity and love...for all of us!

Life, Love and Peace

uncle matthew