Empowering destitute people towards transforming communities

6.3Missions with the destitute mean restoring human dignity

Seltser & Miller (1993:86) list the following conditions for dignity among destitute people, conditions which must actively be pursued when we do missions with the destitute:

6.3.1Autonomy

The most important condition of dignity is an appropriate degree of autonomy. Human beings require a sphere of choice, a sphere of action over which they have some control and discretion.

6.3.2Predictability

The second condition for dignity is that we enjoy some degree of predictability about our future.

6.3.3Self-expression

Experiencing dignity depends also upon opportunities for self-expression: the ability to express who we are and what we feel.

6.3.4Social solidarity

In addition to fostering autonomy, predictability, and self-expression, having a place to live also provides a deeper conviction that we are social beings worthy of being part of a community, adults who can take care of ourselves and fit into society.

6.3.5Conclusion

It is one thing to assert philosophically that all persons have dignity; it is quite another to enable people to experience their lives in that way. I have pointed to a set of conditions that seem to be essential if people are to possess that sense of themselves as whole and worthwhile selves: they must have some opportunities for autonomy, predictability, self-expression, and social solidarity with other persons and groups. To undercut these conditions is a serious threat to their dignity.
Destitution presents a serious and systematic threat to this central need to see oneself as a worthwhile, respectable, and dignified human being. Thinking about the conditions of dignity reminds us how our own lives would be undermined if we lost our homes and become destitute, and how wretched an experience it would be to find ourselves on the street or in a shelter.
The application of such a concept to the experiences of destitute persons should be quite obvious. We are concerned about how destitute people experience their own intrinsic sense of dignity, how other people and institutions treat them as people with dignity, and how destitute people uphold their own dignity in the midst of their experiences. These issues tell us something not only about the destitute, but about our actual, lived-out values as well. If it is true that we can best learn about a society by looking at the people in it who are the most disadvantaged, then examining the question of the dignity of the destitute may be an appropriate starting point for learning about how (and, indeed, whether) we truly believe that all persons deserve to be treated in certain ways.
Listening to the voices of the destitute provides us with an important and revealing insight into the central values of society. Stripped of most of the standard trappings of status and role, the destitute confront us with troubling questions. Do we truly value and respect people for their own sakes? Is the worth of a person determined by place of residence, occupation, or income?
If dignity is dependent solely on our being human, it should not be affected by our material situation or our social status. But we experience dignity through our worn self-image and the way we are treated by others. If I view myself as someone who is worthless, and if others treat me in that way, my dignity has been significantly threatened. Dignity not experienced is, too often, dignity denied.

7The destitute are people experiencing God

One might think, mistakenly, that the destitute would either not confess spiritual experiences, or would reflect negatively on such experiences. However, it appears the opposite is true. They humble us in teaching us how to experience God in the absence of material goods, or a home, or all the other creature comforts we are used to. They “convert” us to look for God at work in different ways in unexpected places.
But let the destitute speak for themselves…
The following interviews and parts of interviews were conducted over a period of three years in Popup, a development project in the inner City of Pretoria, and are all published by permission. Where names are used they are pseudonyms, for the sake of the protection of the dignity of the people interviewed.

7.1Thembi’s Story

When we spoke with her, Thembi (pseudonym) was a twenty-five-year-old black, single, pregnant woman living in the shelter with the youngest of her three children. She came into Popup because she had nowhere to go. She had been evicted from her last apartment when she was unable to pay the rent and had been shuttling between shelters and friends’ homes for the previous couple of weeks.
Her childhood was difficult, but she says that “we never had to do without.” Her mother was on welfare after divorcing her father; this did not seem like a major deprivation, however, since they lived in an area where “everybody was on welfare.”

She ran away from home when she was thirteen, believing that her family “just didn’t care enough for me.” She married a man who abused her, and she is pregnant now from another brief relationship. She has held a few cashier jobs at the minimum wage, but she hasn’t worked for a year because “I was just turned off doing it, it’s not enough money for me and the baby.”

She tells a story of years filled with “very terrible things”; being homeless, by comparison, is “really nothing for me.” She was kidnapped and shot, and she was raped several times many years ago. She feels she has suffered from severe racial discrimination.
And she is having a very difficult time in the shelter. She complains about the rules and the fact that the staff will not let her discipline her child the way she wants to: “You have to go by their rules when you’re here, so that’s why when I get my own apartment, it’s going to be different, and my child is going to have to get used to it.”
How does she deal with what has been happening? Throughout the interview she refers to ways in which God has helped her. What has kept her going is just having faith that God really will do something: “It’s greater than whatever you can do, its inside, the Lord knows your heart; he knows the inside of your soul. It’s really great when you feel like that. It saved my life all these years……Everybody needs different things.” When she was most terrified about being out on the street with her young son, what saved her was the fact that “I just knowed that I had to really stop whining about it, put my faith in Jesus that he won’t let us be on the street.” All she hopes for is that Jesus will continue to act in and on her life, because “your life is already planned…..Jesus makes plans for you…I don’t make plans ahead, I just take it as it comes.”
She attributes to divine intervention the fact that things are not even worse. She notes proudly that she was never obliged to live on the street and that her mother took the family in during her last pregnancy. She seems convinced that in spite of all that has happened, “the Lord is always working miracles for me.” Thembi also reveals a certain sense of hopelessness or apathy about what will happen in the future. She finds it very difficult to speculate about where she will be in five years, saying: “I don’t even have a boyfriend.” She attributes her problems with men to the fact that “they can’t deal with me because I’m a real person…I don’t even have friends, I don’t have nobody, I’m just by myself.”
Her religious interpretations are perhaps the only source of meaning and connection she can experience at this point in her life. Not only do they allow her to avoid drawing the conclusion that she is entirely on her own, they also provide comfort and reassurance that things will get better because someone else is really in charge. She is torn between her insistence on her own independence and strength (particularly in relation to her son’s discipline and her living conditions) and her fear that nothing will ever change unless someone else (namely God) can intervene in her life.
Thembi’s references to God represent a desire held by many individuals to understand life in terms of a deeper frame of reference than their social circumstances. Thembi believes that there is a divine plan at work in her life that makes sense out of otherwise meaningless events. There is more to her life than meets the eye. If not, then she would feel desperate, because the events taken in isolation present a very bleak picture of her prospects. Her sense of personal dignity and hope rests in her faith that Jesus is making plans for her.
Thembi’s story is just one of many which clearly reflect the fact that the destitute undergo real spiritual experiences, onto which they often hold as an anchor in their desperation.