or (Christmas, part two)

"Excuse me, sir, do you have the time?"

I glanced up from my lighting console. A young girl - maybe eight or nine years old - stood in front of me. I was in the church auditorium getting ready for a big worship service that Celebrate Recovery was putting on. I glanced at my watch.

As it so happened, I did.

"Yeah. It's twenty-sixteen. And please don't call me 'sir'."

She looked at me quizzically.

"How can it be twenty? And what do you want me to call you?"

And thus I met Onna. I spent a few minutes explaining what twenty-four hour time was, and then she skipped off to find something else to do. She returned a few minutes later to ask me to come watch her go down the slide in the back. I met her mother and sister later that night, chatted for a bit, and that was that. I finished the evening and went home.

I continued to see them around POG. I gleaned from several conversations with her mother that their financial situation was less than optimal, so I volunteered to take Onna (Her sister was old enough to look after herself without mom's supervision.) on a few occasions for a couple of hours. We went to see Ratatouille, and they invited me to come swimming with them on several occasions.

One day I was invited by them to go with the family and see the kids off to summer camp. The trip up was uneventful, however when we got to the camp, Onna was refused entry for lice. Nits, to be more precise. She took the news pretty hard, (I mean, what kid wants to be told "No, you can't come have fun, you have bugs on you."?) but rebounded pretty quickly. To cheer her up and give her mom a break she spent the evening at my house. We spent some time playing with the Wii and my piano and had macaroni and cheese for dinner - basically had a good time. However, I noticed something when she jumped up to give me a hug.

She smelled.

And not like the typical "kid who's been running around on a hot summer day and is all sweaty" smelly. More like "kid who hasn't bathed in several days" smelly. Mom noticed it to, and mentioned it to me. I sort of shrugged internally. "She's a sort of a tomboy, maybe she just forgets to take showers every day." and didn't think too much of it after that. (I did, however, place a frantic call to that afternoon to find out about how contagious lice are.)

Five months later, I stopped by their house to see Onna and say hello to her mom. We exchanged pleasantries in the doorway of her small home, and then Onna invited me to see the rest of the house.

Now, there's poverty, and then there's apathy.

Imagine, if you will, a garbage dump. Now imagine one inside a house. Words cannot describe the filth in this house. The tiny walk-through kitchen had stained countertops, dirty pots and pans piled high, and papers and candy wrappers all over the floor. Beyond that (no door) was her mother's "bedroom", a room with a single queen-sized bed with some kind of brown stains on it. Trash was piled all over the floor. And I don't mean just "clutter", I mean literal trash. Candy wrappers and bits of food and crumpled papers and old torn clothing and animal bedding from the two occupied birdcages in the room. One of these sat on top of an old rusty dishwasher that was serving as a table, the other sat directly on the floor. The dresser was piled high with every conceivable piece of clothing, dirty and otherwise. There was grit on the floor...grit that I can only describe as substantial. It took conscious effort to not stop and pick off the little pieces of stuff that were sticking to my socks as I walked. The minuscule bathroom also had no door, just a tattered bedsheet to pull across it, and the girls shared a tiny bedroom with even more clutter scattered around it. In the living room a woman henceforth known as the Largest Woman Still Able to Move Under Her Own Power sat and chain-smoked, while the owner of the birds washed dishes. Onna's mom sat on the couch and vegged. Suddenly Onna's body odor issue became clear. In all honesty, I would not have been surprised to see rats scurrying across the floor.

Even now I have difficulty articulating what I was feeling as I walked through their house. Disgust, sympathy, sadness, and more disgust. The acrid smell of cigarette smoke wafted through the house, and mixed and interacted with the smells from the trash and food and whoknowswhat to create a nasty odor that stuck to my clothes. It was horrible. Perhaps even more disturbing was the large TV sitting in the living room with a DirectTV box hooked up to you.

"Hello, this is your priorities calling..."

I didn't stay long, I had some place to be. But the image of all them there in that dump of a house stuck with me after I had left. I started out feeling guilty about being so repulsed by their living conditions. After all, millions of people get by with a lot less than they do, and compared to the horrors of being an orphan in Africa they actually have it pretty good. But after a while I just felt disappointed. Disappointed in the lack of pride that Onna's mom took in their homes and lives.

At what point is lack of money no longer an excuse for your living conditions? When are you allowed to say "Money is not the issue here, you are living this way by your own choice."? When is it appropriate to say "The people you are allowing to live with you here are not contributing to the health of you or your children."?

And this brings up a related, better question: what can I do about this? And the honest answer is: not a whole heck of a lot. If I could stretch out my hand and bestow a new house on them, would it really help? I don't know, but gut tells me that Onna's mom's lack of ambition to expend minimal effort to make their situation better would eventually just cause their new house to fall into the same situation as their current one. As my friend Greg pointed out, "You can be clean without a lot of money." So what assistance could I render? Send her a book about cleaning houses? Offer to come over and help her clean up? Express concern to her about the conditions that her children are living in?

I suppose any one of those things could possibly help, but probably not long term. I think I'm probably unable to help her anyway - I don't live in Iowa anymore, so my choices are limited in what I can do. But what she needs is not a handout, or a letter of concern, but rather to take a serious look at her situation and think of ways to improve it. Start with cleaning up the house. Cost: free. Get rid of cable. Savings: $40+ per month. Find a way to take some classes, look for a better job. Get a roommate who doesn't chain-smoke. Someone to show her how to help herself, I guess.

Maybe she needs hope more than anything. I wish I knew how to give it to her.

Exit, stage left. Sparks