A New Direction and a Discussion

As I will come to do at the beginning of every week, I went with my AIDS class to the township of Dunoon this morning to for the field work portion of the course. It looks like we finally have some direction for the project we will be doing there. Our work will be to set up a database based on a map of where patients are located. To do this, we will be going out in the community to all of the patients’ houses and making sure that we have correct information about them. This will allow us to locate them all on the map and look at how they are divided among home based care workers. Right now the patient database is out of date and there is no easy way to add people to the program. As a result, the specific patients which are seen by the community health workers aren’t always recorded accurately for the NGO’s records. Our work will hopefully help them keep track of the patients and their respective workers and allow for easier admission of new patients.

After returning from Dunoon, the class went to a cafe to debrief the fieldwork and for the classroom portion of the course. Our discussion focused on why people do acts of service for others. We focused particularly on defining the term compassion and whether it holds weight as a concept. Through our discussion, we seemed to break it down into two main sides of thought. One side thought that there was a moral obligation of members of society to serve those around them. That is to say that everyone ‘should’ serve others through acts of ‘compassion.’ The other side disagreed with that argument on the premise that not everyone – such as those with mental issues such as PTSD or developmental differences has the actual capacity to be empathetic. It is unrealistic then to say that everyone should do something when some are biologically unable to do so. They argued instead that people perform acts of ‘compassion’ for some benefit to self or their community, whether that is their immediate family or their city or even their country. It is natural to feel good after you have provided an act of service to another. One of their big questions is why often the religious community has gone overseas to build orphanages despite the common knowledge that children who grow up in an orphanage lag behind in virtually every aspect of society. Their point was that this provides a nice pretty picture of an orphanage with cute kids to take pictures of and makes everyone in the religious community feel good, even though it doesn’t really help the situation.

The discussion we had in class really stuck with me all afternoon because it has really profound implications for my life goals of working in and NGO meeting the medical needs of an underdeveloped community. It was really interesting that we had this conversation today because just yesterday I was listening to a sermon called “Justice” by Timothy Keller (you can find it on Itunes podcasts) about the how Christians are meant to live a life of service. I had already been wrestling with these things for a day and so this just added more thoughts to my head. I think I definitely believe that there is a moral obligation for service. There is just something inside me that repeatedly says that service can’t be just selfish. There is definitely something deeper than a desire to get the brief moment of joy from serving someone else. Though I think this is a definite reality and oftentimes people do service for this reason or others like it, I tend to believe that there is such a thing as compassion that springs up out of a moral imperative. Though religious communities may be partially doing their work in building orphanages for the moment of joy they experience, I think it is highly improbable that all such actions are simply for this selfish reason. I suspect that many of them are just not informed and though their desire for action may come out of a sense of moral obligation, their actions may not be the best for the community they seek to serve. It is harder to deal with the case of PTSD and other patients with mental disabilities because they biologically can’t empathize. I think my answer to this is based on my idea that though there is a set moral obligation that we are meant to fulfill and God judges according to that standard, there was another way provided by the person of Jesus. I believe that Jesus bore the inadequacies and wrongdoing of the world in his death so that we can be restored. All of us will ultimately fall short of the moral obligation we are called to uphold, but the person of Jesus erases that failure to live up to standards unattainable by humans requiring simply that we seek to live like he lived. Our honest convictions in our core are what matter and these are ultimately expressed in our behavior. This is what is required and as a result, people with PTSD are not judged on the ability to meet a moral standard they are unable to meet, but are judged based on their own condition and their efforts to change their condition to more closely reflect the life of Jesus.

It is ultimately impossible to try to argue for a moral obligation without invoking a particular view of it, but I also think there is a really powerful concrete example that supports it. There are people who show for a small time what it means to really act out of moral obligation and not for any kind of selfish gain. During the Holocaust, people in Europe who sheltered Jews in their homes risked everything. If they were caught they were likely to be sent to concentration camps to be killed along with those in their families. These people risked their whole world – all that they have and all of their loved ones – for others. There is no personal benefit. People who sheltered Jews personally disadvantaged themselves for the sake of others with no expectation of a return. How can this not be done out of a moral imperative?