Massive Change
On Saturday the ten of us (household + Jennifer) went to the Massive Change exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It was a fascinating show that deserves more commentary than I have time to give it now. One item that really caught my attention was a stretcher on wheels towed by a bicycle. The accompanying blurb explained that in remote areas of Africa many people die because clinics are few, far between and unserviced by ambulances. It just takes too long to get sick people to the doctor. The stretcher on wheels is a concrete and immediately realizable help to this problem. It’s made with materials, techniques and for a price within the means of local people.
Often I assume that the only real solution to a problem like no-ambulances is…well, ambulances. But it’s not. With all due respect to ambulances, the designers of the stretcher on wheels realized that a simpler (albeit less complete) solution was actually better for the people on the ground whom they were trying to serve.
It reminds me of the fix-it projects in Allendale. This summer we put a lot of time and energy into houses that, from a purely structural point of view, really needed to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. But we couldn’t do that. We didn’t have the money, the city didn’t have the money, our neighbors didn’t have the money. So we did what we could. We painted walls that were rotting out. We replaced floors under leaking roofs. We built a brand new shed behind a house that may collapse at any moment.
The Lord was very much in all that. “Jesus went around all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom, and curing all kinds of sicknesses and disease among the people” (Matthew 4:23, my emphasis).
The Massive Change exhibit came “not far from the Kingdom of God” at certain points.
Nick
November 17th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
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