Lessons learned by sharing Top Ramen

There is squalor and poverty all about me.  I see kids without shoes, and big men with calloused hands working in the bush with hand tools (machete and long-hoe) six days a week to feed their family and hopefully grow a few extra vegetables to sell so they can pay tuition for their kids schooling or afford expensive imported kerosene to light their house.
The women weave mats and baskets using a traditional time consuming and labor-intensive method of harvesting leaves, boiling them, soaking them in ocean water for eight days, pounding the leaves, drying them in the sun, and then weaving. 
They also sell fruit and vegetables from a small table in their front yard near the street.  Some cook roti (breakfast burritos) and sell them to Chinese stores usually located near a school.  Breakfast for the fortunate kids (those with eighty cents) will be a roti, potato chips or dry uncooked Top Ramen. 
You see people pushing a wheelbarrow to and from the local fruit market.  All about me are the problems and challenges of poverty and lack of necessities. 
Most kids have never been to a dentist or doctor.  Often you see a big bright beautiful smile with the abruptness of a missing front tooth; like a front door missing from a house. 
Cars are becoming more abundant because the young men go to New Zealand to pick fruit.  About 45 percent of the money in Tonga is from remittances (money sent home to mom). 
Rusted broken down cars are piled in the front yards because people don’t throw anything away as it might be useful someday and everything rusts in Tonga. 
I have seen several old vans up on cinder blocks repurposed to be a bedroom for an older son.  Nothing goes to waste in Tonga.  Repair, reuse, recycle, repurpose is a way of life, not a slogan to ease the conscience of the well to do. 
Car windshields have characteristic round shatter patterns or dents from coconuts falling 60’ and stopping.  Part of our training is “don’t park underneath a coconut tree”. 
Issac Newton would have been knocked out cold for a week if he had been hit by a coconut instead of an apple and generations would have missed enjoying calculus and we would have never gotten to the moon because without f=ma there is no order in the universe. 
Weather wise, it is another beautiful day in Tonga.  Sometimes you get lulled into thinking every day is going to be 68 degrees in the morning and 72 in the afternoon.  Repeat tomorrow. 
Pleasant weather can dull your senses, making it easy to ignore the poverty.   Sometimes you miss beautiful things happening in front of you. 
The magnanimous moment in front of me is not captured by casual observation.   The young girl’s eyes sparkle, but deep inside there is a hunger due to the lack of consistent nutritious food. 
The elementary age girl shares her package of Top Ramen with a stranger.  Dry uncooked Top Ramen is eaten as a meal or snack.  I have tried it, and it is like eating Saltine Crackers and trying to whistle, ugh. 
Mathematically, I can’t explain why less is more.  But somehow the two girls seem satisfied with their meager portions and walk, giggle, and chat their way to school.   
Poverty and hunger can be awful.  But sometimes shared poverty leads to the very best that humans can hope for.  This beautiful little girl is providing a sermon on gratitude, charity, and Christ like love when she opens her package of dry noodles, breaks it in half, and gives it to her new friend.
There have been times when we deliver books to small, isolated villages and they honor us with a feast which usually includes a roasted pig. 
They insist we eat first and eat as much as we want; only then would they eat.  The feast is probably a week’s worth of food for the entire village, but their generosity is genuine, and no greater insult could be flung at them than to refuse their generosity. 
God has been trying to teach me.  I know I am a slow learner and “stubborn” if you believe my too kind and loving wife.  But I have come to realize that “your mission didn’t fail you, but you failed your mission” if you don’t capture all the good that can be found among the squalor and poverty.
Going on a mission has been a blessing to me.  I was sent to Tonga to bless others, but it is gospel truth; the more you serve others, the more you are blessed. 
In my engineer brain, that doesn’t make mathematical sense.  These are real tangible blessings, not just heartfelt satisfaction.  I call this celestial math. 
Take whatever you can offer and let God multiply it.  He did it with loaves and fishes and I have learned there is no limit to His promises, only our faith. 
When the “good book says we must “become like a little child”, I suspect we could take a lesson from a young Tongan girl that gave half of her food to a stranger.   
“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” 
This Thanksgiving I have much to be grateful for.  I won’t be eating a turkey or pumpkin pie and then falling asleep in my big over-stuffed chair. 
But if all I have is dry Top Ramen, I hope I have changed enough and am humble enough that I would share it as easily and charitably as that small Tongan girl did.