For most of my life I was sick of poverty. Not that I cared about it, I didn’t really care to be honest. I saw all the cliched images from the third world depicting all too familiar scenes of children drinking contaminated water and desperate hands competing for morsels of packaged aid. So many images over so many years has a real desensitization effect on me which compounded my apathy.  And besides, those were issues and ideas which were “out there”; very large socio-political issues to be handled by governments and high officials, not a common, ordinary person like me. It’s not that I even wanted to donate to aid organizations, as I’d heard that most of your time any hard earned cash donations mostly became wound up in unwieldy administration costs and more often than not very little got to the suffering person. But as I said, I didn’t really care to be honest.

I grew up in a upper middle class home, went to a private school, was generally cocooned in life, so poverty was something that really didn’t concern me, after I shouldn’t I really put all my attention to my career, my life, my education, my friends and family.

This is a story of how that perception slowly changed. For the better.

In 2003 I visited Tanzania, at the time I was visiting an girlfriend (now ex) who had volunteered for a student aid organization. My visit was at the conclusion of her formal placement at a remote village, the central project was the establishment of HIV screening centres. I’ll never forget that trip, I always recall reading the Tanzanian newspaper noticing how obviously most people were dying of HIV  and AIDS, the denial was palpable with many families paying for photo obituaries in the newspaper citing a ‘mysterious illness’ as the culprit for prematurely snatching a beloved son or daughter at a preciously cruel young age. This started to open my eyes. I was unaccustomed with being in a culture so acquainted with death and dying. I mean I was used to seeing accidents, murders and odd deaths repeated ad infinitum on the news, but this was different death was so common for so many families. It was all pervasive, the classifieds told the harsh, brutal truth. I realised that on that trip most Tanzanians were struggling to make ends meet, really struggling to live from meal to meal. Yet despite such vagaries and uncertainties many had a palpably more happier and radiant disposition than me. They seemed more confortable in their own skin. I knew something deep down was horribly wrong with the world and in a weird way I knew that by embracing and looking at poverty, those people in poverty who don’t take anything for granted and who know the value of really living,  could teach me a valuable lesson of life and unshackle me  from a n all-too-common western apathy consumed with fanatasized anxieties, petty jealousy and an over inflated sense of entitlement.

That trip changed me. Much for the better. I knew that deep down I spent time with people who appeared so much more lively and free than me, yet they by and large had no possessions and certainly had a lot more than me to worry about. I remember that trip well, most of the time I was thinking about petty, pathetic issues back home, petty friend jealousies, bitterness, anxiety and resentment. It was also the time when a recurring repetitive strain injury (RSI) started to magnify and significantly worsen. The relationship I had with my girlfriend  was also drawing to a close too. So there was plenty of things going on for me. And slowly I was being drawn to the fact that I really lived unhealthily in my mind, as I said many of the Tanzanians were clearly more desperate and needy than me, but they were in a way generally more free and relaxed in themselves than me.

So I returned home confused, bewildered and in pain. I won’t get into the long detail about the. Check RSI and Depression sites for more background. But I grew in awareness that poverty was not something “out there”, something foreign, it was all too familiar and too local. It began by seeing my own poverty and realizing that when I was unemployed – the RSI and depression episode forced me out of work for nearly two years –  I was a stone’s throw away from poverty. Had my parents not had sufficient financial reserves I could have easily become homeless, drifted into full-blown dug use , and ended up with a long stint at a psychiatric hospital. Considering this scary but plausible scenario, I fundamentally realized that  poverty was very much closer to home, it really was quite close to me. With this new realization I began to open up my eyes and notice the poverty which existed in my own backyard: Sydney, Australia.

Despite being an incredibly affluent country rich in minerals and populated by a hard-working, innovative, creative and entrepreneurial people 100 000 people slept homeless every night. 100 000! That’s nuts! Working in homelessness for the past 6 years has exposed me to the high levels of poverty and destitution experiences by many inner city Sydney folk. Too many too. I’ve worked for the past 6 years with some of the most desperate and needy homeless men and women of Sydney.

This exposure to poverty first in myself as a spiritual poverty, potential physical poverty and local poverty shaped and changed the way I embraced and accepted poverty. The more I began to attune into the human condition and how I was part of it, the more poverty couldn’t be neatly edited out or neatly categorized into some little benevolent purse I almost unconsciously feed out of virtue. I had to accept it and at the same time realise it is completely unacceptable and not something OK to tolerate or just put up with it. I had to do something to help reduce it and that was first discovering and helping with impoverished and destitute people in Sydney, the homeless. Some of which live in filth and squalor on a nightly basis.

Not soon after I worked at the homeless shelter I realised that so many people look down and laugh at people in poverty. That makes me sick to the bone, believe me. It’s a real bad sign of character to look down and laugh someone who struggles in squalor and poverty. My growing awareness and response to poverty ran parallel with the growth and development of my Christian faith (God).

Now for the last five years I feel like I guess I’m doing my little bit toward addressing the poverty situation. I know that deep down it is crazy to live a life comsumed with posession, greed, money and assests in which the majority of discussion and social interactions revolve about discussing ownership, objects and about  getting and accumulating more and more. This is the type of mindset which perpetuates the heinous gap between the haves and have notes in this world. I know that by conforting and tacking poverty I’ve also discovered an inner poverty which has been able to be finally clothed and accepted. In addition to my work in homelessness, community mental health and psychiatric hospitals my wife and I give to Compassion Australia on a monthly basis. Through this we’ve been able to forge a lovely connection with a beautiful growing girl in India.

I know that beating poverty means coming alongside the broken and the neglected and realising that the body of humanity is brusied, bleeding and in desperate need. It’s not that I’m some holy saint, far from that believe me, but I can definitely say that taking a stand against poverty and opening my eyes to the treasures of the broken has given me a new sense of freedom, liberty and understanding that while the world indeed is unfair, unjust and so many live under the yoke of oppressive chains, often it is these people who carry the key to unlocking my own poverty and darkness.

Thanks for reading my testimony.

Justin Bennett