Prayers with Hands and Feet

A few months ago, when the Trump Administration first floated the idea of shutting down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a high school classmate of mine posted on Facebook that he was “okay with that.” This guy is known for his provocative statements and his strict adherence to the MAGA party line, and usually I do my best to ignore him. But this I couldn’t let go. I pointed out all the good that USAID has done since its founding in 1961—all the lives it has saved, all the goodwill it has garnered for the US in the developing world, all the pandemics it has prevented—and predicted that its closure would mean countless deaths.

It turns out I was wrong about the “countless” part. A very recent study published in the highly respected British medical journal The Lancet has put a number to the impact of both USAID’s activity over the past 64 years and its shuttering (which became official on Tuesday). According to their research, USAID’s efforts have prevented 91 million deaths since it began its work. 91 million. To put that in perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to the combined populations of California, Texas, and New York. That is a LOT of people who got a new lease on life because of the United States’ generosity.

But when it comes to the consequences of taking away USAID, the numbers are as grim as these others are bright. The Lancet study estimates that between 8 and 19 million people, 4.5 million of them children, will die by 2030 without some kind of aid program to take USAID’s place. The state of Pennsylvania has a population of 13 million people. Imagine everyone within the borders of this Commonwealth going extinct in the next five years, and you will begin to perceive the impact of this regrettable and irresponsible (if not downright malevolent) policy decision.

When I pushed back against my friend’s declaration that he was “okay with” the dismantling of USAID, his comeback was that the agency was mismanaged, riddled with fraud, and “woke.” Apparently he objected to $32,000 being spent in Peru on a comic book featuring a transgender character. Never mind that the book a) was designed to promote HIV/AIDS prevention; b) did not have any transgender characters; and c) was not even funded by USAID—that was reason enough for this privileged first-world person to be okay with consigning millions of people in other parts of the world to death.

The trick, I suppose, is not to think of the people who will feel the impact of these cuts as people at all. If we can dehumanize people it makes it far easier to let them die. Think of the Hutu leaders in Rwanda who consistently called their Tutsi neighbors “cockroaches” and encouraged their followers to slaughter 800,000 of them in 100 days of terror in 1994. Think of the dehumanizing or at least dismissive language Israeli leaders use for the people of Gaza, which makes it easier to kill children lining up to receive desperately needed food aid. Think of the terminology that names undocumented immigrants in the US “illegal aliens” and “animals,” which makes it somehow okay to abduct them off the streets and ship them off to supermax prisons in El Salvador or “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Everglades. Think of the way President Trump in his first term referred to nations in sub-Saharan Africa and similar places as “shithole countries” (I started to use a euphemism or asterisks to hide the ugliness of his comment, but this is a direct quote from a sitting US president, so I decided to leave it), which makes it easier to cut off life-saving assistance to their citizens.

Need I say that I understand the clear message of the Torah, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and the best tradition of the church to be that God holds these people dear, and that God is dishonored when we treat them as expendable creatures instead of full-fledged human beings created in the divine image? I believe that God weeps when God accompanies children to their death by starvation, AIDS, malaria, or any number of other preventable causes, and that God seethes at the thought of greedy first-worlders who bask in luxury and give no thought to their sisters and brothers in these other parts of the world. 13 million is not just a number to God. Each of the persons who make up that number is an individual lovingly created and nurtured, a person with hopes and dreams and potential. Each of these deaths is an unutterable tragedy, and we have to do something to prevent every one we can.

It is easy to give in to despair in the face of injustice. It is hard to maintain faith in the coming of the commonwealth of God, and harder still to take action to smooth the way of that coming. But one action each of us can take is to pray. I am praying that Secretary of State Rubio will follow through on his pledge to continue the life-saving work of USAID under the auspices of the State Department. I am praying that other countries will step up their foreign assistance contributions to fill the vacuum left by USAID’s departure. And I am praying for the two-year-old in Ghana highlighted in a story on the PBS NewsHour last night who has already been admitted to the hospital for malaria four times in his young life and whose mother just walked seventeen miles to the clinic only to learn that the anti-malarial medicine USAID used to provide is no longer available. I am praying for mercy, for compassion, and for justice. And I am looking for ways to put hands and feet on those prayers.