This evening, we're in Imlay City, MI. The last fifteen miles were a hard rain that kicked up a lot of sand and grit. I think I've cleaned my bike five times in the last week. Sigh.
We had a new look at poverty today.
For the bulk of our trip, we've seen a fair amount of rural poverty. It looks like boarded up small towns like Derby (Iowa, I think). It also looks like Native villages or homesteads that don't have electricity or running water. It very often looks like abandoned farms or decaying farmhouses where people can no longer live, but show that some-when, someone tried to make a life there.
Today we saw a new face of poverty: urban poverty.
We rode through Flint in the late morning. (It was raining lightly already then.). There was very little traffic I downtown, many businesses were boarded up, and it didn't eve sound like a city. It was quiet. In the residential areas, there were many boarded up homes, countless burned ones, and very little construction or repair.
For me, this was a reminder that poverty knows no boundaries. It's in my home state, in city and country. Its causes are many, and its solutions hard.
Jesus was very right: the poor will always be among us.
And we don't have to go very far to find it.
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