Applied ethics on the way to work
Part 1
13 March 2007 – a post I wrote two years ago for another blog:
“Every morning when we wake up, we look for God’s face” is how someone once started a reflection. It had made a lot of sense to me at the time, a clear image of God our mother, whose face we seek first thing when we wake up, as any trusting three year old would do.
For some time, I tried to imagine God’s face in the morning, looking at me, but it was more up to my imagination if I’d find God there or not. Then I realised what I needed to do: not forcing God to show her face by the sheer power of my (failing) imagination, but asking politely for it.
So today I woke up and said: please show me your face.
Breakfast, nothing. Leaving the apartment, nothing. Walking up to the traffic light – there! The woman who is begging at the car’s windows waves at me and comes over! Huge smile on her face, half of her teeth are gold, beautiful, she starts talking to me in Romanian. When I tell her that I can’t give her money, but that I can go to the supermarket for her, her smile grows even wider. I ask her what she needs, she mentions chicken, bread, potatoes, sugar. So I go up to the supermarket and for the first time ever, I thoroughly enjoy grocery shopping. I get the things that I’d never get for myself, sweets, Italian bread at the counter (so far, I have been too shy to ever go there), fruit juice, yoghurt in many colours… And other useful stuff – two big shopping bags full. When I come back to the traffic lights, she moves towards me in between the cars with her huge smile. In the middle of the road, I hand over my shopping bags. I can see that God is pleased.
Show me your face again, I can’t get enough of the beauty of it!
Part 2
13 March 2009 – two years later and she still smiles at me every morning:
Maria has become my friend in the two years that I have done her grocery shopping. On Monday, she asked me to get something for her from the pharmacy, for her stomach. She handed me a piece of paper with the name on it. The medicine is called Cytotec and when I got to the office, I googled it. Wow. It comes with a big warning sign because apart from doing something good to the stomach, it also does something bad to the uterus and is known to lead to abortion. I read some more, and it turns out that it is used particularly among undocumented migrants. The data comes from the United States, but my guess is that it’s probably as common in Europe.
I knew I wasn’t going to buy this for Maria, but what would she do with the child? I saw a saviour scheme coming my way: I was going to take her to the appropriate services, they would provide her with accommodation, she could finally leave her husband (sometimes husbands force their wives to beg, but I have no proof that anything of the like is happening here), she could stay at my place while her new life was being sorted out. This would be her fourth child and she begs in order to feed the other three in Romania, so maybe she wouldn’t be want to keep it? Could I raise the child for her? In my head, I went through a whole story of giving meaning to a piece of paper and figuring out someone else’s life…
The next morning, I asked her if she was indeed pregnant and in a longish conversation (she is very eloquent with the few words of Italian that she speaks), she made it clear to me – to the point when I finally believed her – that she wasn’t pregant and that her doctor in Romania had prescribed exactly this drug and that she had been taking it for a long time, including while pregnant with her last two children. We went to the pharmacy together and although they would have given me Cytotec for her without questions, I did end up buying something that ‘lines the stomach’ instead.
But what about all the others? Who will help them find solutions that don’t involve going to the pharmacy? Who will think through all the options with them and not let them down at the end, whatever they decide?
Kyrie eleison.
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