loaves and fishes

Harrisonburg, Virginia hosted its first beer festival last weekend, further evidence that what was once solely an agricultural town has transmogrified into a sprawling but increasingly urbane community. Additional signs of change: a wrecking ball was diligently, if not effectively, dismantling one of the remaining downtown grain elevators; a food co-op, with food from over 100 local vendors and farms, is scheduled to open in June; and what was once the temporary office of the 2008 Obama campaign is now a cat and dog adoption center. (Although the Obama campaign may have had a tough time of it in this traditionally conservative town, it was a shrewd piece of real estate for the adoption center, which is located across the street from the children's museum).

According to the local paper, some 3,000 people showed up at the beer festival. The local newspaper is known in shorthand as the DNR, however, and its fact-checking department seems to have gone the way of the morgue, so I’m more inclined to follow the count of a friend who actually attended the event and estimated that she helped serve beer to some 2,000 individuals. The real accounting error, however, falls to whomever ordered the toilets, which numbered a total of eight and left the first annual beer festival with a bit of a loaves and fishes situation. My friend, who is not short on charm, bribed her way to the bathroom by promising free pours of beer to those who let her cut in line.

I am a reluctant event-planner, and am entirely sympathetic to the harried mind of any creature who takes it upon themselves to plan anything beyond dinner. (The low point in my career was the moment at which, having organized a dinner without enough food, set up tables in a mosquito-and-mud drenched field, and driven a 15-passenger van into a lamppost--with my boss in the passenger’s seat--my boss and I found ourselves heaving sodden and seeping garbage bags into a dumpster six feet above our heads, which, despite my desire to forget the entire affair, seared the scent of half-consumed salsa and queso forever into my olfactory nerve.) The festival's toilet-to-drinker ratio, however, does seem to reflect a gross neglect of cause and effect.

On the same day as the beer festival, New York City’s local rag reported on the state of the internally displaced persons camps in Haiti. It is a loaves and fishes situation most awful, for reasons that are deep and longstanding, and have as much to do with why the camps exist in the first place with why they still exist over a year after the January 2010 earthquake. In other words, it has much to do with unfulfilled promises; in the aftermath of the earthquake, the international community passed Haiti a basket brimming with the promises of billions, but which have proven, thus far, to be illusive.

In situations such as the IDP camps, United Nation standards proscribe 1 toilet to every 20 individuals. In Haiti, nearly one third of the IDP camps do not have toilets. In those that do, each toilet is shared by an average of 273 individuals. Other practicalities—shelter, water, security—are equally abysmal.

One of the most astonishing things about the miracles of Jesus is their earthly sensibility: wine for a wedding, food for a hungry crowd, calm for a choppy sea—not to mention Martha’s concern that, as her brother Lazarus was four days buried, there would be a terrible stench if they opened his tomb. Being Easter Sunday in a tenaciously religious country, many of those living in the IDP camps would have managed, somehow, to attend services in their Sunday best. The acts of earthly practicality required to do so may not be miraculous, but they are certainly acts of faith.