An All Our Fullness story about cultural identity.
By Lia Rivamonte
 
I may have been five when skipping down the sidewalk of my street a girl on her bike suddenly blocked me with her front wheel. “What are you, anyway?” she asked. It was a taunt rather than a question motivated by curiosity. Cynthia was one of the Smith kids, known for being bullies. I guessed my answer would be subject to further mocking but I didn’t know how else to respond, ”I’m Filipino.” How I knew that’s what she meant is another question altogether. My parents must have prepared my sister and me for such interrogations. After all, they chose this spanking, brand-new, all-white suburb of San Francisco in which to settle—they must have expected some resistance to the presence of their brown-skinned family. “Haha,” Cynthia Smith laughed. “You’re a peanut!” She continued in a loud singsong voice as she swung her bike back into the street, “A peanut!”
 
As tame as it seems now, it was hurtful to my five-year old ego; I was shy and easily intimidated. I remember feeling such shame as I walked back up the street to our house, shaking, embarrassed. In that moment, I understood that me and my family were different from our neighbors and what it might mean to look different, eat different foods, and have grandparents that spoke a different language. Oddly, our parents seemed proud of these differences—almost boastful. And, to be frank, most of our neighbors were kind, even eager to befriend us. But it took just one little, ignorant girl and her simple question to awaken in me a feeling of inferiority, telling me I did not belong.

An All Our Fullness story about encountering difference.
By Shelley Butler
 
"You say you love the poor? Name them." – Father Gustavo Gutiérrez
 
I knew when I joined the working board of a non-profit several years ago that served a so-called third world country, that one of the pitfalls was developing a savior complex; “we” save “them.” Easy enough to avoid, I thought. Yet, as the writer on the board, I found it difficult to prepare fundraising letters and grant applications to persuade people and orgs to give money without some version of us/the haves vs them/the have-nots.
 
And then I went to Haiti.
 
To say I experienced difference is an understatement, as days went by when the only other American, white, or English-speaking person I encountered was my traveling partner. Children, who rarely saw white people, yelled, “Blanc, blanc,” and reached to feel my smooth hair. The difference in privilege was even more pronounced than race, language, and hair texture.
 
As a guest, I ate the same food, slept in the same beds, and literally walked the same paths next to and often behind our Haitian hosts. The difference experiencing this difference was a change in me. Sure, I would still raise money, but not to save anyone, only to convince others to walk beside our Haitian friends, as one neighbor helps another.
 
I understood Father Gustavo Gutiérrez really for the first time, “If there is no friendship with and no sharing of life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.”

​An All Our Fullness story about cultural identity.
By Ray Wiedmeyer

It was during a walk around Lake Harriet with a friend that the lightning struck. I am not sure how the conversation had developed but he shared something that day that has stuck with me ever since. He had read an article in The Atlantic entitled “The War on Poverty Is Over. The Rich Won.” 

Now I had never considered myself to be rich, or given much thought to what class we might be floating in. The statistic he shared that day was the amount of savings a “rich” person in America owns – their net worth. I realized that day that we were in the top tier of Americans when one considers wealth. I was shocked. After harboring negative thoughts all these years about the well-to-do, I suddenly found I was, in fact, one of them. 

Over time, I was challenged to realize how we had gotten here. Was it just because we had no kids and were frugal? We were not the beneficiaries of much generational wealth. But we were both able to attend college without accruing debt because the government chipped in much more than it does today. We were able to buy a house within five years of marriage because of a government guaranteed assumable loan in a neighborhood where property values would triple overtime. And we could afford to invest fully in government tax-advantaged savings accounts at home and at work that grew quickly.
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What we didn’t have was the need to work two or three poorly paying jobs just to make ends meet. One of us slipped easily into the burgeoning computer industry, learning on the job, in what would turn out to be a well-paying profession. We were able to move smoothly through life because we were white, educated, and had advantages not everyone had available to them.