What kind of Kindness?

What is kindness? Giving away things generously? Is there such thing as excessive kindness? Would such kindness be of help to empower others? Or would it instead work against empowerment?

Remember Fr Tromp? Some people, including other local priests (who come from other parts of Indonesia) are quite critical about the way he treats the locals. He is seen as being too generous and too kind to the people particularly the Papuans. It looks like he always gives almost anything they ask of him. And this gives the local priests a hard time for they can’t afford of being as generous as he is. Besides, that kind of generosity is considered a charity which often leads to dependency. Therefore, instead of empowering the Papuan, he pampers them. Many people see him as the foremost defender of Papuans. Apparently this is also the general attitudes of other Dutch-born missionaries. It is the reason why the native Papuans like them more than they like the local priests.

I somehow agree with the above-mentioned view about Fr Tromp. This reminds me of one Catholic priest in Java who has similar attitudes. I don’t understand how you could expect people to grow if you always grant anything they want with almost no efforts. Teach them how to get what they want. Teach them the how.

But it easier said than done. Honestly I have no clue on how it is to be done particularly with a civilization as young as the Papuans. To some of them (the people in Lembah Baliem in Wamena for instance) the encounter with other people outside their culture (read: modernity) occurred quite recently that was in 1957. How do you expect them to adjust their long-well preserved way of life in such a short period of time?

Fr Tromp thinks that the best you could do for them is “being there” for them without having pretension of turning them into modern men. But how possible is that? I wonder if perhaps the phenomenologist is being too optimistic to expect that one could really bracket his/her prevailing opinions or beliefs or whatever. Wouldn’t it be like climbing out of yourself?

And would it mean that we have to let them live the way they had been living their lives? The question is could some people seclude themselves from the rest of the world in a more integrated and open society like todays society? There have been some problems with the way Papuan who had been living a life as gatherers all their lives adjusting themselves with other culture or one may say ‘modernity’. We’ll talk more about this later.