Solidarity vs. Charity: An Easy Essay

Charity looks like this:
One person thinks their life is going great.
They have what they need; All is well.
They see another person who doesn't appear to be doing well and they feel sorry for them.
They help them, sometimes to make themselves fell good, sometimes because they think God wants them to.

If you find your self doing charity, its okay;
It happens to the best of us.
Just stop immediately and revaluate.
Repeat as necessary.

Here's what dolidatiry looks like:
One person sees some problem with the way the world looks. Things don't seem to be going well, and they feel bad about living in a world like that.
It causes them to feel oppressed, even if this oppression isn't as obvious as some other people's.
Then, they see another person who doesn't seem to be doing well and they decied that helping that person means liberation themselves from the world they disagree with.

Doing Solidarity work involves getting to know and understand the people you are working with and really seeing thme as people, not just broken things to be fixed.
It means opening yourself up to the possiblity of learning from others, because you don't have all the ansewers.
It means you see the root causes of the system that hurts people and drives them apart from each other.

Things are only going to get better when we stop trying to save poor people and start addressing the problems in our lives and in our system that make people poor and trying to change them from the roots up.