aaaaaaafrica.

I’m going to start blogging something everyday, mainly because i can’t avoid the necessity of an emotional outlet.

this is mainly stuff i had planned on writing in an email to john britt, but i felt it representative enough of my feelings about being in Africa to share with others. so here.

Africa is messing me up a little. I’m not entirely sure why it’s taken me so long to get this out into some tangible form; i think i just needed enough steam.

I don’t really know where to start, except to say that this trip and this place are not what i expected. This is not a vacation, it’s not romantically adventuresome and it’s not fun. Africa really is teeming with poverty and destitution on multiple levels...the spiritual, psychological and physical. I think i came expecting to find people with good ambitions and good priorities simply in need of a savior from outside oppression, but the issues here are much more complicated and holistic than that. This is difficult to come to terms with as I not only want and hunger to free people from suffering and untimely, preventable death, but i want to see it done right away, which is tough because a lot of the crap that cements people in these problems requires more than bread, water and money. Accepting a calling to fight poverty means accepting a task whose end you won’t see in your lifetime, but whose end you crave with urgency in every bone and emotion in your body. it’s ridiculous.

I don’t even know where to begin, and it’s so tempting to just wallow in all the suffering and hopelessness eating at me and never get around to doing anything passionately...or to just forget about it and move on with myself. it’s a tremendous task to understand and reconcile the fact that people, real people like my family, my boyfriend, my best friends, are dying in the streets. I’m fighting to come to terms with my physical and emotional limitations in helping as well. the more i empathize and try to understand the pain of others, the more messed up i feel…I think i’ve decided that my mission has to be for the whole of a suffering humanity before the suffering individual, or else my life will be lived in endless mourning and feelings of shame for having so much more materially and psychologically than most of the world.

It’s hard to balance this urgency with reality…it’s hard to accept that there is and will be suffering no matter how much of myself i give, which exposes deeper struggles rooted in faith and in dealing with human morality, which are things i’d been wrestling with long before Africa. I’m trying to figure out some kind of balance in the paradox that exists between being really affected by and doing something for the poor and suffering, but to also have a healthy dis-empathy…because there’s only so much shit we can swallow before we’re completely emotionally paralyzed and essentially useless.

i’m really starting to identify with Buechner when he talks about how sometimes taking up your cross, before it means making big sacrifices and doing crazy things with your life, simply means to deal with the burdens of your own life. i’m seeing that i’m just as poor and desolate as these people, only in different ways…

far from making me hate America, this trip has made me appreciate my culture and my potential role in that culture. to live in a place where education is way more accessible and to be in the midst constantly of people who yearn for truth and understanding is something i completely took for granted…perhaps the thing that makes me the most passionate about this place involves this rampant epidemic of common misunderstanding. Even more so in Africa than America, people just don’t ask why; they stop so short of truth, either because they aren’t taught to go further, or they just don’t know how…This is sad, mainly because people get lost in belief systems that have no real meaning for them or real personal benefit and potential for wholeness, and they just accept it. This leads to prejudice, greed, dishonesty, legalism and blatant in-authenticity, among other things…there’s so little intellectual development, and i don’t say that condescendingly. I need to think! I need to be near people who think! And I often wonder if i’ll be the kind of person with patience enough to lead others to think and ask questions like the ones that constantly burn inside me…

I’ll close this with something about love that my friend Kirsten shared with me. Her theory is basically this:

Our most intense experience with humanity and being human lies simply in our relationships with ourselves. it’s nearly impossible for us to see the vastness of the worldviews and lives of other people because they’re not as human to us as we are to ourselves. So, if we could fully understand someone’s humanity, we would never hurt them and never do anything to limit them; in other words, we wouldn’t be able to help loving them.

In a sense, being unloving is simply refusing to see someone’s humanity. being annoyed with and wanting to reject someone is placing your world over theirs, and it’s acknowledging that that person is less human than you are.

i’m not sure if i’m articulating this as well as she did, but it’s been a great help and a challenge for me, especially as i spend more and more time with 12 other girls near me constantly…and as i wedge myself without mixing myself into a culture full of differences; to become annoyed with and ostracize someone is to see them as less human. holy shit. and that’s so obvious, but i guess i never thought about loving someone as being something that formulated and achievable – or about being something more than just overcoming the rift that rises in us at all the things we hate about other people. I guess loving someone is realizing that all those things you hate are either things you really just hate about yourself, or are at least similar to those own struggles of over indulgence and self-control and overall selfishness that you know you struggle with regularly. loving someone isn’t necessarily liking someone, but rather seeing them how they are: just freaking like you.

i know, i know…obvious. but some reiteration doesn’t hurt. especially when it comes to love.