music is liberation.

kudos to jesse walls for having all the music i love and all the music i want to hear on his itunes library...

and for sharing it.

today i like africa a little more.

photos.

latest batch. these are my favorites so far.

please look at them and give me some feedback.
also don't forget to check out charith's photos.
she's ridiculous.

connectedness was in buechner's top 5

'Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality - not as we expect it to be but as it is - is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily: that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love. This is not just the way things ought to be. Most of the time it is not the way we want things to be. It is the way things are. And not for one instant do i believe that it is by accident that it is the way things are. That would be quite an accident.'

Buechner made this conclusion following his ideas about why the Good Samaritan was good...the Samaritan stopped not out of some greater moral strength than the others who passed the broken man on the street, but because he recognized that that broken man was the same as himself.

i think that's why poverty kills me. I think that's why i always turn to extremes to try and somehow fulfill this urgency i feel to do something about people's suffering. when people suffer, i suffer. my family suffers, my best friends suffer. it's the beauty and the beast that is connectedness.(i'm surprised it's only my fifth, sorry to all you non-greenvillians who have no idea what this is about.)Everything thing is connected.

And perhaps the world's biggest problem, its greatest indifference, exists because people refuse to see the poor as equal to themselves... if only they could see that they breathe the same and feel the same and experience the most basic things together; if they did, they would surely do something because there is so much shit...so, so much.

..... moving on.

so what is the purpose of marriage? what is the purpose of that relationship? what kind of significance and attention does it deserve? what's it's role?

i think i've grown up viewing marriage as some kind of ultimate end - marriage was fulfillment, marriage was happiness. So the significant other inevitably takes the role of some kind of god figure and problems happen...or they die and all of sudden marriage isn't the ultimate whatever.

the closer i get to marriage, and the closer i get to God (and whatever ultimacy that implies or entails) simultaneously the more i realize how much stock i've put into something mortal and finite, and how definitive of my character and motives i've let it become. i want to get away from that...i'm tired of idolizing this relationship.

but it's hard because i can't find a balance. how much of myself do i give? how much do i love you? because it's a lot easier to love you than it is to love God, but only God seems to have that dependable perfection i know i need. it's a lot easier to give myself completely to you, to live my life for you and with you and about you, but that's just not healthy...but i don't want to be scared of loving you.

how do i get to that point where i'm loving God by loving you? i guess it's when i can be happy outside of our relationship...which i can, it's just being brave enough to act on it. it's being brave enough to give you up in hopes that i'll get you back.

it's when you stop being my underlying purpose, backbone, support, escape, etc...and it's when i finally stop being a damn light switch and learn to give myself to you and this ultimate relationship with God...or maybe when i give myself to you because of that relationship.

i dunno. but i could use prayers from those great friends of mine who really care.

gods! idols! oh the things i can't get enough of.

today i named my gods. they are these:
fear, me, chase, popularity


and just at the admission of those i felt relief and somehow peace that there is something yet bigger than these things and something compeletly infinite.

it just requires letting go of this hole-laden and comfortable thing that's sinking me, and then crossing those treacherous waters through which i can vaguely see whatever that blinding white ship is that's supposed to be God...and peace.

IT'S THERE! it is.
:)

....

i think i'm just sick of not being sure of anything.

the ants are crawling on my legs.

today i conquered the mighty white Nile.
on a raft.

that's right, i swam and rode and fell into the longest river in the whole damn world and it was awesome.

our guide was a beautifully-built African named Jeffry with a love for western slang...examples of phrases:

"wicked sweet!"
"oh, that's sweet ass"
"oh shit!"
"that's happy days, mate"
(we taught him a new usage for "tight" as well)
and all of this in a real high-pitched, African-trying-to-be-British accent.

of course writing will never do it justice but it made slang seem absolutely ridiculous. and it was hilarious. he was real quirky.

so after 8 hours on the river and all burned shoulders and thighs and noses to show for it (despite multiple applications of spf 50) i am.... we are now better people somehow.

it was also nice to get to talk to (male) westerners for once, since we have very little testosterone to balance our group out. i sat next to a charming aussie named John to and from the river (though it seems like anyone not American who speaks English as a first language is charming)...it was cool but weird.

he spent the majority of the conversation trying to convince me of why i should wait until i'm 25 to marry, no matter how suitable someone may seem...that i need to travel more and live it up and enjoy myself before i'm truly ready for marriage. i'm wondering how much of that kind of worldview is him and how much of it cultural...or at least sub-cultural.

i guess i don't want to be completely independent before i get married. i guess i don't think i need to try more than one person on for size...maybe i'm with someone who makes me better than i could ever be on my own and vise versa and who will continue to do so. maybe i don't need to grow separately to be completely whole. maybe i don't need to 'find myself' completely alone. i mean, i am in africa by myself, aren't i?

i was once again left feeling completely misunderstood...we talked about religion and i felt completely naive...it's much harder describing your faith to someone who has no real religious foundation outside of the post-modern, relativistic view on almost anything like that than it is to someone who at least shares some religious conviction. i guess that's obvious...but i'm amazed at how unintelligent i felt trying to convey the gospel, potentially, to someone with no realized roots in it, compared to the way i would feel conveying those same things to someone who's thought and felt similar things as me. i felt way dumb.

all in all, i listened to some british and american techno on his phone, had my first sip of beer (there was a lot of sun in my head...) ...talked about good movies...and unfortunately our time together culminated in a conversation about the Brazilian (look it up if you dare) and his unnecessarily detailed description of his experience with his ex-girlfriend and hers...i guess europeans are just more liberal about shit like that. more culture shock. anyway...this guy wasn't as creepy as i'm making it seem. it really was nice to be able to talk easily to someone of the opposite sex for once in a pretty good while...i forget how necessary that is...and how relieving it can be, especially when you spend all your time with 12 other girls...

anyway, don't know where i'm going with this. oh yeah, i do now...

i think i was just going to say that talking to john made me realize how young i really am. he's 10 years my senior and is very social...and foreign....and 'cool' whatever that means. it made me feel less alive at first...unsophisticated and, well, naive. but then i felt completely okay with that.

i am young.

i won't deny that i've got a pretty good head on my shoulders...i can't think of anyone who would. but i am young. and that's okay. it's more than okay. it's perfectly fine. and perhaps i can start really believing that's okay and quit trying to always act the equal of all my older friends - in other words, i can stop being inauthentic and perhaps start just being me. and being okay with that despite the things i lack.

i wonder how many different times and in different ways i'll come to that conclusion - the knowledge of the importance of being myself and being honest with myself and loving myself - before it comes to some sort of fruition. wise people have said that progress is three steps forward, two steps back...

but i'm sure i won't notice the development of these traits i want until they've swallowed me up and i've become something even i couldn't have imagined. i mean, that's how it usually happens, right? i think so.

no.

where is this coming from? why do i feel so inadequate? it’s completely self-inflicted and completely uninfluenced by any outside criticism. well, almost.

right now it’s because i feel like i annoy people when i make observations about things or when i contribute to group discussion…at least here. i sub-consciously suspect that the group, the leaders especially, are growing weary of me…but i think i always approach relationships with people i’m really interested in getting to know – people i respect and look up to – with the assumption that there will come a point when they realize i’m not what they thought and they just won’t care anymore. it’s a complacency worse than rejection.

most of the time i imagine it. right now, i’m making it worse than it is, but that’s mostly because i have such a low opinion of myself and i don’t know why.

i can take care of my things, you know. i know you’re just trying to help but sometimes i want to crawl into a hole when you imply that i can’t take care of myself. i think that’s mainly because this is a weakness i already know i have and work to fix, and it’s painful when it’s reinforced by the person who’s opinion i hold in the highest esteem.

then i felt the pang of jealousy in the mention of a name belonging to a person i can’t help but compare myself too, even though i don’t even know them. it’s so silly, but there’s this underlying fear that you’ll meet and fall in love with someone better. someone more stable, someone better with people. someone nicer, kinder, more understanding, less manipulative and with better taste in music…someone more sophisticated, more interesting, less needy, funnier. better.

what hurts me more than fearing you finding a more suitable or wonderful match is the acknowledgment that i actually believe all those terrible things about myself - i really believe i don't have the qualities listed above. maybe i just don't want to see that i do because being insecure is a lot easier than confidence, especially when i'm not emotionally inclined to confidence....i have complete and total faith in my inadequacy…and i'm struggling with how to turn this into something good.

sometimes...

i'm completely overwhelmed at how great my friends are.

paul.

we just arrived in kampala and i’m elated. i was swimming in a haze in Rwanda, and i didn’t even realize it until i left and i could breathe easy again. i’m sick of the genocide. i’m sick of Rwanda and i’m not entirely looking forward to going back for practicum.

something ridiculous happened last night.

we’ve become friends with a boy/man named Paul who works in a craft shop in downtown Kigali, Rwanda. Paul lost all his family in the genocide and is only supporting himself by the grace of the some friends whose mom owned the store he’s working at. this guy’s had it rough.

he’s a smooth talker, a tad manipulative, but i don’t think his intentions are terrible. i think he has attachment issues and some understandable residual emotional trauma he’s working through. he wants peace, he’s an outspoken humanist, and he’s more compassionate to street kids and vendors than anyone i’ve seen thus far. he’s great.

but last night he told one of the girls in our group that he was in love with her. stifle your laughter, please. this guy was dead serious. he handed her a letter, told her, in front of me and another girl, that he’s loved her since he first saw her and that he wants to be with her. this love he feels his beyond his mind and his wish is that God wants them together. he then proceeded to follow us to another separate date that he had already made us an hour late for.

later, with tears in his eyes after he asked to speak with me away from everyone else, he told me that i was like family to him, that God didn’t create tribes or skin color, only personality, and that i will always have a brother and a protector in Rwanda; he said i’m like the sister he lost in the genocide. then he asked me if i would be the mediator between him and her while i’m in Rwanda for practicum and she’s in Ethiopia. he said he’s lost so much in his life and it’s time he found someone to share his love with. he wants me to convince her of his sincerity, and he wants me to wish them to be together. i owe this to him because of the role i’ve become in his life…

he then told me that his boss was going away for a month and he would struggle with paying rent. he wanted me to help, and despite the unrest i felt about it, i did. i felt manipulated, but i couldn’t blame him.

this event really weirded me out.

i think the core of my confusion/puzzlement/amazement is how seemingly unreal it all is. Paul’s a genocide survivor. he saw his mom killed. he saw people he trusted do it. he’s experienced things i will pray with my entirety i never have to deal with…perhaps i just imagined or expected some kind of strength of character to develop from this – some kind of emotional sobriety that i assumed was essential in coping with something like that. i think i just expected something completely unlike me.

but here he was, emotional immaturity and all, wrestling with the pain of his past and that wonderful agony of new love…and then there’s me, being swept up into it, feeling completely inauthentic and slightly manipulated because i don’t know how to embrace these sentiments he’s more than offering me, much less know how to react to his seriousness when all i want to do is laugh at how ridiculous it all is.

what the hell am i doing here? i don’t know how to help these people. i can’t even get over myself or pick up my own cross, much less carry anyone else’s.

i’m struggling with what i’m supposed to do with not only the reality of pain and suffering, but the mundane complacency of it. there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about the people or situations where pain is so real…these people are just like me. there’s nothing romantic about it at all, despite the kind of emotional gravity concepts like genocide warrant.

the most difficult part is being here, experiencing firsthand, or at least from primary sources, some of the worst shit in the world, and i don’t feel transformed…at least not in the way i was expecting. i think i was hoping seeing this would make me selfless. i would’ve hoped that forming a relationship with someone like paul would really shake me up and get my over myself, but i kind of just want to withdraw even more…

i dunno. it’s just weird.

….

could use some prayer as far as motivation is concerned…i, for the first time, felt the pain of my academic ‘doing-thorough-research-and-writing-a-good-paper-scares-the-shit-out-of-me’ anxiety. we did a presentation on the church’s role in the Rwandan genocide and i was ashamed. i’ve been a half-asser all my life and i’m sick of it.

please pray that i’d be able to overcome procrastination.

also, can i pray for you? how?

heycool!

the song.
the one with the lyrics below.
is now on my myspace.
please check it out.
myspace.com/caitlindaniel

a song.

it's all grey
i'll attempt to want your loving arms
but it's raining down on everyone
and it's okay
i came to breathe the air with you
to meet the people that you knew
would understand it all

and you find
if you hang tight, hang tight
oh, it'll probably happen
if you hang tight, hang tight
now, in my arm.

and do i dare
to claim what i've been lookin for
face the unexpected poor
it's unfair
i asked for all the simple things
i asked to bring them back with me
and make them understand

when you find,
if you hang tight, hang tight
oh, it probably happen
if you hang tight, hang tight
hang tight, hang tight
now, in my arm.

todaytodaytodaytoday

today i realized how inadequately i express all these thoughts and theories and, as i see them, truths that sound so (sometimes dramatically) great and revolutionary and are constantly in my mind…then when they’re out and exposed they get all jumbled and meaningless, mostly shot down before i can get the truth of it out in a way that can be universally understood. is that even possible?

if i could only explain better. if i could only say it the way i feel it. if i could only allow you into the context of my mind and my understanding of and experience with humanity. then we’d be golden, but that’s practically impossible. everything that comes out of me is mere translation; it’s like a different language, and is hardly as good as the original. i should work on developing my thoughts into words more often…

and the more that i think about this, the more self-centered it seems.

whatever. even if it is selfish, there is something significant and necessary about self expression…or at least there’s something necessary about an emotional outlet, and i might as well get things out well…

anyway.

we learned about the Gacaca court system today. Gacaca, meaning “grass,” was developed to maintain the hundreds of thousands of cases Rwanda had on its hands following the 1994 genocide. these courts are held in open air with an audience full of Rwandan community members, and a suspect is tried in front of a panel of judges (elected based on integrity) with witnesses, etc…they’re meant to bring justice, healing and reconciliation to the community, mostly by holding the murderers and all those involved in the genocide accountable for their actions…just like any justice system, but smaller and maybe a tad more primitive, and easier to instigate.

there are some things i don’t understand…mainly that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of clarity as far as what exactly these prisoners and suspects are being held accountable to. it’s not like in the states where the suspected are tried based on specific laws broken. it seems like the standard of accountability is based on what perhaps should be some universal moral code – you just shouldn’t kill people.

man, but people killed out of obedience. i mean, some wanted it. some really hated the people they were elicited to murder. but, as i’m reading in the book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch, people killed in shifts, like a 9 to 5 job. they did it because that’s what they were supposed to do, regardless of whether they really wanted to kill or not.

i’m learning more and more that genocide happened so easily and efficiently here because Rwandans are painfully obedient, reverent toward power, and have been since early Rwandan history. There’s a ridiculous submission to a higher power that people will sacrifice even inherent moral attitudes, like the idea of murder as abhorrent and horrific, for the sake of adherence.

so i guess the scenario that confuses me the most is that the murderer goes from growing into a social environment of hatred and animosity towards a certain group of people, learning that that behavior is acceptable and the attitude true, that the government is right, and that if the government says kill, you kill. then, after the genocide, they’re held in front of the remainders of families they helped destroy as the most loathed and malicious criminals, judged for the rest of their lives as the bane of society.

there doesn’t seem to be a lot of justice in this.

i do believe that there are crimes against humanity. that people should know right and wrong and that murder is wrong. but if people, like some of those in Rwanda, are coerced or even just influenced significantly by higher powers to forget these things, it’s perhaps, as Dwight Jackson would say, a crime by the society rather than a crime committed by the individual.

so what should be done?

it seems as if a lot of people are able to heal more quickly after seeing their families’ killers put in jail, or are in some ways made to atone for their actions, but it doesn’t really make sense. it’s a false sense of justice, because the real injustice lies in the lack of strength in character and a general mindlessness that causes the people to, in a sense, live robotically with little autonomy…at least autonomy in thought. this isn’t true for every individual…but it’s true enough of the population as a whole, hence the genocide.

i have no idea what to do or think about it.

people should still be punished, but not in the normal sense of the word. i guess i hold to an ideology of punishment solely as a means of rehabilitation, not condemnation…and i wish i could remove the good person, bad person worldview from that. that the bad people can just go rot in prison with all the other bad people.

i think i just wish there was a general understanding of people. That people would find healing and justice in the knowledge that what happened did not happen because people are bad, or that the killers were evil. I wish they’d find justice, not in sending an essentially innocent person into a tainted reputation, disrespected and hated for as long as his or her memories are around, but that they'd find justice in healing in the hope that their society can and is changing.

I wish we could just stop hating people.

currently unloving.

i'm not particularly please with myself - my feelings and actions towards others - right now. it’s happened off and on throughout the weeks i’ve been here, and it feels like it’s out of my control, even though i know it's not.

i just don’t like people. i keep measuring up all the girls on the team, deciding which ones i like and which ones i don't...it's a different standard every day...that one's really not very pretty, not very intelligent, smacks her food when she’s chewing, looks at me too much, talks to me too much, very fake, doesn’t ever know what she’s talking about. i’m better. i’m better. i’m better.

what the hell…i’ve never, ever had this problem before. i’ve never had so much difficulty seeing people as human. this may be due to the fact that before now i’d always been willing to give my left arm for social acceptance and approval, so i never had a chance to really see the way people really are. or perhaps this is just normal as i’ve never had to spend this much time with 12 other girls – 12 other girls who are also more different from me than anyone i’ve ever spent this much time with. i wasn’t expecting this struggle...and it makes me miss home so much more.

i just don’t want people to talk to me, i don’t want them to look at me, i don’t want them to touch me or ask me if i’m okay…just leave me alone, alright?

this makes me feel ugly and unloving…like everything i’m completely against.

…and i’m having difficulty really caring about or being motivated to do anything. i have no desire to study developmental economics or the Rwandan genocide. i’ve been homesick since i got here and i’m waiting, waiting for this to be as magical as everyone said it would be.

adjusting the will, much less even changing the will, is a serious...well, seriously difficult...thing to mess with. but it can be done. it has to be done or else my entire mission of truth seeking and understanding is completely null and void. ah, but so hard...

what the freaking hell.

caitlin: everyone kept telling me that africa is where you find hope...but i've yet to experience that. perhaps i'm too cynical...but i don't think i've ever felt farther from God
John Brit: when nietzsche says that god is dead he talks about a particular view of god
John Brit: maybe you can't see God there or feel distant because in Africa, God can't be seen yet with american eyes
caitlin: why the hell not
John Brit: because sight is mediated
caitlin: so what am i supposed to do?
John Brit: i think that maybe you ask them how they see
John Brit: you be the caitlin who asks great questions because that's part of who you are
caitlin: okay.
caitlin: i can handle that.