I've now been back home for a couple days after this most recent trip to Africa...this piece from Shauna Niequist in her book COLD TANGERINES communicates many of the feelings and questions and blessings you experience...and then must wrestle thru...the tension never stops for me...and the joy is a blessing from above...I'm so different and perhaps more who God wants me to be because of my time with the people and places of Zambia...enjoy this read...it moved me...
Also, though, and more difficult, I had to make things right within me. I had to confront the person I found on that trip, the one who wanted to fly home the first night and pretend the whole thing was not real. That’s the trick, I think. That’s why actually getting on a plane and going there is dangerous and very important. Because I could not forget about it, as desperately as I wanted to. I had to clear away space in my mind and my heart, spaces previously occupied by easy things--groceries to buy, albums to download, people to call--and replace them with the weight of Africa, a heavy, dark thing to carry with me, something under which to labor, something under which to tremble. Because once you see it, you will never be able to un-see it, and once you see it, you will be responsible for it, and for the self it reveals back to you.
Four years ago, I went to Africa with my mother and my
brother and a friend of ours, who is the president of a relief agency. We went to Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia, and it
freaked me out. It unnerved and unraveled me, seeping into my dreams and my
thoughts the way a particularly evocative movie or song does. Africa is nothing
if not evocative. It’s a place of such unimaginable beauty and dignity and
expanse and possibility, and such unfathomable suffering and despair and
disease and decay. It is at once so alive and so wracked by death, so powerful
in its landscape and physicality, and so powerless under the weight of famine
and political upheaval and disease. Its intensity scared me and overwhelmed me,
and I feel like I wandered through many long days there, stunned and tired and
unable to digest what I saw and heard, and more specifically, what I felt
inside myself. And even now, four years
later, I’m still piecing together what happened in me and what was happening
around me in those cities and villages.
I wasn’t ready for Africa. I have been to lots of other
places, but I wasn’t ready for the chaotic jumble of people and homes and music
and muddy winding paths through the shanty-towns in Nairobi or the huts in the
Ugandan bush, tiny huts in the middle of a binding, parched expanse that went
on as far as I could see. I wasn’t ready for the hospitals in Zambia, where I
cried and hid my eyes as much as possible, where the smell of death and the
cries of people in extreme pain rang out over row after row of rusted beds with
dirty and bloodied sheets.
In the most disorienting change of venue, I flew from
Zambia, through Frankfurt, back to O’Hare, and on to the Caribbean for a family
vacation. I wish I could say that I wasn’t seduced by the smooth deck and
bright white sails of the boat we stayed on, that I couldn’t swim in the
perfectly warm navy-blue water because I was so overcome by the horror of what
I had seen. I’m ashamed to say that wasn’t the case, and even more ashamed to
say that I was glad to be there, glad to no longer be in Africa. I almost tried
to let the warm salty water and the soothing wind wash away the smells and
sounds of Africa.
I wanted away, out from under what I had seen and felt. I
talked about it a little bit, but it was so hard to explain, and so hard to go
back into those places inside me. I didn’t know how to tell my husband or my
friends that Africa had done something bad inside me, had demonstrated to me a
part of myself I didn’t know I had. For one of the first times in my life, my
beliefs and perspectives bowed and flattened under the weight of my experience.
Before I went there, I wanted to invest myself in the healing, in some small
way, of Africa. But when I was there, I just wanted to leave, and I was ashamed
and surprised by that part of myself.
I wanted to shut my eyes and stop seeing the images of
starving children. I wanted to sleep at night without smelling the scent of
smoke from open fires and the sounds of guards’ heavy footsteps outside our
doors. Everyone I know, it seems, wants to go to Africa, wants to volunteer for
a few days in an AIDS clinic or an orphanage. And that’s good. It’s a good
impulse to want to see it with your own eyes and to want to be a part of the
solution. I encourage them to go and recommend organizations and churches to
connect with, but inside myself, I whisper to them, Be careful. You will be haunted by what you find there, and you
won’t be able to wash away what you’ve seen and heard. You will see things and
hear things, and then you will be responsible for them, for telling the truth
about who you are and who you discover you are not, and for finding a way to
make it right.
I had to make things right in two ways. I had to do
something personally to make things right in Africa, because now I knew too
much and couldn’t erase the images and sounds that had embedded themselves in
me, like seeds planted in a garden. I had to make something happen right there,
which is both enormously daunting and shockingly simple. Daunting because of
how massively tangled the roots of the issues have become-it is about famine
and sexual violence and patriarchy and racism and economics and medicine, and
when you think you’ve knit together the magical solution, one pull on one
string unravels the whole thing and leaves you with a mountain of new
questions, while the clock ticks away lives by the dozen. And then again,
shockingly simple, because there are such good, smart people doing such
courageous, good, smart things, and what can be done with tiny little bits of
money is just dazzling.
Also, though, and more difficult, I had to make things right within me. I had to confront the person I found on that trip, the one who wanted to fly home the first night and pretend the whole thing was not real. That’s the trick, I think. That’s why actually getting on a plane and going there is dangerous and very important. Because I could not forget about it, as desperately as I wanted to. I had to clear away space in my mind and my heart, spaces previously occupied by easy things--groceries to buy, albums to download, people to call--and replace them with the weight of Africa, a heavy, dark thing to carry with me, something under which to labor, something under which to tremble. Because once you see it, you will never be able to un-see it, and once you see it, you will be responsible for it, and for the self it reveals back to you.
Somehow on that trip, I grew softer and harder in unexpected
places. But more than that, I’ve grown since that trip, because there is a new
thing inside me, however thoroughly I tried to escape it. Africa has grown like
a stubborn stalk in the soil of my life, despite my resistance, despite my fear
and selfishness.
It took some time, after the trip. It took some time for me
to want to talk about Africa, to want to read about it again, to want to hear
about it at church. But I saw it, and carried it with me, and despite my best
efforts, I couldn’t un-see it, so all I could do, it seemed, was enter back in,
in an entirely new way. I will never recapture my naïveté, my idealism about
what magical solution might just bind up all the broken pieces. But I practice
listening, learning and praying. I practice telling the truth about myself, the
truth I was too proud to admit four years ago, that I’m scared and that when
faced with death, I cried, instead of rising up like a nurse or a prophet. I
hid my eyes. But I don’t anymore.
The baby growing in my belly as I write has brought my
memories of that trip into focus. What was distant and abstract is now bursting
into my field of vision in sharp relief: mothers could not feed their babies. I
understand that now in a way that I did not, could not, then. My own mother has
said that AIDS in Africa will be addressed and eventually healed by mothers.
Then, I thought she meant women in general, possible mothers, I guess. But the
non-mother-me who took that trip didn’t get something that the mother-me does
now. Everything looks different--Africa and my own neighborhood and my own
belly and the pregnant bellies I saw there, others carrying babies who will be
born hungry and live hungry every day of their lives.
There is a food truck that comes to our neighborhood twice a
month. A wonderful local church sets up the truck in their parking lot, and
people line up around the block for potatoes and formula and apples. Our house
church volunteers sometimes, unpacking the food and packing it into the laundry
baskets and bags and buckets that our neighbors bring. I’m silenced every time,
watching women just like me, carrying babies they love the way I love mine,
tucking onions and corn and juice into baskets, because without the food truck,
they would not have enough food for their children.
What happened in me on the other side of the world is
working its way through my life like yeast through dough, right in my
neighborhood. I help feed people on Thursday afternoons, a tiny thing, but one
that is important to me, because once you see something, you can’t un-see it. I
saw the women in that line with their babies, and I can’t un-see them. And I
don’t want to.
One night in Africa we climbed to the highest point we could
find, through waist-high bushes and bramble and thorny underbrush, and when we
came to the top, we looked out at the sun setting across a majestic and regal
land, land that had been given and taken and stolen and drenched with blood,
but land that at that moment was glowing with the softness of the fading sun
and the rich purples and greens of harvest time. The property on which we stood
was walled on all sides, and the top of the wall was spiked with broken bottles
so that no one could scale it without being cut on the glass. We stood inside
the wall, and the broken bottles glinted in the sun like sparklers, keeping
people in, keeping people out, twinkling and beautiful, and at the same time,
embedded with violence and division, and in those two things, those twin
natures, lies Africa.
And in Africa I discovered my own twin natures, extending to
me two hands, one holding terror and despair and one hope, and day-by-day, I
make my choice. There is hope for Africa, and there is hope for me, and for my
neighborhood, for the shards of broken bottles that puncture and divide us all.
