I'm privileged to have traveled and shared this valuable experience with you. Love you, Mom!
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Mama Gardener
The song California Girls just came on in the cafe where I'm attempting to try and work not laying down. It reminded me of my mom, sitting on the bed of our hostel in Heathrow, watching the music video, and telling me it was her favorite song. This was the person who went from being apprehensive about our trip, going so far as to wanting a helicopter out the first day, to acquiring an African family and tearing up in the London airport after leaving Africa and our team of people. The person who is now thinking about how much we waste in America after going to breakfast with some of her friends. Who is excited about sharing with her community of family and friends about the life-changing effects of potable water from W-E-L-L-S in a remote African village. Who wishes that her church would adopt African dancing during its weekly worship services. Who stamped books and read to children who waited all day outside of the windows of the library I was trying to start. Who prayed with me about how the books were going to get over there and made a friend who knew exactly where the books should go. Who loves chipate and can't want to try the recipe at home. Who wants my dad's eyes now opened to the reality of a third world country where people contain joy and love that we in the developed world cannot comprehend. Whose facebook profile now shows her picture with girls that she and her friends helped to dress by hosting a pillowcase dress-making party. Whose worldview has been forever changed.
I'm privileged to have traveled and shared this valuable experience with you. Love you, Mom!
I'm privileged to have traveled and shared this valuable experience with you. Love you, Mom!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Vision and reality
Activity does not always lead to productivity, as Moses my African brother helping with the librairies, says.
Here I am, first day back, already feeling overwhelmed. On the verge of tears, smelling the shellac from the hundreds of strands of paper beads in my bag. Filing a claim with United and Kenya Airways after realizing that both my SLR and flip video are missing from my checked bags. Chatting with the Africans on facebook. Sore from four flights and 50 hours of traveling.
Drinking Kenyan coffee from a Kenyan mug with my roommate. Her asking me if I have ever thought of moving to Africa and thinking how much more I feel like I can contribute when I'm there. Missing my mom and her encouragement, telling me everything is going to be okay. Realizing as many things as I want to do this week, I don't have to do any of them.
Trying to sum up my trip, pretend like it actually did happen, easing back into a developed country and being in the majority, not minority. Wanting to start collecting books to help start librairies all over Uganda. Thinking how can I possibly affect change in San Francisco, right here, right now. Hoping my blocked ears will finally pop so that I can hear again. On the verge of tears, because I haven't cried, really cried, about all I've seen and heard.
Shauna Niequist, my new favorite author, is helping me through all of this right now:
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 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 right there, which is both enormously daunting and shockingly simple. Daunting because of how massive and 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 knitted 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 jus 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.
from Cold Tangerines
Here I am, first day back, already feeling overwhelmed. On the verge of tears, smelling the shellac from the hundreds of strands of paper beads in my bag. Filing a claim with United and Kenya Airways after realizing that both my SLR and flip video are missing from my checked bags. Chatting with the Africans on facebook. Sore from four flights and 50 hours of traveling.
Drinking Kenyan coffee from a Kenyan mug with my roommate. Her asking me if I have ever thought of moving to Africa and thinking how much more I feel like I can contribute when I'm there. Missing my mom and her encouragement, telling me everything is going to be okay. Realizing as many things as I want to do this week, I don't have to do any of them.
Trying to sum up my trip, pretend like it actually did happen, easing back into a developed country and being in the majority, not minority. Wanting to start collecting books to help start librairies all over Uganda. Thinking how can I possibly affect change in San Francisco, right here, right now. Hoping my blocked ears will finally pop so that I can hear again. On the verge of tears, because I haven't cried, really cried, about all I've seen and heard.
Shauna Niequist, my new favorite author, is helping me through all of this right now:
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 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 right there, which is both enormously daunting and shockingly simple. Daunting because of how massive and 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 knitted 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 jus 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.
from Cold Tangerines
Friday, July 16, 2010
Book tour of Africa
Is what my mom said today when we were talking about the books all getting to Africa, one container busted, but the rest still intact. How they were loaded on the roof of a van by Africans for transport to Tororo. How someone on our team just happened to tell us about a library down the road that they had worked on last week and painted with bookshelves but no books. How kids on our team helped sort the books last night, reminiscing over the beloved stories from their trip. How somehow miraculously they all made it 10,000 miles away from home.
Choosy Moms choose Jiff (in reference to my mom), In the interest of time (as the Africans always say before they begin a 20 minute long speech), You are most welcome (how they make you feel so special every time that you greet them), women selling vegetables along the roadside, dust in your eyes, clean water to villages that have never seen it and already have their jerry cans lined up, classrooms needing painted, conversations with a new friend- a vegetarian who likes art and Africa as much as I do, dresses that my friends in San Francisco being dressed on girls that have never felt empowered before, reading Eve Ensler before bed and realizing that yes, I like all the African women with me, "am an Emotional Creature." Washing widows' feet and hearing them go "I-yyyyyyyyyyyiiiiii-yi-yi-yi" when they receive gifts and hear about women who aren't trying to buy them, who love them, who have been through trials in life too. Eating chapati bread for a meal. Seeing a goat on top of a van and then dropping through the window a second later.
Hearing that we, in the West, are in a spiritual poverty and sometimes at a greater loss than those living in poverty here. We create our own problems, whereas they live contentedly with what they have.
My head is full of thoughts, as it always is when I'm in Africa. It's the first time I can shut off the tapes that roll through my head or the distractions of city life. It's like I never left, that a part of me was here, that my heart is beating for Africa. I was made to do this, I don't know what, made to bring my mom here and see my African brothers and sisters again. Fill a school with hope, deliver dresses for girls who are wearing rags or nothing at all, seeing my friends' pictures attached to the dresses on their bodies.
Choosy Moms choose Jiff (in reference to my mom), In the interest of time (as the Africans always say before they begin a 20 minute long speech), You are most welcome (how they make you feel so special every time that you greet them), women selling vegetables along the roadside, dust in your eyes, clean water to villages that have never seen it and already have their jerry cans lined up, classrooms needing painted, conversations with a new friend- a vegetarian who likes art and Africa as much as I do, dresses that my friends in San Francisco being dressed on girls that have never felt empowered before, reading Eve Ensler before bed and realizing that yes, I like all the African women with me, "am an Emotional Creature." Washing widows' feet and hearing them go "I-yyyyyyyyyyyiiiiii-yi-yi-yi" when they receive gifts and hear about women who aren't trying to buy them, who love them, who have been through trials in life too. Eating chapati bread for a meal. Seeing a goat on top of a van and then dropping through the window a second later.
Hearing that we, in the West, are in a spiritual poverty and sometimes at a greater loss than those living in poverty here. We create our own problems, whereas they live contentedly with what they have.
My head is full of thoughts, as it always is when I'm in Africa. It's the first time I can shut off the tapes that roll through my head or the distractions of city life. It's like I never left, that a part of me was here, that my heart is beating for Africa. I was made to do this, I don't know what, made to bring my mom here and see my African brothers and sisters again. Fill a school with hope, deliver dresses for girls who are wearing rags or nothing at all, seeing my friends' pictures attached to the dresses on their bodies.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
MJ
I don't know how to sum up summer so far:
3.5 hour psych classes
The fog rolling in at night
Friendships with people going through the same things I am
Unexpected transitions and change making me feel constantly uprooted and unstable
Being 2 semesters away from being a credentialed teacher
Sharing my love for Africa with others
Having a dinner, while crying over a beer and immediately feeling better about life
Special needs kids who write Michael Jackson poems to commemorate his one-year anniversary, hug me for 2 minutes, read to dogs from the SPCA, and say "People these days..."
Opening myself up to new possibilities when I get back, feeling the anxiety lift as I think about what life will be like as of Monday...
3.5 hour psych classes
The fog rolling in at night
Friendships with people going through the same things I am
Unexpected transitions and change making me feel constantly uprooted and unstable
Being 2 semesters away from being a credentialed teacher
Sharing my love for Africa with others
Having a dinner, while crying over a beer and immediately feeling better about life
Special needs kids who write Michael Jackson poems to commemorate his one-year anniversary, hug me for 2 minutes, read to dogs from the SPCA, and say "People these days..."
Opening myself up to new possibilities when I get back, feeling the anxiety lift as I think about what life will be like as of Monday...
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Rainbow Chips
The last three fourth of Julys in San Francisco have been anti-climactic in ways... Tumultuous relationships, roof-climbing parties, nose piercings and tattoos (my friend Maggie's, not my own). Foggy cloud cover and time spent outside on porches or roofs with close friends.
This year, I'm scrambling to finish summer school, paint a fairy mural, write two papers, spend four more days with emotionally disturbed kids, dote on a golden retriever, and get ready for Africa. I feel superhuman some days- I just need to get through the day, breathe in, breathe out, do my best, love other people well, take care of myself.
It's like the Funfetti cupcakes with the rainbow chip frosting. I'm trying to buy both the icing and the cake mix from Pillsbury, but really for the cupcakes to be good, I need the rainbow chip frosting. I'm resisting it at first, because I already have the Pillsbury frosting, and Betty Crocker icing isn't even found at Walgreen's. But, when I do find it, with the support of my good friends, I realize that it was worth it to wait and find the right one. Even though I just want to make the cupcakes and get them to a middle schooler for his birthday.
That's how I'm feeling about everything right now. I have the Pillsbury frosting, and I just need to find the rainbow chip Betty Crocker one to finish off my cake.
This year, I'm scrambling to finish summer school, paint a fairy mural, write two papers, spend four more days with emotionally disturbed kids, dote on a golden retriever, and get ready for Africa. I feel superhuman some days- I just need to get through the day, breathe in, breathe out, do my best, love other people well, take care of myself.
It's like the Funfetti cupcakes with the rainbow chip frosting. I'm trying to buy both the icing and the cake mix from Pillsbury, but really for the cupcakes to be good, I need the rainbow chip frosting. I'm resisting it at first, because I already have the Pillsbury frosting, and Betty Crocker icing isn't even found at Walgreen's. But, when I do find it, with the support of my good friends, I realize that it was worth it to wait and find the right one. Even though I just want to make the cupcakes and get them to a middle schooler for his birthday.
That's how I'm feeling about everything right now. I have the Pillsbury frosting, and I just need to find the rainbow chip Betty Crocker one to finish off my cake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)