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