Oh, hi, I'm an American.

Before I left for West Africa, there was a lot of talk about Kony 2012.   A topic that has confused me and challenged me and forced me to think hard about the things I really believe about social justice and the role of social media in social change.  Because I work with young people who are borderline obsessed with “changing the world”, the mission of Kony 2012 immediately resonated with me.  Though I clicked on it with hesitation, and really hemmed and hawed over sharing the link, I ultimately decided to do it.  Kony represented to me a campaign that would encourage young people to educate themselves about international issues they wouldn't necessarily know about, help put a name to a place, and to fight for “justice”, a huge bulbous word with thousands of meanings, in the face of what appeared to be such egregious acts of human injustice happening in Uganda.  

Using tools of social media to connect masses of people behind a specific issue, Kony 2012 would press systems that local people rarely have genuine access to, systems of politics and power that appeared to oppress people, to make changes.  Yes, ignorant.  Yes, oversimplified.  Yes, perhaps motivated through American white privilege and guilt.  And, yes, perhaps not conducted as a local campaign, but rather by an American tourist who found himself overwhelmed by the fear and vulnerability he encountered in his new Ugandan friends, something I can relate to as a traveler and as an "adventure explorer".  Sometimes you encounter things that make you sick and seem to go against everything you know to be just and true.  And you don’t know what to do with yourself but start talking about it, no matter how ignorant you may sound, or how uninformed you may be.  And sometimes that’s how things start.  Sometimes, you have to take a risk.  And put yourself out there for criticism behind something you believe in.  Which is something most of us nurture in our children.  If you believe in something, stop at nothing to achieve it. 

The immediate scrutiny of this campaign as "racist" and “western imperialism” came across to me as just as pompous as the campaign itself.  The criticism went viral almost as quickly as the video.  The snarky leftist commentary and the uppity op-eds from the bookish websites and magazines that I, too, read daily starting pouring in and I was struck with this feeling of defensiveness that I didn’t expect from myself, as I’m usually the one to be critical and snarky.  

But you well-seasoned do-gooders have forgotten something critical:  you too were once stupid and uninformed and blindly passionate about something you knew nothing about.  Time, age, and experience are the only things that help you refine that passion, and tame your actions into responsible, sustainable ones.  These are things that are learned through practice.  Through watching failed reform efforts instituted by people who don't have to live the daily life, who are disconnected from the core of the real work.  We, of all people, should understand the intentions of where Kony 2012 came from.

I was disappointed in my peers who so quickly dismissed this young man’s passion as “racism” and surprised at how few people were cheering how quickly Kony 2012 spread.  How fast it became viral.  How many people shared it.  The real power behind these tools of media and Facebook and Twitter.  Clearly, there was something powerful in his film.  It hit the right notes with people.  And not just young white college students.  More than 800 million people watched this video in less than a week.  That's powerful.  

People are generally pretty shocked to learn about what is happening in places that the Western media doesn’t talk about (unless of course something has happened to an American there).  Not everyone reads Al Jeezera and the BBC Africa everyday.   Not everyone knows Africa isn’t a country.  Fact:  most people are blindly ignorant about most of the world, not because they choose to be, but because there is limited access to real information.  Because it takes digging to find the real news underneath America’s obsession with all things celebrity.

And now, having had a few weeks to really think about it, I understand more why Kony 2012 was a misguided mission.  How damaging it probably has been for local Ugandans.  And really for many Africans who got lumped together in the video’s oversimplification of “Africa”.  I understand the snarky skepticism.  But I still hold onto this notion that we have to begin somewhere.  And that there is work to be done that most people don't know about.  And is it really such a crime to inform people about these things?

Right after I arrived in Ghana, with a bitter taste in my mouth about Kony, the news about Trayvon Martin was beginning to go viral, and I watched from half-way around the world as my friends and family posted articles and pictures rallying against the racial injustice of this young man’s murder.  I read as much as I could download on the slow internet connection and was fed information mostly through social media, again, impressed with the power of this tool to spread information across the world with such immediacy.  As the Facebook posts and bloggers began to dig deeper, I watched as people began to make connections between Kony and Trayvon.  Between racial injustice and systemic and structural racism.  Between US immigration law and Trayvon.  Between white guilt, a hunger to “fix things” perhaps not really broken in the first place and a color-blindness, a product of privilege, that sometimes hurts people more than it helps. 

And it seems Trayvon Martin has become something even bigger in the last few days.  Maybe because the case is as blatant and obvious as can be to anyone with eyes and ears, and this has become a vehicle for exposing thousands of narratives about people’s real racial fears.  Or maybe because this was just the straw that broke the camel's back.  

To call Trayvon Martin a symbol of racial injustice would be a gross underestimation of how common Martin’s story has become.  And not just because of this one case, but because Martin seems to have broken the chain of silence about the hundreds of thousands of others that happen everyday to Americans who aren’t white.  Trayvon has triggered honest dialogue about what's really happening in 2012.  About what our supposedly “post-racial Obama” age is all about.  And here's a hint: it’s far from post-racial.  And we’re far from an age of racial justice.

Traveling through West Africa as a young white woman seems to be an almost perfect setting for thinking about racial injustice.  Just that sentence made me want to gag a little.  Spending my afternoon in a castle built by the Portuguese in the 1400s, with slave dungeons that shackled thousands of human beings to each other at a time for hundreds of years, couldn’t be a more fitting setting to think about institutional racism.  To think about the power of colonialism and western imperialism.  To think about fear and vulnerability and what can go wrong when masses of people pursue actions they don’t fully understand.  To try and put Kony and Martin in context.  

To think about how power can water down reason and judgment.  How someone can blindly support things that are at their roots evil and wrong without even knowing it.  How you could be a business man in New York City in the late 1700s, unknowingly supporting the capturing of thousands of Africans to be enslaved, by buying and importing his cane sugar from Cuba, and investing his money in a ship he was most likely unaware would be filled to the boughs with human bodies along the slave trade triangle.  Or perhaps we’ve given him too much credit, and he did know.  How you could be an American housewife who employs a young black woman to help you raise your children, not because you think you can’t do it alone, or because you’re participating in slavery, but because the culture of your time says you have to do this.  You have to hire this woman.  And that she isn’t your peer.  And that she doesn’t deserve to be paid well or have access to the same systems you do.  Or perhaps we’ve given her too much credit.  And she did know. 

These are the systems that were built by our country.  These systems that so many of us have fought against for more than a century, and probably will continue to fight against for many more.  And to not acknowledge that the foundational backbone of modern America has been built on the economics and structural deficiencies of slavery, is a painful form of ignorance and bigotry, perhaps more deadly than a young black man being murdered because he’s young and black and a potential threat.  

I think about racism a lot.  Perhaps its because I encounter it so frequently in my work and in my travels.  Or because I work at a private liberal arts college where topics about racism and social injustice are daily conversations I have with my students.   Maybe its because of the way I was raised and the community I grew up in, and thankfully, the open-mindedness of my family.  Or its because of the many interracial relationships I’ve been in over the years, and the way I’ve felt when we hold hands in certain places or kiss in public (or the way my partners have been treated for dating a white woman).  Or the way I watch my loved ones grapple with racism in daily actions—going to the grocery store, going to the mall, eating in restaurants, going on vacation—and I can’t ignore it. 

Being in Ghana, and Togo, and Benin, places a realness for me to what it feels like to be a racial minority.  I feel the heat here of being white.  I carry the weight of my ancestors actions, something every white person should experience at some point in their life.  I feel the insecurity of being one of few with my skin color, a skin color that has literally raped the continent of it's dignity and grace.  For being put on spot to represent my race—and my country—that everything I do is distinctly “Caucasian” and “American”.  I'm Obroni.  Yevu.  White person.  Foreigner.  Outsider.  "Other".  And I see the damage we've done to these communities.  The beauty and strength of the African people and their traditions and the ways the "white man" overrode it, made it shameful, and built new structures and rules that made African people subordinate to white people.  Made the religions and practices of the white people superior to the religions and practices of the African people.  Not just physical slavery, but mental slavery.  We colonized people's minds, not just their communities. 

Which is hard to stomach upon re-entry into America.  Watching the little video in customs welcoming people to the land of opportunity, knowing full and well most of the poor immigrant families I know struggle for respect.  Struggle for legitimate work.  Struggle to be seen as peers.  As equals.  

And knowing just how exhausting it is, for two or three weeks at a time, to feel as though I've been held accountable for everything the "white man" did to Africa (which is perhaps more my own mental infliction than what is really happening), I can't help but translate my experience as the norm.  Which is something I hear a lot from my students of color back in the States.  That they’re such a minority on campus or in their workplace or in their faith community, that they are asked, everyday, to represent their entire race.  That they’re put on spot to be the voice of "Black" or "Latino" everyday, and in every class, and how its utterly exhausting to feel so alone.  And so misunderstood.  And so representative of “other”.  

To say I understand that feeling because of my collective eight or nine months worth of time spent in West Africa would be grievously ignorant and would be dismissive to the experiences of Black Americans who fight this fight every single day of their life.  But to say I’ve become more empathetic to the exhaustion and to the overwhelming emotional toll it takes to be representative of a group of people would be true.  And to say I think white people have really fucked over a lot of people of color would also be true.  And it's like a reflex for so many people.  Racism is something they can't even hear in their voice, or in their hushed tones.  In their reflections on what happened today on the city bus.  In their accounting of what made them fearful.    

My work and my travels have opened my eyes to the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) racism that exists in everyday life.  And I guess I can’t ignore it anymore.  I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist.  Because that’s part of the crime of Trayvon Martin.  So many of us see it, everyday, and we never stop to challenge it.  We never stop to question the police.  Or the store manager that follows the only black man in the store.  Or the group of black women who get chastised as being too loud when they’re just eating lunch together and having a good time.   We walk away, shaking our head, but remaining silent.  Partially because we know we'd be dismissed as the liberal white girl who dates a black man and thus thinks she "gets it".  But partially because we're afraid, too.  Afraid of what will happen next.

There are days when I feel as though I’ve come full circle with my own racial identity and awareness over the last ten years (and days where I feel like I'm just starting to "get it"). Which is not to say that I don’t still have my moments of ignorance.  That I don’t still say dumb things sometimes or find myself in places where my privilege and my race aren’t painfully obvious as tools for my success.  But I feel like I’ve made a lot of growth over the years, despite where I started on this journey in rural Western North Carolina.  I can’t even count anymore the number of times I’ve found myself a minority, or I’ve found myself in uncomfortable conversations about race and class, conversations that don’t always end well or leave me feeling good about myself.  Situations where I’ve had to challenge myself to see beyond the surface, and to question the beliefs and value systems that have been handed to me as truth as a member of the white middle class.  Times when I’ve had to risk the acceptance and understanding of my peers because of something I believe is truly wrong and unjust, or because I’ve been given a rare internal access point to what life in the other shoes feels like (something I don’t take for granted, nor assume is comparable to actually being in those shoes on a daily basis).  And then there’s the frequency with which I see racial injustice.  Which is daily, if I’m being honest with myself.   

In the States, I consider myself an ally for my students, colleagues, and friends who struggle with having their voices heard.  Which has been a spot I've earned through years of relationship building and trust-making, not a spot immediately granted.  I’ve found myself in a career that indirectly supports a lot of people who are victims of institutional racism.  Who are products of a system that could be challenged as having done more harm than good, now multiple generations deep in Welfare-supported families and school systems that have never truly educated their children because of the color of their skin, and the lack of money in their pockets.  And I’ve been blessed to be let in to some intimate circles in these communities.  A place not all white folk can find themselves.  I’ve been accepted as honest enough to trust and privy to conversations that not all white people get to hear (and not all white people could stomach to hear).  And smart enough to keep quiet when I need to keep quiet, because that's part of the trust-building and the relationship making.  And yes, these communities have transformed into complex, deeply misunderstood places.  The “inner-city”.  The “ghetto”.  A  place many people talk about but few have truly stepped foot inside to see what’s really happening there. 

Movies and the David Simon’s of the world have taken great pains to accurately paint the picture:  broken-down systems that tangle incestuously underground and become hopelessly broken, and no one seems to care except the little kid waiting to be fed a government-subsidized lunch in a cafeteria infested with rats and cockroaches.   And people have mostly stopped there.  They’ve seen the movie.  Or the television series.  They don’t need to know more.  They don’t care about the corner store that has stopped selling breakfast to kids so that they can perhaps attempt to make it to school on time.  Or the group of retired neighborhood leaders who have decided to sit on their front porches every day from 2:00 to 4:00 pm to ensure the “school bus”, the multi-block walk most kids take from school to home, is a safe walk.  Or the group of religious leaders who raise money to send groups of kids on trips around the world so that they can attempt to be competitive with their suburban and private-school educated peers when they begin to apply to college.  These stories don’t generally make the front page of the Baltimore Sun.  But when a group of  black boys beat someone up on the public bus, it’s in every media outlet.  When a young black man kills someone in front of the Nordstrom in the County, everyone begins to cluck and shake their heads in unison about how there is nothing sacred anymore.  When a young black woman beats up a transgendered woman in a McDonalds, it makes national news.

Which is where things get ugly.  Where Kony 2012 becomes western imperialism, and not a plea for social justice.  Where Trayvon Martin becomes representative of all the racism that happens in everyday life because Americans genuinely don’t acknowledge black suffering as a part of the human experience.  Which is woefully ignorant.  The same kind of ignorance that says because we have a Black president, that we no longer have race issues.  Because we don’t acknowledge that these things happen every day, in every community.  We treat this as an exception.  And we fail to ask the most critical question:  how do the people who live there really feel?  What do the people want?  How do the people want to move forward? 

Our most painful racism is our lack of desire to know more about each other.  To dig deeper.  To really understand the people and the places that suffer the most.  Our willingness to swallow stereotypes and to perpetuate myths without ever stepping foot in a place we’ve dismissed as broken.  To label all Africans as suffering, or hungry.  To label all inner-city black teenagers as thugs or criminals.   All Muslims as terrorists.  All Latinos as lazy and stupid.

And then we have our struggles with organized social justice.  In an age of social media and technology, we are perhaps most ignorant about how to effectively enact social change without behaving like colonizers.  Or imperialists.  We’ve forgotten that at the root of injustice, is a person or a group of people who are victims.  People who are being oppressed.  And that oppression is never simple.  Or easily stopped.  And that, internally, personal agency must be employed in these communities to really begin change.  Change can’t be applied from the outside.  It must be nurtured from the inside.  Layers upon layers of heavy corruption tangle the mess and it’s damn near impossible to find the real cause of a problem, or to identify one person as the perpetuator and one person as the solution.  

Which is where I struggle the most, professionally, to understand how to best help my students who are so passionate about helping others.  Who are so out-spoken about social change.  Who are so ignorant about what’s really happening in the world, but so blissfully charged to do something anyway that it’s hard to stop them.  How to teach them to work from the inside.  To understand a community inside and out before suggesting solutions to problems they’ve interpreted through the lens of “outsider”.  To burst their bubble.  To ruin their dreams of being a solution-maker.  A peace worker.  A white savior.

Like many of my Facebook friends over the last few days, a dear friend of mine posted a picture of himself in a hoodie in solidarity with Trayvon Martin.  This friend is a loyal leader in his community, and someone who supports the young men in his neighborhood with a passion that can’t be tempered.  He is steadfast and loyal to these young men, no matter what happens to them.  Even when they fall victim to the system and become a statistic.  And he’s an internal as you can get.  He’s lived in the neighborhood his whole life, and understands what these boys are up against.  He understands the power of stereotypes.  The power of these stereotypes to lead these young men directly to the alley to buy a handgun from someone.  The power of these stereotypes to sling on the corner.  The power of these stereotypes to build a pipeline from a middle school directly to a juvenile detention center.

Next to his picture he wrote, “Prepare for War.  Pray for Peace”.  I was struck by his comment.  Simple words with a lot of meaning.  We are preparing for war.  A war that actually has already begun.  And has been raging for years quite silently.  A post-racial Obama age war.  A war on assumptions.  A war on ignorance.  And yet we are praying for peace simultaneously.  Wishing we could close our eyes and tap our heels and find ourselves somewhere else, where we don’t have to worry about our young black men being shot for being young.  And black.  And male.

We are in a unique time in history.  Just this morning I woke up to this article and this piece and this one I’m finding myself overwhelmed and nauseated.  I don’t quite know what to do with myself.  How to make sense of it all.  How to take my next step.  Short of turning off the computer and going deep in to the woods, bathing in patchouli, raising goats and becoming a potter, to hide like some crazy person.  Which is not really the solution, I don’t think.

And as I sit here and process where I’ve just been for the last few weeks, in places where the colonial structures are literally still such a part of the fabric of everyday life, I feel particularly lost.  And afraid.  Afraid that I live in a country that so narcissistically places itself superior to these places—the civil unrest in Nigeria and Senegal and Uganda, the fighting in Israel and Palestine, the ethnic wars between Middle Eastern countries—and yet here we are, fighting our own silent wars against our very own citizens.  And patting ourselves on the back for our great leadership in the world.  For our citizenry.  For our community service. 

And I’m not sure what else to do.  But prepare for war.  And pray for peace.  

Gratitude

This is one of those weeks that is always difficult for me, as it is for many Americans. One of those moments in American history that none of us will forget, assuming we were old enough to understand what was happening.  9/11 happened just three weeks into my freshman year of college.

I was asked to share a remembrance of 9/11 at my alma mater and place of employment this afternoon.  One of the great things about working in higher education is that we place great value in processing experiences. In sharing our stories. And though these events are often targeted for our students, those of us who participate find ourselves thinking and weeping and learning right alongside our students. Which is a great blessing.

I spent the latter part of this week trying to figure out what I was going to talk about. How I could even begin to stand in front of others and talk about this moment that has changed my entire adult life. My 18 to 28 years. Because 9/11 infuriates me. It makes me incredibly sad. It confuses me. It makes me feel uneasy and sick to my stomach. Still. 10 years later. And not just because it happened. But because of the decade that was born out of these attacks. A decade of fear and polarized politics and racism. A day that forever changed our definitions of words like “security” and “terrorism”. A day that would change virtually every practice we had in traveling and entering and departing public spaces. In our assumptions that we were safe here. Always. And a day that would forever impact the average American’s perceptions of “other”.

And yet this was a day that our whole country stood united. That everyone stopped. And watched. And grabbed the hands of those around them for support. For some security that we were indeed safe. And we built communities inside communities inside communities, like tight concentric circles, made of human hands and warm embraces and candlelit vigils.

Here’s what I remember: I woke up on a Tuesday to a beautiful clear morning. Unaware that I should watch the news, I didn’t. I dressed and walked to class. Finding the academic buildings mostly empty, I walked back towards my dorm, confused about what holiday I had missed or what time change I had failed to make, and found a small group of people standing near a television. I stopped to watch an unbelievable scene on the television. The eery silence of the academic quad began to make sense. Though I couldn’t quite make out what was happening yet, or just how significant it would become, there were billows of black smoke and people running in fear. Alarms and noise and chaos. Buildings were crumbling in flames and chunks of concrete and bodies jumping from windows. I watched, with my heart in my throat, never expecting to see New York City in the background. And later, the Pentagon.

What I remember most clearly, however, was that there was an immediate community in that group of people. And an immediate and overwhelming sense of patriotism, fear and anger. A loss of words. A numbness that overcame us all: Was this really happening? Could it be true?

Within the next hour, the whole campus was awake. We had found ourselves in small huddled groups all over our wooded campus. It felt like everyone was crying. All day. Our shoulders heaving in unison, hands holding each other tight. Two of the girls on my floor had parents in the towers. Almost a whole day later we’d learn that they had actually not gone to work that day. Others weren’t so lucky. My dear friend Devita lost her brother, Romeo, in the Pentagon. Others lost family and friends. It seemed everyone knew someone in New York or Washington. And all of us knew someone who had been affected. Someone who had survived. And sadly, someone who hadn’t.

Keep in mind, this was my freshman year. I was nearly twelve hours away from my home in the deep western mountains of North Carolina. Just three weeks in to my first year of adulthood, I suddenly questioned if I should have ever left my beautiful blue-green valley. Or its deep purple hills that would have protected me from these planes and these loud noises. But that morning confirmed that I was in a place that would quickly become more than just my school; this place became my home. The rest of the day quickly turned into weeks and it was all a blur from there. What events I attended, how we found the strength to go back to class or to take anything else seriously; I can’t remember.

In reflection, I now can say that 9/11 was the first time I was able to place the word “gratitude” in my adult vocabulary. It was the first time I acknowledged my Americanism. My privilege. While it seemed like the whole world was falling apart, I had landed in this small community of thoughtful people. Of people from different places and backgrounds and cultures. I felt safe here that Tuesday. And so lucky. Like so many communities across America, we became one campus that day. One body of grieving souls. One community. For which I remain grateful.

Here’s where it gets hard for me. At this point, I can’t always dissect my life experiences from one another. 9/11 was an integral part of my first year of college, but moreover an integral part of the emergence of my adulthood. That same year, I lost a grandfather and a dear friend, David. I met hundreds of people and made thousands of mistakes. Over the next four years I'd travel abroad and meet thousands more. I'd watch a friend succomb to suicide and another battle with serious mental illness.  I'd begin and end (and begin again) relationships that would teach me the capacity with which I was capable of loving.  Over the last ten years, I’ve lived a lot of life in a short number of years. This community has been the backdrop for most of that life and in this space I’ve learned how to process the things that don’t make sense. To grieve. To grow. To laugh at myself. And those first weeks, and those first relationships, have remained so significant.  Perhaps because this was how we started.  This was my very first big thing.

In my ten years in this community, we’ve watched towers fall and gasped as two wars have been declared. We’ve protested and rallied together. We’ve learned how to define big grown- up words like “community” and “justice” and “inequality”. We’ve watched presidential elections and debates. We’ve heard the voices of famous politicians and policy makers. We’ve debated controversies and we’ve shared great stories. We’ve laughed until we’ve cried. We’ve listened to world-renowned musicians and held small, intimate conversations in our rooms and classrooms and offices. We’ve struggled through moments of ignorance and misunderstandings together. We’ve grieved losses and shared humility with each other. We’ve been outraged by each other and ourselves. And we’ve helped each other process it. And though we don’t always agree, we celebrate the freedoms of academia.

And for me, this day of remembrance is a remembrance of all the things I’m thankful for. For this community where we have the freedom to think critically about issues like social justice and kindness and humanity. For the grace and courage to ask hard questions. For the multitude of opportunities we have to learn about ourselves and the world. And how to make it a better place.

I’ve always loved that our College seal references First Thessalonians, chapter five, verse two: “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” I find this fitting because this is what our students have always done so very well: ask questions, dig deeper, challenge the status quo, seek solutions.

On this day of remembrance, I’ve challenged myself to have deeper gratitude. For my work. For my students. For my family. For my experiences. For the ability to dig deep on the issues that I care about. For the freedoms I have to learn as much as I can and to share that knowledge back out with my community. An endless ebb and flow of knowledge seeking and information sharing.

For our greater community, I challenge us to transform a decade worth of confusion into action. To allow our anger to motivate intellectualism and compassion. To allow our discriminations to motivate democracy and justice. Our apathy to motivate empathy and civic engagement. That we move into the next decade not discouraged by our lack of progress, but encouraged that there is still great work to be done. Motivated that we are the dreamers and the thinkers and the activists and the policy-makers for the next generation. And that we all have the ability to do something. To be a part of it.

a wish list of sorts

I attended a retreat conference on Monday that asked us to reflect on the last few months. As we closed, we wrote out a wish-list. Since I've been on a bit of a sabbatical from this blog, I decided to share my scribbles. Perhaps this will inspire me to start writing again. Perhaps.

Here goes.

6.13.2011
I want.


For the whole world to wake up. Especially us. Because it seems like everyone is sleeping through the most important parts.

I want.

For us to seek justice, not revenge. To seek solutions, not more questions. Even though questions help us feel better. Questions make us seem more important.

I want for us to help people, not because it makes us feel good or because it’s something we should do, but because it’s something we must do. Without a thought. Without a hesitation. Because our actions affect others. Always.

Justice. Humility. Grace. Community.

I want.

I want us to acknowledge our differences. To accept diversity as a reality. As a standard. The way the heat makes my hair curl but maybe not yours. The way the sun makes my skin pink and freckled but yours gets deep, rich, and dark. The way we may not agree always. That we maybe haven’t recovered from the past just yet. And to be patient about that. Because we all need time to understand ourselves. And the injustices we're born into. The chances we have with the choices we're given.

To acknowledge we share different faiths. Share. Not compete.

To admit we speak different languages but that we all giggle in the same tongue and wink eyes in the same mischief. Energy and space between skin can be electrifying. That love is universal. And anyone can be family.

Knowing that some times all we need to know is that someone cares about us. That someone notices the things we do. That some people love us, even if some people don’t.

I want.

To practice what we preach. To understand that we all need time to reflect. To heal. To recover. For restoration. Before we can go back out into the sunshine. A delicate balancing act of living, breathing, risking, and wishing.

I want.

Patience.
Tolerance.
Humility.
Peace.

Two-headed monster

Sometimes after I’ve been on vacation for a while or, say, I've spent two weeks in another country (or on another continent), I have this sobering re-entry into the real world.  Into my real life.  For the short amount of time I’m away from my daily life, I disconnect just long enough to remember what life can be like when it isn’t a total bat-shit crazy race.  I’m reminded of another kind of life that exists—“Island Life”, I call it.  And I lust for ways to integrate island life into my Baltimore life.  My noisy, has-and-wants-too-much wandering life.

When I was in college I’d sneak away to my quiet, picturesque mountain town during holidays and breaks and I’d so quickly fall back into my old patterns.  I’d hang out with the people I’d known since toddlerhood, cracking the same old jokes since 1985, and falling into a kind of lazy comfort that only comes from years and years of life shared with friends and family.  I’d drive the long way home just to see the sunset over the mountain ridge.  I’d leave my house and take my ancient Honda station wagon, covered in liberal, peace-mongering bumper stickers, “up in the forest” (which is what we’d say when we’d take the windy road up into the mountains and into the national park that covers a large portion of the county) and park my car along the side of the road.  There are hundreds of spots where you can just wedge yourself between the trees and the river and listen to the noise it all makes when you’re quiet.  And I would sit, often stunned, next to that river, comparing my two worlds.  The noise of the water just loud enough that I was comfortable thinking whatever I wanted—no one else could possibly hear it.  Here was this life that was really quite charmed—safe and secure, nestled between the river and the valley.  I knew everyone I needed to know—and they knew me.  I didn’t have to prove much to anyone anymore because they’d known me since I was in diapers.  They knew what I was capable of (and they knew my faults, too).  Life, in general, was pretty quiet and slow.  Things happened gradually.  People lived pretty simply.

Then there was this new life I’d discovered in this bizarrely large city called Baltimore and this small, wooded, suburban college campus.  I could never find my way anywhere (accept around the one loop road that outlined my college), the city roads made no sense to me, the drivers honked and drove too fast, and these “beltways” that wrapped themselves around Baltimore and Washington, D.C. felt more like boa constrictors than highways, slowly choking the life out of the communities they “belted”.  But there was this group of people I’d met who were so much like me it scared me (because that didn’t happen often in that small town of mine).  They were liberal and progressive and snarky and thought the same weird things I thought were funny to be funny, too.  There were things in this city that were wholly new to me—things that scared and excited me, equally.   I encountered people and situations I thought only existed in movies (uhh…lesbians are real!?).  I made all kinds of messes.  And mistakes.  It was exciting and shiny and new and I had to work, for the first time in a long time, to have an identity—to find that same “comfort” I’d had in my cozy little hammock of Western North Carolina.  Oh and did you see The Wire? Yeah.  It was like that, too.

I’d take the flight, or ten hour drive, back to Baltimore, fretting over the transition that would inevitably happen in the coming days.  The giving up of what I knew for the gnawing discomfort of the unknown.  The speeding up of life.  The loss of my sweet, subtle southern accent.  The lack of understanding people had about where I was from and what real life could look like without giant shopping malls, access to designer anything (because we had Sky City and Wal-Mart…take your pick), or anything too complicated, really.  Not to mention there was this charming naïveté I’d come to love about the people I grew up with.  It couldn’t be more different from the cynicism and biting commentary I was growing to love from my new Northeastern friends (although I wasn't entirely sure I really liked it just yet).  I almost felt like the two worlds couldn’t possibly share space in my identity.  It was too exhausting to go back and forth.  It was basically culture shock, every single holiday and vacation.

And I’ve discovered, for better or for worse, that gradually, I’ve shifted my identity.  I’m still from that small mountain town and my childhood is an inescapable part of who I’ve become—but I’ve modified my home base.  I’ve allowed a lot of complication into my life.  It’s messier and noisier than I ever expected it to become.  I care too much about the brands on my feet and the realness of the pearls in my ears.  I still fall in love with all the wrong people (and some of the right ones, too).  Baltimore has become my home, without asking (rude), and while I’ve come to love the noise and rats and quirky appeal of Charm City, there is still something wonderful about getting away.  About sneaking out at the crack of dawn and watching the harbor fade in the distance as I head south (or just out).

It never fails, though, that the getting away triggers all these questions and leads me into this deep, dark journey into the “person I’ve become”.  And it awakens the Piscean gypsy in me that feels uncomfortable with being so settled—so embedded in a lifestyle that I can’t quickly pack up and leave from without a moving truck and at least a month to do laundry and buy boxes.  It makes me think questions like, “Have I become the asshole I never wanted to become?” or “Would I like me if my high school me met me now?”

There is no doubt that Baltimore has changed me.  Working in a low-income urban community in an inadequately resourced public school system will change your life.  It changed the way I think and the way I talk and the way I see the rest of the World.  It changed how I think about systems and education and accessibility.  In fact, it changed my whole path.  I never intended to stay this long.  I had a one year plan.  This turned into a five year plan.  And it looks like it’s quickly become a ten year plan.  I think I suck at plans.

And the timing of this internal babbling is pretty spot on.  For those of you who work in higher education, you know what the months of August and September are all about.  It’s like our January.  Our spring.  Our Easter.  Also, our living hell.  We are reborn into a new academic year with a new freshman class of students, so wide-eyed and brimming with excitement and fear and all those feelings of being torn between their old life and the new life they’ve yet to realize.

These last few weeks have also been trying, to say the least.  These are the weeks where we all cuss under our breath, all day long, wondering why the hell we pissed away June and July with retreats and half-days and week-long vacations (although if I recall correctly, my summer wasn't particularly quiet, either).  These are the weeks we work 10 hour days and weekends without even realizing it (what day is it, anyway?).  These are the days we deal with hovering parents and toxic levels of anxiety and lots of tears and lots (and lots) of whining.

But these are also the days where I find myself questioning, just like the first-year students, "Where have I come from?" And "where am I going?"  Sometimes the motivational talks and speakers and events continue to reach me, and to move me (perhaps more than the students?).  The messages of "explore with wonder and awe" and "challenge yourself to grow" are messages I have to remind myself every morning.  Because it's easy to become okay with the mundane routine.  It's easy to get caught in the cycle of blah and to forget that a part of living life is actually enjoying it.

As I've been readjusting to a new semester, a new year, and frankly still trying to process all the things I'm thinking and feeling about this last trip to West Africa, I'm feeling contemplative and like I'm just on the verge of some new breakthrough--some new insight into my world. 

When I'm traveling or headed home, I often don't look at a watch.  I try my damndest not to have a schedule or a plan.  I try my best to go with the flow (although the "work" me has been so well trained that it often takes days to really slow down and disconnect).  But coming back is like a slap in the face.  My inbox has piled up, I've forgotten just how mean people really are, and the soft, quiet, subtlety of not really caring what happens is replaced by the loud, blinking, anxiety of my working life. 

This week I've been having lots of long talks with friends and colleagues about the nature of life and the nature of our work in higher education and in the community.  These have been deep, philosophical conversations that ebb and flow somewhere between, "why are privileged white people so stupid!?" and "does the work we're doing even really accomplish anything?"  And somewhere in those discussions, too, is this private battle of mine between these two people inside me, like a two-headed monster; the "Baltimore" me who has become hardened and bold; the small town girl who still remembers what the frogs on the pond sound like at night and how the dew smells first thing in the morning.  The girl who empathizes with the urban poor and all the issues wherein (and has become pretty vocal about it, too) and the girl who understands small-town values and who wasn't shocked when George W. Bush was elected again.  The girl who has spent months of her life in places like Ghana and Benin, experiencing new cultures and religions and tastes and sounds and people and the girl who remembers being afraid to drive to the other side of the county because it was too far away.  The girl who still smiles anytime she smells honeysuckle and the girl who doesn't even notice anymore when a rat darts across her path in the alley.   

The girl who is still trying to figure out how to have the best of both worlds.  And how to be happy about it.    

Seeing is Believing

I’ve been back from my adventures in West Africa for just over a week now.  I keep saying that this “culture shock” thing keeps getting easier each time I take one of these trips.  Considering I talk to my students about culture shock all the time, it always comes as a surprise when I still experience it.  And I guess in some sense it does actually get easier, but in others, I find it harder and harder to cope.  I’m less jarred by the transition from the shiny, sanitized, orderly United States of America to the dusty, noisy, unruly ways of the developing world.  I'm already prepared for the noises and the smells and the tastes.  I know what I want to do as soon as I land and I have a list of things and places and people I want to see before I leave (just like a visit home).  I'm ready for the "Africa Time" and the waiting and the endless marriage proposals.  I can recognize phrases in local languages and navigate the borders with a confidence you only get from experience.  So in this sense, yeah, the culture shock is “easier” because I’ve done it more.  I know what to expect.  In fact, I’ve come to anticipate it—to enjoy the mere chaos of it all. 

But because of this I see more.  On my first trip to Ghana I was so overwhelmed with what I was seeing—thatched roofs and mud huts and half-naked children running around—that I could barely understand these things.  I couldn't recognize the details and the defining characteristics of each of these villages.  I didn’t notice the subtle differences in the tribal scars on men’ and women’s faces.  I didn’t notice the road signs and the names of towns as we went in and out of them.  I wasn’t paying attention to the commerce—this village sells tomatoes, that one sells fish, etc.  But this time around I almost felt overwhelmed by all the pieces I was seeing. I’m not spending so much of my energy just trying to see everything.  I'm now working on processing it.  Which is way harder, for the record. 

But it also gets harder to leave.  Coming back to the United States pretty much just makes me angry.  Standing in the Kotoka airport (in Ghana) before departure, I actually considered getting out of line.  I thought up approximately one hundred and one reasons why I couldn’t go back just yet.   I was already beginning to craft the email in my head to my office explaining what happened (see there was this goat...and a flat tire…and an unexpected funeral party…and a marriage) and why I was going to need a few more hundred dollars wired to me.  Knowing this was absurd and that I already had appointments on my calendar back in Baltimore, I continued to stand in the longest line ever, feeling sorry for myself.

There are always a lot of Americans in Ghana.  I guess Ghana has become a fairly easy place to navigate, being all Anglophonic and politically stable and democratic and what not, and the missionaries come in by the boatload (although I’m not sure there are many people left to convert).  Standing in this bulging, unruly queue, I hear a familiar sound behind me.  American accents.  I turn to the small group of Americans who were looking around Kotoka for signs on what to do—because airports in developing countries have hundred of unspoken rules and approximately three signs, and those are usually in another language, despite being English speaking and politically stable and democratic and what not. 

This group behind me is southern (I'm guessing Texas or maybe Alabama, based on the tone) and I’m also guessing, based on their monogrammed backpacks, gold cross necklaces, and rolling floral suitcases, that they’ve been here charged with God’s work.  And I'm not hating on the work these good people do (or did), but at some point you get tired of congratulating people on their "hard work" when you don't see a place as desperate anymore.  It's like when people do mission work in Baltimore.  I get it.  I just don't necessarily like it. 

I’m usually dead on with these American spottings—the random Peace Corps volunteer, the best-of-intentions-missionary, the curious professors, the overly-zealous ex-pats, etc., each time becoming more and more conscious of my growing irritation towards the “American” in “Africa” (kindly ignoring that I, too, am American).  This is sometimes easy to forget when you’ve convinced yourself you aren't really American.

Standing and waiting and moving up a few feet every 20-30 minutes, I'm growing anxious about leaving Ghana.  I just left my "family" and giant plates of food and 3 beers I didn't have time to finish.  I didn't get enough time with my "big sisters" Christine or Skinny or my "niece" Woewoe.  I'm already thinking of the things I didn't scratch off my list in the eleven days I was there.  I decide to be chatty instead of being depressed.  I casually ask the group, “How long have you been here? Have you loved your visit?”  Inside my head I’m not really listening, and frankly I’m not sure why I even asked because I can’t say that I really particularly cared to know when and where and why this group has been traveling in this place I’ve become almost protective of; ready to attack anyone who dare say they had a miserable time in West Africa.  I learn that the group has been visiting the Volta region of Ghana, and as I suspected, working with a mission group.  One gentleman in particular says, “It’s been great but I’m sure ready to get home!”  His statement is simple enough, and completely innocent, but I translate it to: “Get me the hell out of this uncivilized place!”  I resist the snarling noise that seems to come from inside me, like a rabid dog, and I forcefully smile at him, nodding in a sympathetic way, hoping he can’t sense that I’m struggling to empathize.  And the fact that I completely put words in his mouth that he didn't say (because he probably wouldn't say hell).

And it’s not that I'm upset with these people who have probably been doing really good work.  It's not that I resent the missionaries.  These communities have embraced Christianity with a zealousness that's almost unnerving.  God has done his work in Ghana.  Churches from around the world have built schools and they support hospitals and provide medical care throughout this continent.  But if you really spend some time here, you start to see the gaps.  You start to see the thousands of unfinished projects started by people with good intentions.  You start to see the false hope spread by people with valid passports and multiple entry visas that allow them to travel in and out of these communities, when the going gets tough.  You start to see the loss of tradition at the hand of western dominance.  Which is not to suggest that Africa shouldn't be allowed to have things like potable water, Facebook, and Blackberrys.  This statement is merely to suggest that development and globalization comes at a cost.

So his eagerness to get home leads me to believe that he hasn't seen this place yet.  And I'm not holding that against him.  In fact, I’ve had that feeling standing in this airport.  My body drained from a week-long bout of traveler’s diarrhea and some bizarre stomach bug I can’t seem to shake; my soul shaken from what I’ve seen and felt and heard, desperate for some kind of normalcy, like a McDonalds or a grocery store or a flushing toilet.  But this time, I couldn’t be further from understanding his emotion.  I mean, I love a good flushing toilet, and I could kill a McChicken sandwich right about now, but I’d rather stay, frankly.  I’m sure I can find a chicken later, kill it, clean it, and make it into a sandwich.

When we land in the US, the Americans from the line wave at me in passing, and I can sense that they’re beaming to be back in the shiny, sanitized, orderly United States.  I, on the other hand, am grumbling at the sparkling floors and the big, clean windows and the excessive signs in English (I get it! I can read it!).  The shiny brushed nickel barricades that force everyone to get in neat, orderly lines (whether I like it or not) are making me irritable.  I’m mad at the petulant Customs agents for not smiling ever and for yelling at a group of Ghanaian teenagers who are in the US for the first time (welcome, kids).  I’m irritated that I can probably safely sit down on the toilet seat, because it has probably been cleaned and sanitized, on an orderly schedule, every 2 hours, since it was made functional.  I’m looking at the rotating luggage belt with disdain—what makes YOU so special!?  So what?  You go round and round.  Want a shiny, clean American award? Grumpy.  Like as if I were in DisneyWorld kind of Grumpy. 

I’m feeling cross and tired and missing the sounds of goats and chickens and a sea of languages I don’t understand.  There is no one standing outside of the airport waiting to haggle me.   There is nothing exciting happening.  There is no ocean and no fishermen and no singing and no obnoxiously loud gospel music playing 200 decibels too high.  `Just a lot of boring, expressionless people yelling at their kids to walk faster while they play their handheld video games.  I guess I won't be singing any patriotic songs today.

Each time I take this journey, I get more and more attached.  Each time I become less and less afraid of what makes this place so different.  Each time I push myself a bit further outside of my comfort zone.  And today I’m having one of those moments where I think to myself, I could maybe do this.  Like for real.  Because this airport is freaking bananas.  (Did I mention that bananas are better in West Africa, too?) 

Do you ever have those moments where you’re staring at something, and you’re questioning yourself and God: Is this a sign?  Am I supposed to DO something right now?

Since I’ve been back I’ve been looking around my life wondering, what holds me to this place?  What is it about my job that I love?  What about Baltimore?  My friends?  What would happen if I just took a giant leap?  Not for a lifetime, but maybe a year or two.  What would happen if I actually moved to West Africa?

Because something happens to me over there that I can’t quite describe.  It’s like the restless part of me settles down and I get downright spiritual.  The “things” I think I need to be happy are challenged and I always find myself opening my heart a bit wider with each person I meet and each experience I have.  And it’s not all peaches and roses and flowering bushes.  Africa is Hell.  I remember.  I get it.  Cities lack infrastructure, governments lack decency, the economy lacks liquidity.  People suffer from hunger and poverty.  HIV/AIDS and other diseases are rampant.  Health education and women's rights are generations behind the West.  But it’s like reminding me that Baltimore’s murder rate is high.  Yeah.  I know.  I heard a gunshot last night.  What of it? 

I guess we'll wait and see where life takes me.  But for now, when I dream, this is what I see:

 

Africa is Hell

Since I was a little girl I’ve had this bubbling desire to do something—to help people and to make things right.  I remember the first time I recognized class:  I was a little girl and went home with one of my classmates after school.  Being a kid, I didn’t really know the difference yet between new furniture and old; I didn’t know what to look for in a kitchen or a bathroom for signs of new-improvements.  I didn’t even know the difference between a house and an apartment.  I was focused on the Barbie dolls and the glue sticks and the make believe.  I guess I didn’t really comprehend it, but it was something I felt—this place was different than my house.  When I got home and started asking questions about the difference I quickly was told to be thankful and polite—furthering my suspicions that something other existed.  I suddenly felt overwhelmed with this new knowledge and uncomfortable about how to deal with it.

Throughout my childhood, my father was the director of Social Services in my small, southern, mountain town.  I would go to his office and see people I knew in the lobby.  Years later I would understand what this meant—friends of mine that were in the lobby because their parents were applying for food stamps or welfare.  I didn’t understand how lucky I was.  As I become more conscious of this lucky place I had landed in life, I also learned how to feel guilty about it.

When I got to college, this only exacerbated itself.  I discovered not only my guilt about class—but my guilt about race, as well.  I suddenly become aware of what it meant to be white and privileged.  I read book after book about how evil I was—an honorary white, female member of this budding bourgeoisie class coming from the small, private, liberal arts colleges of the world.

And in my sophomore year, I decided to go on a three-week study abroad program to Ghana.  That first trip rocked my world.  I experienced these things every day, all day for a month.  I felt my white skin, for the first time, as a minority.  I was questioned, out right, about my class and my guilt—didn’t I feel horrible for what had happened to the African man?

On this first trip, walking through the slave castles, a young Ghanaian stops me and asks: Don’t you feel terrible for what your people did to us?  His question is so blunt and so forthright that I stumble on my words and can’t answer him.  Here I am, walking around feeling heavy about this whole experience, and this total stranger pins the whole thing on me.  I'd never thought to ask myself if I felt responsible for slavery.  He walks away with a smirk on his face.  He had won.

I searched my soul for a response to the young man's question.  I sought some kind of a reaction that would illicit some large scale change in myself.  I arrived home with a false sense of simplicity.  I threw away clothing, I scaled down my possessions—seeking solace in a temporary reduction of the stuff I felt cluttered my life and my vision.  I felt almost pious about these acts.  As if these reductions had somehow made me a better person.  In truth, the possessions crept back in to my life, over time.  After all, it was never really the possessions that bothered me in the first place.  It just seemed like the simplest place to start.  The least messy place to begin.  If I didn’t start with my stuff first, I’d have to actually look into myself for answers.

But the question, and the thousands of new questions that stem from that first one, have sat on me for eight years.  Don’t I feel like I need to do something?  Is there something I can do to help?  To make amends?  To change things?

On each of my trips, I watch children with distended bellies reaching out for my hand.  Grown men and women beg for money.  Young men run scams for the tourists, desperate for American dollars or something from our luggage.  Women in markets offer you their children (mostly as a joke, but some not so much), begging you to take them to America.  Posters in shack-like store fronts proudly display images of America—red sports cars in front of McMansions—referencing the American Dream.

And each time I struggle with myself.  How can I have so much and be here with people who have so little?  And most of all, how do I even begin to understand—to empathize—what this space is about?  How do I cope with who I am?  How could I sit comfortably with myself, knowing what I now know about how wrong the white man did Africa?  And even worse, I'm always met with questions when I come home that I don't know how to answer.  Why do you like it there so much?  Why doesn't it scare you?  Questions that make me angry and I don't always know why.

My work with urban youth in Baltimore has helped; these kids have taught me an awful lot about the realities of race and class in America.  And I’ve learned a lot about my own skin.  I’ve become sensitive to the way people talk about others, as if somehow ethnicity, class, and race affect a person’s humanity.  I haven’t just read about poverty in textbooks—I’ve seen these things.  I’ve felt it.  It’s a different beast all together to feel these things.

So today while I'm packing a bag with my designer white jeans and my malaria pills and my expensive arch-supportive sandals, I’m struck by how far I’ve come since that first trip.  How much more comfortable I’ve become with my status.  I guess I’ve become more comfortable with myself, in general, and most importantly I think I’ve gotten over the self-righteousness that comes with being a “do-gooder”.  I spent too many years of my early twenties feeling really, really proud.  It wasn't doing me any good.

I feel a distinct difference in my heart from the first empty hand I turned away.  I feel that my guilt has shifted to a new space.  I still feel like shit, at times, but I have a different understanding of things like community and wealth and race.  I’ve come to love these communities—these places I travel.  I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons about history and a human’s capacity for forgiveness.

I also have a new understanding, and perhaps appreciation, for what my role is while I’m traveling through these communities.  I’ve become more okay with who I am. I am a white woman of privilege.  I am American.  I remember on my first trip wanting so desperately to be somewhere where I didn’t stick out.  Where I wasn’t the subject of everyone’s conversation.   Where I wasn’t the white girl.  It was another first encounter with other.  I didn’t know what to do with the feelings I was having.  I couldn’t find words to explain myself.  I didn’t know how to get over myself.

When I was working in the Baltimore City Schools, I had hundreds of moments where I felt like this.  Where I wanted to be liked.  Where I wanted to blend in.  To not be the white lady.  To not carry the baggage of all the horrible things the “white people” seem to do around here.  And I learned, as most of my friends who teach in schools where they are the minority, that this was, fundamentally, my issue.  The kids didn’t really understand what it really meant—they barely recognized me as a white woman.  It was me who recognized myself as a white woman.  As a contrast.  And I had to sit on it.  I had to feel uncomfortable for a few months.  And it eventually changed--but I think it was me who changed.  Not the situation.

And the kids helped me cope with myself.  One afternoon, a small child, we’ll call her Jada, was sitting next to me in the cafeteria.  For some reason she’d been calling me “Godmama” all week.

She asks, “Godmama, can I have another cookie?

“No, Jada,” I reply, “only one for every one.

Another child walks by, sucking his teeth, “Man, she can’t be your godmama! SHE WHITE!"

Jada, without skipping a beat, replies to him without the slightest bit of hesitation, “SHE NOT WHITE! SHE LIGHT-SKINNED!"

She then quickly and innocently turns to me, places her hands on my face and says, “When people call you white, it hurts your feelings.” 

Breakthrough.  Not white, light-skinned.  All about perspective.

And I’ve had to dig deep on what these things mean.  And I’ve learned that I’m not afraid to feel hurt or scared or to get my hands dirty.  I crave to understand.  Yeah, those things suck when they’re happening but what comes out on the other end is something that I often can’t name (although I’ll probably try).

And yes, I still have moments when I feel terrible, but I am who I am.  I must start from this point.  I can’t be anyone but who I am and I cannot continue to make excuses for where I come from.  We all have a role to play in this world—the question becomes: what do we do with the power we have?

I know now that I'll never really save the world, despite all the liberal idealism I once had for myself.  I've learned too much.  I've had to get over myself.  These last few years of traveling back and forth, I know I’ve been taught a lot more than what I’ve brought with me.  I’ve seen more in these small self-sufficient villages that will educate me about community, about living, about humanity, than I would ever get from a lesson in a classroom.  But it doesn’t make turning away those hands any easier.

I recently flipped through a travel book preparing for my site visit.  Stuck between a paragraph on volunteering in Africa and safety tips was a sub-chapter entitled “Africa is Hell”.  At first I read the short paragraphs waiting for the punch line—for the intended joke.  There wasn’t one.  The author was being genuine.  He wanted to remind his readers not to get caught up in the fantasy of Africa.  He wanted to include a reality check—a remember the-AIDS-rate-and-the-fact-that-civil-wars-erupt-overnight message.  As if anyone whose ever really gone and known what it feels like could forget that.  I'm not sure the editor really read this book before it went to print.  Or maybe he did because he fundamentally believes this. 

I've spent weeks laughing about this "Africa is Hell" chapter.  And just today, as I'm packing and thinking and anxiously blogging, have I really processed what it means.  I guess I can't blame the guy for including the chapter.  I've seen the hellish parts.  I've walked past people in such unfortunate situations that will permanently sit on my heart; I've seen images that I'll never shake.  The place has changed me.  The Africa is Hell message ringing true.  And there are so many Americans who buy into the fantasy.  Who go to "Africa" (a place to many think is a country) to find their roots and to go on Safari and to dance with other just long enough to feel excited but not really digging deep or asking questions.  Africa is Hell, he wants to tell these people.  Don't go.  Don't ruin it.  Don't exploit it.

I can't ignore the facts.  No amount of sugar coating can take away the simple truths of what poverty really looks like.  Hunger does horrible things to someone’s eyes.  But I can’t shake this feeling that there is something more important happening under the surface of this pain and devastation.  If Africa is Hell, why do I feel changed?  Different?

And I struggle with myself.  Am I one of those Americans?  I don't feel like I am, but can I possibly be anything but that American?  I feel like I've got an exemption pass.  That I've earned my place here.  I've asked all the questions and I've cried and I've kept myself awake at night riddled with guilt.  I feel like I've had breakthrough.  Perhaps in this space, I'm light-skinned.  Because I've also seen the opposite.

Crashing parties is West Africa has become one of my favorite activities.  Between shots of local gin, and the hundreds of libations made to the gods (and to the elders), my liquor-soaked eyes observe smiling faces and joyful dances.  Women proudly prepare mounds and mounds of food, asking you to help and teaching you generations-old lessons on pounding yams, and everyone happily shares.  Small children hold onto your thumb and giggle when you repeat words in your terrible Twi and Yoruba.  This couldn't possibly be Hell.   

And of course all of this rationalization serves one purpose: to make me feel better about what I’m doing.  To make me feel more comfortable in my expensive jeans and pearl earrings.

As I'm packing, I'm remaining positive.  I'm looking forward to another few weeks in this place I've come to consider a second home.  I'm packing the gifts I'll bring to the people I've come to consider family.  The children I've watched grow-up.  The women I've become sisters with.  But the guilt never subsides for long.  It creeps back in with a mighty fist, demanding answers.  Questions that I’m not sure I know just yet how to answer.

Like nothing I'd known before, until I knew it better

People ask me now, 'What was Africa like?'  I tell them that the place I came to know is laughing yet troubled, strong yet crippled, and dancing.  Africa was like nothing I had known before, until I knew it better.  But to really explain it, I have to start from the beginning. -Sarah Erdman

In flipping my calendar this morning to the bright and shiny month of July, several things happened. 

One:  I relished in the fact that June was over.  Normally I don’t feel this way about June—such a sweet, warm, school-ending month.  But this June was an exception; a terrible month of car accidents, driving rental cars, and bad feelings in the pit of my stomach over stupid things like money and material possessions. 

Two: I sighed that my one week of vacation had come and gone so quickly and that although I am tan, and relaxed, it never seems to be enough time to do all the things I think about when I’m drafting those “things I’ll do on vacation” mental lists. 

Three:  I glanced down at the bright purple note on July 28th that I depart from Dulles Airport at 11 pm for Accra, Ghana.  My fifth (FIFTH) trip to West Africa since 2002.

Four:  I crapped my pants because I haven’t even started thinking about my 10 day site visit to the motherland.  Or the malaria pills I’ll need.  Or located my yellow fever vaccination card.

(Sidenote:  However, I do use my annual trip to West Africa as a year-round excuse to buy cool, light-weight, earthy/artsy looking clothing, insisting, "…this will be just PERFECT for Benin!” and then promptly losing said clothing to the great abyss that is my closet and dirty laundry pile and going to Target three days before my trip and cursing why Target doesn’t sell short skirts and tank tops during December.)

For those of you who don’t know me, perhaps you’ll find this fascination of mine with West Africa charming.  Or perhaps even kitsch.  You’ll probably assume I’m way cooler than I really am and that I’m so well-traveled and probably really smart.  You’d, for the most part, be pretty wrong on all fronts.  You probably also think I’m the luckiest girl on the planet that I get to travel so much for work—and well, I can’t argue you on that one.  Working in higher education has its perks.  This is definitely one of them.

For those of you who do know me, however, you’ve probably already stopped reading because you just can’t stand to hear me talk about it anymore.  And that’s okay.  I understand.  I’d hate me too.  But I can’t help but talk about it.  And think about it.  And find ways to weave it into stories.  I’m starting to understand how the fundamental religion-nuts feel.

I remember in middle school, so sick and tired of being asked had I been “saved” and did I go to church—saying, yes, I was baptized as a baby and, yes, I go to the Presbyterian church on Main Street, and being met with “well have you considered OUR church?”—I finally cracked and blew up.  WHY THE HELL IS IT SO IMPORTANT THAT I BE SAVED IF I PRAY AND TALK TO GOD AND GO TO SUNDAY SCHOOL ALL ON MY OWN!?  I was met with a response: “I just want to make sure you make it to heaven, that’s all.  It’s like I know how to get free passes to DisneyWorld and I want to make sure you get ‘em too.”  Jesus.  I’m starting to perhaps make connections on why I hate DisneyWorld, too. 

I’m like this with West Africa: “Have you been?  Wanna hear a story? You should go…maybe your trip to Europe wasn’t enough…ever considered West Africa?”

And since blogs are entirely self-indulgent, this is my time to do just that.  And even though they’re pretty much like diaries that are read by anyone with an intrawebs browser, something about my blog feels cozy.  Like if you’re taking the time to read this stuff every few weeks, you might actually like me.  Or enjoy my ranting and raving about the world.  Or think I have something intelligent to say.  Or you’re just someone who accidentally stumbled across it and is now obsessed (this is my secret hope that you’re all strangers out there building a cult following of me.  In reality, I know it’s just you guys).

I decided to start blogging last fall because I was sad.  My grandmother was dying and I was filled with sleepless angst.  I’d sit in my living room at three in the morning wondering how I’d make it through my 8 hour work day (9, let’s be honest) and my grad class, and still manage to be the bubbly, happy Lindsay that my friends and colleagues know me to be.  I started writing.  Tons of it.  Ever since I learned how to write sentences this has been my coping mechanism.  When shit hits the fan, I start writing about the shit.  And the fan.  And the people who get hit with the shit from the fan. 

When my parents divorced.  I wrote.
When my siblings got married.  I wrote.
When I graduated high school.  I wrote.
When I had my heart broken.  I wrote.
When I lost myself.  I wrote.
When I found myself.  I wrote.
When I lost myself, again.  I wrote.

You get the picture.  So I thought I’d give this “sharing it” thing a go, as I’m pretty sure my friends were tired of waking up to word documents in their inboxes with headlines like “couldn’t sleep…read this and tell me what you think.”

So when I studied abroad for the first time in Ghana, I wrote.  I wrote things that were appallingly self-righteous and myopic; things that now, frankly, embarrass me to read (even in my head, where things are safe).  But I was doing what we all do as humans—I was shifting from one place to another.  From a smaller circle to a bigger one; one with bigger ideas, harder realities, and steeper consequences.  We learn.  We grow.  We change.  Amen, hallelujah.  

Some part of me has always desired to become a famous writer.  I have a fantasy that someone will discover me—think I’m brilliant—and offer me a lot of money to sit at small café tables and write what I think about the world.  That I’ll be given travel allowances and take off for weeks at a time with a laptop in my leather satchel (you know, the one I'll buy when I can afford it?) and a big fat expense account.  What a dream—to be someone who gets paid to be a person with things to say; someone who others look to for advice and support.  Someone who can churn out words that carry meaning and weight and power in the most challenging of moments.  Someone who can sense silent words, too. 

But this fantasy also carries a fear—a fear about what this kind of writing can do to you.  Does it lose its cathartic value when it’s being demanded by an editor or a greater public?  Would I ever really want to ruin what I've got here for myself?  I’m thinking about all the times I’ve used my insomnia to process the things I see and hear into short stories or pieces of poetry; all the times I’ve taken my deepest fears and insecurities into a leather-bound journal and written sentences that make no sense and follow no rules of grammar but translate everything I need to say into letters and words and spaces on paper so that I can feel better about tomorrow. 

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the journals and journals of angst-ridden writing, processing my own adolescent and post-adolescent struggles with racism and classism and “finding myself” are quite worth the read.  It’s mostly a lot of garbled words struggling to describe this feeling I’ve had for most of my life—this desire to do more, learn more, and understand.  To embed myself in really hard places and think my way out of them.  Crying and cursing all the way out.

And this thing with West Africa was in me from day one (I feel sure of it).  It’s not that I just woke up one day, watched the Lion King, and decided to become obsessed with Africa.  No.  In typical Lindsay fashion, it was a much more long-winded, complicated story.  With a lot more dips and bends and uncanny coincidences.  I didn’t dream of going on safari as a child or hold onto some colonized vision of traveling to an uncultured, uneducated land and teaching the masses of my great knowledge and heritage.  No.  It was more a whisper.  A thread that seems to have woven itself into parts of my life that I’m just now beginning to recognize.  A rhythm in my day-to-day that I can’t ignore.

An opportunity to go for the first time and three weeks of walking around with my mouth hanging wide open.  And seven years of processing and going back again and again and learning more and growing.  And finding deeper roots. 

And it isn’t really Africa itself, so much as how life is enacted there.  The way people live.  The culture.  Which I suppose is inescapably connected to “being African”. But from my limited scope, it’s about music.  And struggle.  And community.  And pain.  And beauty.  How communities celebrate together and mourn together.  How people find ways to sustain despite access to critical resources like clean water and nutritious food.  How people can learn about things like astronomy and mathematics and biology from working fields and harvesting crops and raising livestock.  How family means everything and how much corruption can damage a person’s sense of themselves.  How powerful wealth is and just how dangerous power can be.  How little we know about the rest of the world.  How intolerant we’ve all become to darkness and anything “other”.  And what this all means to me.  In my heart.  In my life here in Baltimore.  In my work with urban youth.  In my work with college students who are just beginning to lose themselves and find themselves again.   

Mostly I think it’s been about how me going to Africa doesn’t mean anything to the universe at all.  This journey is mostly about me and me learning how to strike the balance between “this is what I can do” and “that’s bigger than I am”.  Learning to bite my tongue as much I love using it.  Learning how to just watch and observe before offering suggestions for change.  Learning how to be uncomfortable.  Learning how to be faithful, honest, and humble.  Or perhaps just learning how to do those things better than I did before.

Feeling heat in places you didn’t think you could feel it.  The sound of drums reverberating up your spine and around your heart, coupled with the exquisite preservation of tradition lingering in formal ceremonies.  The hair on your arms standing up straight because you’ve never seen something so beautiful—something so simple and so pure.  Witnessing poverty in a staggeringly real way but in a way that doesn’t leave you feeling empty like it does here in Baltimore.  Feeling scared and unsure, stripped of all my usual defenses.  The adventure of it all.  The realness.        

In flipping that calendar, I’m allowing my brain to go places I don’t normally allow it to go on a workday.  And even though I’m working while I’m traveling, I can’t help but take it somewhere deeper, somewhere more powerful.  Seven years ago I woke something up inside of me and I can’t get her to sit down and shut up.  Something inside of me that make me feel anxious and excited and scared and thrilled all at the same time.  Something that I can’t seem to quit.  

I started this entry with a quote that I love because I was feeling reminiscent, but I realize now that maybe I only love it because I get what she means.  I’ve felt it.  I read this book by Sarah Erdman in between my first two visits to West Africa.  She spent a year in Mali with the Peace Corps, came back and wrote a book about it.  Her book, along with several others in the same genre, have been enormously useful in helping me frame what I think about what I’ve seen and felt and experienced.  She’s no New York Times bestseller, but she wrote this book as she was going from a smaller circle to a larger one; as she was growing and processing and starting to understand better who she really was in the wake of feeling all these things you feel when you spend a lot of time in what the big fancy sociologists call a “collective society”. 

She summarized all the things I’ve been trying to say for years about my time in West Africa in just a few succinct sentences. 

People ask me now, 'What was Africa like?'  I tell them that the place I came to know is laughing yet troubled, strong yet crippled, and dancing.  Africa was like nothing I had known before, until I knew it better.  But to really explain it, I have to start from the beginning. 

I’d make one quick change to this statement.  I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to explain it.  And I'm not sure anyone else really cares as much as we do.  And I’m pretty sure that’s okay.

Homecoming

Most people seem to get seasonal depression in the winter. The sun stops shining and weeks of dreary, rainy, cold grey dominate all parts of life. Sometimes it snows, but mostly it doesn’t. It’s just cold. Slushy, dirty ice water gathers on the side of the road and cars get covered in white, dusty salt. I’m weird, I guess. I love the winter. I don’t mind the cold. I don’t mind the grey. My worst seasonal depression happens in fall, when I miss home the most. I struggle with myself in the fall. I get wanderlust. I make grand life plans (life plans that I rarely keep). I talk about moving home. Growing up I loved the fall. I loved the way the oak trees that surrounded my house would drop their thick, fat acorns on the cracked stone driveway. The leaves would slowly turn from summer’s fresh green to brilliant shades of red, yellow, and orange. Our local football team would begin their season and my friends and I would spend our evenings in the crisp, fall, mountain air cheering for the home team. I’m not even that huge of a football fan these days, but high school football was a permanent feature of my late adolescence. We loved it. Our lives revolved around it. There was a palpable energy in those stands and a real community in my town that seemed to congregate on Friday nights. Everyone gathered there together. Like the biggest kitchen table you’ve ever seen.

I remember when it changed. When I moved away and I started resenting those days—feeling as though I’d come from the most backward, archaic town in the South. I moved to this small college in Baltimore and met people who, for the most part, came from glamorous northeastern cities and towns with progressive city councils and private school educations. They never had prayer in public school. They’d never heard people use racist slurs. I was in awe of this progression; it was my very own domestic culture shock. As I struggled with who I used to be, and more importantly who I was becoming, I said things I didn’t mean about where I was from. I told stories I shouldn’t have. I shared secrets about my small, beautiful, mountain town that only those of us lucky enough to have grown up there should be allowed to know—things that you just can’t understand unless you’ve been there. Unless you’ve seen it. I guess this is my own cathartic confession: guilt I’ve been holding onto for years. As I’ve gotten older, and struggled for that sense of home in my life that I always had growing up, I’ve started to recognize just how much that small town taught me about how to behave in this world. I feel horrible that I haven’t always loved where I’m from—like I’ve committed the ultimate betrayal to this place that now means so much to me.

Before my own grandmother passed a few weeks ago, my dearest childhood friend, Maggie, grieved for her own grandmother. I went home. This is what you do when you’re from where I’m from. You go home. You sit with people. You kiss cheeks and squeeze hands. You laugh. You cry. You eat. Maggie’s grandmother was a wonderful woman. Her funeral was such an incredible testimony to her life—nothing at all like the quiet, simple service we held for my own grandmother this last weekend. The small Baptist church filled with people who had in some way been involved in her life. This is also what you do when you’re from where I’m from. You go to funerals for people you barely know—because you know that it means a lot to the people who are still alive. The people who are grieving. The definition of family gets wobbly and almost anyone counts. In the middle of the service, a group of six or seven cousins got up and sang old-fashioned mountain music. They sang her favorite hymns. It was so moving I couldn’t help but cry. This thing, this simple, old-fashioned funeral, was all about home. This is what it means to be from a place that is simple and full of grace. This is what it feels like to be around people who believe in the power of prayer and faith. This is what it looks like when family lines are large and undefined; where songs get sung around out-of-tune family pianos. Where stories get shared and stretched over the dinner table. Where simple things are still simple things. This funeral reminded me about what it means to be from this place—how lucky I am. How blessed.

Coming over the mountain into the valley I've called home for my whole life, I always sigh with a deep breath. My cell phone coverage breaks. The radio crackles. I roll all the windows down, hoping I’ll catch a whiff of that unruly honeysuckle bush on the side of the road. I turn on something like Gillian Welch’s Revival and sing all the words as loud as I can sing them. Something in my heart clicks into place. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this over the last twenty-six years. Every time I come home I hold my breath for this part. It’s like when you watch your favorite movie and there is a part you love so much that you can hardly stand to watch it; it feels like you’re too lucky to have that feeling on demand. There is this bend in the road where you start to go back down the mountain and suddenly all you see is this incredible panoramic mountain scene. It’s like my guilty pleasure. Within minutes you’re back in town. It’s done in an instant. But I love it. It means I’m home. And I hate that for so many years I couldn’t see it. I couldn't see anything but what I wanted to see. I only saw the red on the political map. I only saw the pick-up trucks and the trailers and the junk on front porches. I couldn’t see the things that mattered—the real beauty of this place. Not yet, atleast.

There is a distinct feeling I get when I get to a place I call home. There is a settled contentment in the pit of my belly. My body relaxes, my shoulders let loose, and my hips get low and wide. I feel grounded. I feel safe. I feel happy. I can take a deep breath and feel contentment as my lungs fill with air and release, slowly, with satisfaction. Over the years this place called home has become as undefined and wobbly of a word as family at a Baptist Church funeral. I’ve found home is in a lot of places. I’ve fallen in love with people and ideas all around the world. But nothing beats that mountain view. Nothing can compete with what my childhood taught me life was all about. Annie Dillard writes a lot of essays about nature. I’ve always connected to her work. She writes in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.” This quote has somehow captured all that I feel about where I grew up.

I’ve moved to the creek. My life is complicated and messy and absurd. There is so much stuff in my life. But the mountains are home. They are quiet, and giant, and unshaken by my choices. In the chaos of the last few weeks, I’ve been reminded about what it means to have family. What it means to have faith. What it means to go home. In Ghana, people refer to this symbol Sankofa, a bird resting his head on his back, which symbolizes returning to one’s roots. Every now and then I need to go home. I need to return to my roots.

Today the weather turned cold. The leaves have already begun to fall. They hardly changed color this year and most certainly didn’t shine in brilliant shades of red and yellow. Autumn doesn’t happen here the way it happens in the mountains. I got sad. I missed the mountains. I wanted so desperately to be home. I had to push this desire to the side, recognizing my responsibility to my life in the creek, and simply dreamt about coming over that crest. I pretended I could see the mountains and the thousands of shades of orange the landscape becomes this time of year. I had to be satisfied with what I had in my memory. But deep in my heart, in the tiniest, most secret folds, I knew the truth about where I really wanted to be. And perhaps for now, that’s good enough.