deceiving myself

happy 07/07/07 everyone.

last week the other interns and I went on a four day survey trip to the towns Shinyanga and Kahama a few hours south of Mwanza. The purpose of the trip was three main parts: to see other towns in Tanzania, perhaps to see what sort of aid or mission work is being done other than Church of Christ, and to gather information oh these towns as possible locations for long term missions for whoever might consider.

As far as information gathered I don't feel the importance of recording it here at this time, however the trip did greatly effect me and it is to that affect that I wish to write.

While we were in the towns I began to be overwhelmed by all that was around me; by the conditions that all of these people live in day and night, the only condition that most of them have ever and perhaps will ever know, along with countless generations before them. I was overwhelmed by the contrast of their living conditions to my own that I have grown up with (and continued in as I drove through the towns in an air conditioned Land Cruiser) and so many others so excessively comfortable throughout the world, and that we have allowed this contrast for so long. The panic attack began to set in, deep inside as their lives became more and more real to me and less and less could I understand how us "superior" species can do this; I could only ask "why?!" Moreover I was not only feeling them more vividly than ever but it was as though I could feel my own comfortable and self preserving life battling against the feeling of their lives within me and I felt as though my spirit was being torn and broken. I became claustrophobic of the minimal conditions around me, both for it being all the people around me had and at the idea of myself in their place; I was able to image myself in their place in a more real way than I had ever before and I didn't know what to do with it.

I'm sure I am sounding redundant but that is because of my in ability to describe what I felt. A felt, vivid reality of the pain and evil in the world (and in myself) and the very real contrast of the Kingdom of God(love) and what a life accordingly means came weighing in on me like a rising ocean current,drowning me. It became hard to breath, hard not to run, hard not to cry and burst in anger all at once.

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Yet, as I was reflecting on this in my journal I recalled all the ideas about Africa I have had before that time in the town and wondered at how much I talked (to others or myself) about going to Africa to live and changing my life style and giving up everything... and wondered at how much all of that was just to convince myself that I really cared more than the masses; to comfort myself with delusions of really doing something about_______.
"Do not be deceived, do not flatter them and their life and do not make a martyr of myself; our lives are different beyond the very meaning of the word."
I am actually not saying that I no longer think I could live in Africa or give up everything only that I have a clearer reality of what that would mean and how far my life is from that as is. I do not think I will be coming back to America talking about how miserable I was in the villages, in fact I think this makes really displacing myself more truly possible and better for the world around me than before.