... or will I just forget?

Journal entry: approx. July 26, 2007 rural Sukuma territory, Tanzania

At the point that I stopped writing yesterday I decided that I was going to go see if I could do anything for any of these children [I hear crying everyday in the village I am staying in]. I hadn't before out of the order of men, women and children here; because I am a guest that doesn't speak their language and because children of such a young age here are known to be frightened to hysteria by our strange white skin. None the less, this time I decided to try.
I didn't find anyone outside [the huts] except a very small naked baby girl sitting in the dirt, with flies eating at her running snot (accumulated from her recent crying?) which was now collecting sand, her vagina already being covered in sand and dirt.
I went and sat beside her, bashfully giving her my thumb to hold onto which she, even more bashfully, took.
All I could think to do is tell her that God loves her and ask that somehow God might show his love for this girl through me in that moment and ask that she be healed. I repeated this over and over again (though I got a sick, steadily deepening self righteous feeling that she, as well as her whole family, already knew and would continue to know God and his love in a more present, day-to-day power and reality than I might ever).
Then I began to tell her that I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I loved her also without feeling as though I had just told a bold faced lie, one I was just realizing I had been telling myself for years [to shake about some warm, lively feelings of selflessness when feeling empty and cold]. I had nothing to give evidence to my love, no inconvenience from me; no pushing through a difficulty for her sake. So I apologized, for myself and all of us. I apologized that we have abused, raped and reduced and made in our image a "the love of Christ," to checks in the mail and "deep conversation", spiritual masturbatory feelings of meaningful life and even a little martyrdom. We have raped and deformed her identity to checks and deep, emotive and philosophical conversations, essays, poems and music videos, and so used her for our own invigorating feelings of self-sacrifice that might last for quite some time; all the while she is sitting naked in the dirt. It is these good feelings of selflessness that we buy with our checks and accomplish with our heated conversation, for they rarely ever move far enough from that starting point to make her feel loved selflessly. I am so very sorry that we have used her in this long running cycle, replacing her for our "conviction." I apologized that at the rate we tend to go with loving the power, control and orderly ways, she might never get a chance to know the love of Christ in a white person. Although, many of us Christians might never know it at all the way she does or will.
And if this is read, my fear is that, if it does move anyone in any way, it will become another link in the cycle. That those good feelings of conviction and that tingling to "help" will only produce more checks and "good conversation," perhaps even prolonging her life, but not to the reality of Christ in her's which is missing in ours.
...

April 1, 2008: Abilene Texas, USA

Stories are what they want, just a simple "good" will do. Nothing else please, or you might break my stride, effect my time or even wake-up my mind. But don't worry because I can't even speak your nothing more nothing less, I tried just saying "bad" but it tasted like blood in my mouth and about knocked you on the ground for not being the answer you already "knew" for yourself. I can't speak knowing the places I have driven through, everyday life I'd see through the windowed AC. I can't think because for twenty years these things I'd see were through the safety of a screen, where people watch together and everyone would sit and think, passionately speak or maybe even weep, and now I pasted pasted pasted them on the street. The empty swell of the babies belly and the beginnings of infection in that place for a leg where there is none-- treated a little sooner and she probably would have seen years to come. But she never had a chance because she's as noticed as a suit on wall street. should have stayed on the screen. But I had to come and ignore you to your face. I've come a long way, hours in the airports to get to this place to know name and face, real relationship, be changed, and a simple way. But you've made the mistake getting in my space, asking for help and slowing my pace. I'm just here to watch, "hands off. they will help you. get a job." If I help you, allow myself to reach out and feel you, I'll have to help him too, or at least pick and choose, else I'm liable to become just like you. It's more practical to write about you somewhere down the road from the safe activism of my Fair Trade brew.
I can't speak of the times and words I could speak, bargaining on the street, good thing I learned some Swahili. I can't give you money, though it wouldn't be enough anyway. If I had time and we could speak I'd sit with you in the street; as is, I'm off to Europe, have a nice day.
You want to hear stories of my "great adventures?"Sorry, I couldn't see because my eyes were adjusted to sort of pain on T.V. When in Africa, do as the Africans do: Survive. Don't be affected, this is everyday life. Do as the missionaries do: tough love; a turned eye and resenting sigh. Get out of my mind! I didn't pay to live with your cries, I just wanted to tell stories of the days I stayed in your sty. Could you please stop for a moment, it's hard to get a convincing picture of your loathsome plight when your always laughing. know the time and place.
How was my trip? How was my trip? How was my trip? How was my trip? I don't have an answer for you. I can't speak because I didn't speak (who was I to speak?). Now who am I to speak? Numb, frustrated gap of life. On autopilot. Sleep walking, trying to make my dreams like I think they should be. Now I just live with this nagging feeling of incomplete. Learn to be okay with not being okay. Okay with not being okay with what I was okay with. I understand what your trying to do but it's not catchy enough.
I need to go on with my life now, please let go of my hand, I have plans to be with these people so let me leave. Take your hands off, I need to roll up the window.
How was your trip?
Not okay. African is a whore for social service. A tax deduction, a stamp in the passport, a story for the blog.
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Present day:

For this reason I've wrestled for years with sharing this story at all, not knowing how to get around and cut deeper than just being another "inspiring" story, with all the ways we abuse that word as well, from which we throw up our hands in helplessness or to some half baked effort to do something, anything, just long enough to make these feelings of guilt wear off and settle back into our groove and forget that the effort ever stopped.
This experience, her face, has been sitting inside me, a wrenching ache in my soul. She is the crying inside my head, the mirror I never wanted to look at and always saw. I felt this excruciating tear in feeling that she was just serving as something for me to be continuously convicted about and letting myself forget her and moving on to any degree of a well adjusted life in America. No matter what I do I am doing exactly what I didn't want to let happen. I don't want to forget her and move on. I don't want to settle back into American life-- as long as I'm living in America I've realized I can't help being some degree of who I never wanted to be again. I am afraid of not being changed enough by her face, by her cries. I am afraid of using her to make myself and others fool ourselves into thinking we don't forget about the pain of the world around us every day, while we go about ours so comfortably that it is over before we know it. The structuring of the societies of man allow us, "nurture" us to think it "nature", to live in two different worlds and right next door, this fact alone has to be one of the first things to go in the kingdom of God.
Yes, I know I've changed, but what bothers me is how much I haven't changed, how closely similar the person I am now, together with my worries and decision making, is to who I was before.
None the less, these past couple years I have done just that, I have adjusted relatively comfortably to living in America again and taken as automatic some ways of life and thinking, becoming some degree of who I never wanted to be again. At times I think I have gone weeks without thinking about her, seeing her face, hearing her cries and laughter that is fourth dimensional to life as I know it.
I write the story now because I need to get this wrenching inner wrestling off my chest somehow. I write knowing that all of these things I fear are inevitable because the societies of man are the way they are and we are broken bastard children of the societies that raised us, who make for broken neighbors. But we disciples of Christ have been adopted by God and are being transformed by grace and love to an entirely new way. I hope that this story, she, can be another face in the millions that we have encountered that make it harder and harder to forget that they are our living, breathing, dying, laughing neighbors. I pray that I, we, will never stop lamenting what is not yet of the breaking in kingdom of God, in our hearts, minds, lives, homes, religious congregations, neighborhoods, communities. That no matter how uncomfortable it will get at times, we don't forget that we strive to be transformed to the society of God and not back to that of man which says her pain and our comfort is just the way things are.

This may of seemed all over the place and repetitive at times because that is the way it has happened in me, more or less.

"To be deeply bothered is a sign of hope... We are not in control of reconciliation. Too often christians are driven by activism that by trying harder and doing more our communities can become all they should be. We have to keep proclaiming [lamenting] what is not, even what is not in our own midst. Even if things never really change. This keeps calling us to hope in God, to humility, to resist certainty, self-congratulation, and the pride which so easily besets self proclaimed 'radical disciples'" - Chris Rice
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There ain't no reason things are this way
It's how they always been and they intend to stay
I can't explain why we live this way
We do it everyday
Preachers on the podium speakin' of saints
Prophets on the sidewalk beggin' for change
Old ladies laughing from the fire escape,
cursing my name
I got a basket full of lemons and they all taste the same
A window and a pigeon with a broken wing
You can spend you whole life working for something
Just to have it taken away
People walk around pushing back their debts
Wearing pay checks like necklaces and bracelets
Talking 'bout nothing, not thinking 'bout death
Every little heartbeat, every little breath
People walk a tight rope on a razors edge
Carrying their hurt and hatred and weapons
It could be a bomb or a bullet or a pen
Or a thought or a word or a sentence

There ain't no reason things are this way
It's how they always been and they intend to stay
I don't know why I say the things I say
But I say them anyway
But love will come set me free
Love will come set me free, I do believe
Love will come set me free, I know it will
Love will come set my free, yes

Prison walls still standing tall
Some things never change at all
Keep on building prisons, gonna fill them all
Keep building bombs, gonna drop them all
Working your fingers bare to the bone
Breaking your back make you sell your soul
Like a lung that's filled with coal
Suffocating slow
The wind blows wild and I may move
The politicians lie and I am not fooled
You don't need no reason or a three piece suit
To argue the truth
The air on my skin and the world under my toes
Slavery stitched into the fabric of my clothes
Chaos and commotion wherever I go
Love I try to follow

Love will come set me free
Love will come set me free, I do believe
Love will come set me free, I know it will
Love will come set my free, yes

There ain't no reason things are this way
It's how they always been and they intend to stay
I can't explain why we live this way
We do it everyday



people love you the most for the things you hate.
and hate you for loving the things you can't keep straight.
people judge you on a curve
and tell you you're getting what you deserve
and this too shall be made right.

children cannot learn, when children cannot eat
stack them like lumber when children cannot sleep
children dream of wishing wells,
who's waters quench all the fires of hell
and this too shall be made right.

the earth and the sky and the sea are all holding their breath
wars and abuses have nature growing with death
you say we're just trying to stay alive
it looks so much more like a way to die.
and this too shall be made right.

yes theres a time for peace, there is a time for war
theres a time to forgive and a time to settle the score
a time for babies to lose their lives
a time for hunger and genocide.
and this too shall be made right.

oh i dont know the sufferings of people outside my front door.
and i join the oppressors of those i choose to ignore.
im trading comfort for human life
and that's not just murder, it's suicide.
and this too shall be made right.
oh this too shall be made right.