So since I can't compose my own words to encompass my thoughts, I'll steal some of Michael Franti's: "It seems like everywhere I go, the more I see the less I know." I never really got that line (what? see more, know less? huh?) but now it pretty much sums up my mental state as I take in all the absolutely incomprehensible sights around me. Every day I go somewhere different, meet new people, encounter new realities, and every new experience just diminishes my sense of order and cohesion and "knowledge." It's not a good thing or a bad thing, just a strange thing, because I'm used to being able to comprehend and interpret the sensory input around me and draw some marginally legitimate conclusions from it, but I pretty much gave that all up my first night here! I've completely let go of the need to interpret or find cohesion in the rampant contradictions. Instead I'm just taking it all in, moment by moment, and accepting that I know nothing.
Yes indeed I feel like I know absolutely nothing these days, which makes it that much harder to try to identify a specific need in my "community" (which is not one specific place or one specific group of people as far as I can tell) and design a participatory, sustainable project to help people empower themselves towards better lives. That's what I'm supposed to be doing (key word: supposed), but I'm having trouble getting anywhere close. Because I know absolutely 100% nothing. Haha, at least I have a blank slate to work with!!
On a completely unrelated note, today I worked all day in the children's care center at TASO (for children in the pediatric ART program and the children of TASO clients) and witnessed something I just wanted to share: All through day, amidst the chaotic atmosphere of boisterous kids and fussy babies and tired mamas and busy TASO staff, a woman is coming and going with a tiny tiny baby strapped to her back. Sometimes the baby is asleep, but mostly the baby is weakly crying and coughing with this horrible cough that makes you wince when you hear it back it sounds very painful. When the mama takes her baby off her back to sit and eat you see the baby's flaky skin and skinny limbs and little ribs and distended belly. All day the two of them are around, and I wave and smile and greet them (which is the extent of my communication abilities with Lusoga speakers) but I can't actually have a conversation or ask what's up with them. So at the end of the afternoon, they're the last to leave. Dorothy and Solome give the woman a bag full of nutrition supplements and milk powder and send them on their way. Once they're gone, I ask how the baby was doing, and I learn that she wasn't a baby at all but a two-and-a-half year old girl. I was shocked. This tiny body appeared to be that of a 4 month old baby and really belonged to a 2 1/2 year old girl -- a very malnourished, very sick little girl about to start an ART regimen because she is not doing very well. I don't even know what to say, what to tell you. That's AIDS for you. I guess. It breaks your heart into a million pieces and makes you question how such suffering even begins. But TASO is a wonderful wonderful wonderful treatment provider and if anyone can boost that little girl back into good health, it's TASO.
So there you go. I don't even know what to think or how to feel about that or anything else for that matter but there it is. Just one little story out of a billion unexpressed stories that are unfolding in front of my eyes minute by minute. I hope you can take something away from it, because I'm still grasping at nothingness, trying to make sense of it myself. Which probably won't happen, because I'm pretty sure that nothing actually "makes sense" in the end anyway.
Have you ever seen things that make you question everything? That don't fit in the framework of how you process the world? That steal your thoughts and words and leave you just sitting there? I feel like we all have those moments, especially when we're in unfamiliar settings. The world is brimming with nonsense and contradictions and sights of soaring joy holding hands with gnawing sorrow. So if you wouldn't mind, I would love to hear about your dumbfounded times too.
Much much love!
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When I walk down the street here I see Pizza/Mexican restaurants and Pizza/Gyros restaurants I think to myself "really?". It doesn't make any sense at all.
ReplyDeleteConservatives don't fit in my framework. I met a Calvinist today. Weird.
ReplyDeleteNot as profound as your experience. But sometimes I find myself questioning things everyday.