Changed

7/11/2016

Today I woke up in my cozy, small Raleigh apartment, after flying home last night from a month in Africa, and I am again changed. If you are interested, here are my perceptions from the world as I know it today. It is a snapshot, as change is really the only constant in the world, my thoughts will likely evolve in the future.

Today I am thankful, so thankful. I know some people think that is a new-agey, hippie-esque trite word, but I am just so full of thanks and appreciation for my life that I could burst with tears. Note: I am accepting that yes, many of the hippies and New Agers were and are right (and of course many were/are selfish dirty scumbags looking for enlightenment or profit in all the wrong places… but that is another story for another day).

What is the point of this sharing?  Maybe someone will want to read it. Maybe it will help someone? Maybe it will only help me clarify my own muddled thoughts to help me move forward in a less convoluted and confused way. As always, I just want to sort it out.

I realize that I am now a 53 year-old white American woman, who is blessed, pretty educated in some things, often opinionated, sometimes pretentious, sometimes a country hick, and the older I get, the more I know, and the less I am sure that I know. I wake up every day with the blessing and the curse that I am curious. I want to know WHY. I really want to understand. I want to help to make things better. I’ve done many things in my life that I am proud of, and some that I am not sure I should share with anyone but my closest loving friends. Hopefully I’ve learned from them all. I’ll never run for President or any major political position, but I like to be in charge a lot of the time. I’m sometimes bossy, but I’m also empathetic. I come from modest means from a family of historically hard working mid-west immigrants, and I usually try to be responsible, productive, helpful, to follow the rules, and keep a high credit score. I have the ability to travel, and I certainly have enough food and niceties to be comfortable.

So…I am changed.

I am very thankful this morning that instead of walking across a hard graveled mud floor to a pit latrine (yes Caylon, I know that squatting is better for elimination), I hobbled with my broken metatarsal across a soft carpet to a clean flush toilet with running water. My foot will heal. Today I am feeling less physically strong than ever, but grateful for my life’s conveniences.

I am thankful that as I attempt to finish my PhD here in my modest grad-student apartment, I really have more space, things, luxuries, and ease of life than most of the people in the world. As I sit on cushions under large trees with a laptop and reliable high speed internet, I realize I have more chairs on my back porch facing beautiful Lake Johnson in Raleigh, NC than exist in most all of Kuli Kunda, Kiang West Province, The Gambia, West Africa, where my darling son Caylon is currently the only Toubab (white person), speaking Mandinka in a village of almost 900 people serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I am thankful for the love and support of my husband, family, and good friends that allows me to continue on this crazy journey of my life. Food was brought for me by last night by a dear friend who drove me effortlessly home from the airport in an air-conditioned private vehicle. It sits fresh, waiting, preserved, in a clean kitchen with running water and a refrigerator to keep my blueberries, pasteurized Greek yogurt, and apples cold. My Italian espresso coffee blend was waiting for me fresh, from a timer I set last night, with reliable electricity that didn’t fluctuate one bit.

We are spoiled in America. Spoiled, greedy, and overly entitled. Yes, most of us “work hard”. But we don’t know hard. We don’t know living in 95 degree heat with water we only get from a community well. We don’t know living on a few foods that we share with our whole family out of a communal bowl. We want more! More food, more drinks, more things, more escape, more fun. More of everything. We are so blessed, but how many of us really know it? Feel it?

I know I am rambling as I try to make sense of it. I often complain (vent?) about life’s interruptions and delays to my friends. As I am also often alone on this journey right now, I use social media as a scrapbook to record and share, and a way to connect – to stay in touch – to feel my community. I am ashamed now to think about the things that make me feel inconvenienced. My three day “travel saga” to get home (which I realized used to take many months) was full of people trying to help me. I had money to buy what I needed, and I had basic comforts of climate control, chairs, assistance, and yet so many of my friend also shared my frustrations of missed flights, for those stupid reasons that just “should be handled better”.

In Kuli Kunda and other rural villages and lower income areas around the world, families usually live together under one roof. Days are often spent sitting with each other, talking, communicating. There is a lot of love, laughter, and smiling. My privileged self tells me that they could be more productive (especially the men) making things, creating commerce, educating themselves, making their world a better place. They too are sometimes overly entitled. They often beat on things (children, younger siblings, animals) that are lower in the hierarchy, because sometimes that is the only perceived real power that they feel they have. There is often a learned helplessness that makes whole families and communities think that the help will come from outside, from the mosque, the Toubabs, the government, NGO’s, etc., so why should they work harder?

There are huge challenges in Africa, and other parts of the world. The Quoran and Muslim teachings talk about love, prayer, duty, and faith to a God (which is shared by many faiths), but it is usually interpreted through religious practices by a patriarchal, misogynistic group of male leaders for their own status and good (also similar to many other faiths). The women work hard on daily subsistence activities to feed the family and raise their children, but most of the men (not all), sit around talking and wait to be served, or leave looking for “a better life in Toubab-land”. This is really no different than in many low income areas in other parts of the world, and other religions are not much better. Urban and rural low income areas in the U.S. have similar problems. But here, they usually have basic living needs (basic food, water, shelter) at least somewhat provided by the government, so often the frustrated men and boys (some, but not all) who don’t have religion to monitor them turn to other things (alcohol, gangs, drugs) to get their escape and power fixes. Women have babies, often to feel that unconditional love and to try and leave a legacy in the only way they know how. Often they’ll have 10 or more, and many will die. Many thought that I must be widowed or “broken” as I only had one biological son.

Traveling and learning about other cultures is such true education. Today, as I give thanks and reflect and try to reintegrate into my “normal life”, I ponder the real meaning of what I do on a daily basis. One mid-night last week while sleeping under a mosquito net in village, I woke to a feeling of sureness that my mission in life is to “to help communities and individuals thrive by helping to provide quality of life through access to nature, physical health, social gatherings, sport, art, music, and educational offerings.”  I even had Caylon record it on his phone so I wouldn’t forget.

What the hell does that mean?  Why does it matter? Well, one thing I know at this point is that once we have our basic needs met (food, water, shelter, safety), we humans are all looking for the best quality of life we can possibly have. Maslow and others are right. I think depression (when not purely chemically caused) is often just an expression of unresolved anger at not getting what we expect out of life. We want love, connection, health, and transcendence in intellectual, artistic, and spiritual ways. After basic subsistence is met, our leisure time is spent in pursuit of something more. In the U.S., this aspect of life when provided by communities is usually called “parks and recreation” or something similar, but it goes by different names in different parts of the world. Once basic needs are met, these essential quality of life offerings are more important, especially for stressed communities and people.

In America, we have our basic needs met, and we are greedy. We want more, and we want the power to get it. We’ve been taught that we deserve it, and that we have the freedom to get it, regardless of our origins. We can do this through positive expressions of connection, love, physical and mental health, or we can use it negatively to try and collect money, power, and too many things. Usually instead of beating on things less powerful such as children and animals, we do it through using money to get our power and to collect more shiny things. We really all believe we deserve it all.

We sometimes use the “right” to guns as a way to have personal power. What started as basic rights to personal safety has evolved. This is really just greed too, and truly an expression of internal feelings of insecurity and powerlessness. In Africa, no one has guns but the police and military, and while there are sometimes knife injuries, death from that is pretty rare. Crime does come from physical attempts to take things, from desperation or envy of those perceived to have more. There is a belief though by many that criminals will get their own demise from God. I actually felt safer in Africa than I do in most urban places in the U.S. The police are actually much more friendly in Africa, but partly it’s probably that their power is naturally acknowledged as they have guns and others don’t. They are not constantly needing to assert their power or having it threatened.

I am thankful that I was able to spend so much time with and learning from people who have different skin colors and hair from my own. I realize that my white privileged life has been mostly insulated from racial strife. Growing up in Colorado, I spent a lot of time with direct immigrants and their children from Mexico, but few blacks. The Gambia River region is where many of the U.S. and European slaves came from. This was shocking to me as I met these beautiful people. The whites took their boats and guns up the river and raided the villages for the naturally strong, healthy, and physically-resilient people of the Gambia region tribes to use them to increase their work force. On my visit, we openly acknowledged this horrible history, and accepted our physical differences and spent lovely time together. However, there are some natural and real physical differences. I am a mutt-mix of various white Europeans. While they touched my blond hair and marveled at my white skin and blue eyes, I looked into their eyes and we saw that we are all human. I am very envious that mosquitoes, physical hardships, and the heat just don’t seem to bother them as much. I think we whites are mostly physically just evolved for indoor and cooler climates, but we all have gifts to give to each other. Caylon seems to be adapting well (except to the mosquitoes), but he is blessed with a tall, strong young man’s body and very resilient attitude.

In the U.S. I think the continued racial tensions are just ongoing attempts at expressing power and trying to get MORE. It seems that the less intrinsic satisfaction and power a person has, the more they want to have some external power over other people and things. While one very mean current presidential candidate openly expresses bigotry, I now see that while he may have perceived power through money and strong talk, he is incredibly insecure and narcissistic, and just trying to show power in the only way he knows how to try and get it. I feel so sorry for him, for those he abuses, and for those who misguidedly think that he will somehow help them get power too.

Misguided attempts to get power and greed…. It seems to me that there is a benefit to having to worry only about the primitive needs of simple subsistence – you don’t have time for the desire for more, and you appreciate what you do get. However, we live in country that has been blessed with resources. How do we change our focus to one of appreciation and continued positive growth, to share our wealth, and continue to be thankful, really thankful, for all that we have?

Today I am changed, and I am thankful. Now…back to work.