Doug and Mike just returned from a trip to Haiti, delivering tarps and other supplies to people still living in ramshackle tent communities over four months after the earthquake. Doug’s latest blog post about processing the trip, and the mixed emotions that follow, really brought me back to the way I’ve felt after my last few trips.
It was AMAZING.
It was heartbreaking.
It was…something.
Even writing about it now, almost a year after our most recent trip to Africa, it’s still difficult to describe my feelings in any meaningful way.
Yes, it was fun. We had dance parties at Juvi. We played Hangman and Bata, Bata, Kuku (Duck, Duck, Chicken). The kids were brilliant and funny, and full of smiles. I got fist bumps from Rastafarians who loved my dreads. We sang the same Swahili songs over and over around the campfire and slept under gaze of Kilimanjaro. The people were generous and friendly, the country was warm and beautiful. It was one of the most amazing months that I have ever had and I wouldn’t trade it or change it for anything.
When people want to hear about my trips, these are the stories that I share. The giant trampoline that we assembled in an empty lot in the middle of Timisoara, Romania, and all of the kids that came to check it out. It was a regular neighborhood party. Or the camp we helped to run in Ethiopia; probably the craziest week of my life, and also one of the most memorable.
But there is always the other side.
Always there, in every memory, and in the fabric of every story.
The events that I need to process, the emotions that I need to let out. I want to tell people that this was not a vacation. These were not just happy foreign children grateful for our awesome whiteness. How our presence, our time, our gifts, all seemed so very small in the face of so deep a hurt and so great a need.
I must also give words to the experiences that have left me shaken and profoundly changed.
Yes, Romania was amazing…but do you know what encountered us on the streets?
Yeah, Ethiopia was incredible. But have you ever been to an AIDs orphanage?
More than anything, I want people to know the people that I met, to hear their stories, to understand their lives.
Because all of this good and all of this bad was all mixed in there together. You can’t separate one from the other. When we were setting up that trampoline, we were also giving granola bars to kids who may not have eaten anything else that day. I played games with kids in the same place where, just a short time before, I had held a dying infant in my arms. I taught the most amazing kids at Juvi, all the while understanding that they were in Juvi, and not being sure if I could handle knowing what really went on when the volunteers weren’t there.
These nightmares about things you saw one afternoon when you were 18 – these are things that people live with. And when I talk about how warm and generous they are, it’s not just a front and it’s certainly not shallow. It’s the generosity that comes out of having lost everything. It’s the warmth that comes from believing that every person around you is your family. It is a truer and deeper thing than I know.
Because it’s more than just “good”. It’s deeper than that. It’s truer than that. It’s GOD.
God pouring out of every smile, every hug, every song. A God who loves the poor, and cares for the widows and orphans. A God who was there in that AIDs orphanage. Who was there in that bus in Romania. A God who, I know, is big enough to cover all of this.
And yet…
Usually, when I write, I come to some sort of conclusion that relieves the tension of the questions I’m asking. I have no such conclusion today. I don’t know that I ever will.
It still hurts. It’s still sad. It’s not right.
The only conclusion I have is this: I don’t get it. I just don’t. But I do trust God. I have faith and I have hope and I believe that one day I might understand. It just may not come this side of heaven.
On January 1st I started a photo-a-day project. Day 3 was a photo and blog post about my new favorite show, Doctor Who, on the same day that they announced the new actor for the next series. I’m still pretty sad about it.
January 2nd, 2009: “I’m feeling restless today. I’m not sure what to do with myself, my free time or this new adult-sized age I’m now inhabiting.”
March 29th, 2009: “In a little over a month, I will be in Arizona. In exactly three months, I will be flying to London. My dreadlocks are 10 months and 8 days old. I’ve uploaded almost 3,500 photos to flickr. I’ve rated over 1,500 movies on Netflix. I have 202 friends on Facebook and 16 followers on Twitter. I’ve worked at the hospital for five years. I’ve been an Orthodox Christian for almost three years. I’ve been a college graduate for less than one year.”
The four weeks we spent in Moshi were challenging, heartbreaking, exhilerating, frustrating, wonderful and beautiful. I still look to the horizon and miss seeing Kilimanjaro. We will never be the same.
We stopped in London again on the way home, spent more time exploring Camden, saw Harry Potter in Soho and shared a drink with Marg. We came home on August 4th, and the rest of the month blurred into September. Hannah started school again. I celebrated an anniversary, of sorts. In October the leaves began to turn and I had another session, this time with a friend’s daughter.
October 17th, 2009: “Lose a hobby, gain a passion.”
I’m not sure that I could really explain to you how this was the frosting on the cake of our very bad day. If you’ve ever lived with a parent or a grandparent with Alzheimer’s, then you might have some idea of how our day started.
It just went downhill from there.
Last night, I sat in my car and through our house windows watched firemen walking around inside, making doubly sure that we didn’t have an electrical fire. Attempting to flip a breaker had cause some shorted wires to spark and filled the home with a dreadful burning hair smell. We called the fire department, wrestled the cats into carriers, wrestled my grandfather into the car, parked on the street…and waited.
We knew that the house was probably fine. I didn’t grab my camera. Stephen didn’t grab his guitars. Hannah took some of her art, but not all. We didn’t even think about it. We had each other, we had the cats, and we were all okay.
Last night, we dimmed the lights (well, those lights that were still working) and snuggled down together in the living room to listen to Lake Wobegon stories.
“…And that’s what he felt: that this was the whole world right in front of him, and that Christmas was what was in that house. Whatever they did in that house, that was Christmas. And all of the other things that he thought were Christmas were not really. Christmas was in that house, and as long as they were all together, that would be all that they would need.”
