A Look Back to a Punch in the Face, and Haiti

A few weeks ago, when Haiti soared into the international consciousness (and out of the murky space where objects of denial are stored), my trip to East Africa was already on my mind. I'd been working on the website of a woman I got to know while there, who runs a touring company. She needed the language on her site translated from King's English into succinct, marketable prose. As I revised the blurbs and referenced my journal entries from two years ago, I was consumed with emotive memories of what I have since termed my 'punch in the face' cultural experience. It was the trip to the Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali, Rwanda that colored a worldview just coming into focus. There isn't an awakening when you let in the people you have not seen before: when you just accept that there is incomprehensible struggle and pain all over the world for millions who have no access to that great ladder of opportunity Americans love talking about, that's merely when the empathy starts. It is one thing to know it. It's another to see it. To try and change it, to grow the ladder down, honestly it looked possible from the bottom.

A few weeks before, we drove down a dirt road to a settlement in the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda. We were visiting a satellite of a nonprofit that offered classes in trades and mentors for the enrolled teens. Someone asked if we could walk around the village (all shacks and clay floors), but our guide said that the rivulets flowing in front of the homes, was sewage, and we would not be safe. Inside the open room of the organization's outpost, we sat on the floor and talked with the girls, most younger than me, all former sex workers. They were shy but kind, probably used to this type of strange visit.

A few days before that, in the van driving through Kampala's unmarked streets, my friend noticed a woman at a rotary. "A woman with the signs of age wrinkling her face, gray on her head- but likely in her forties, such is the degradation from poverty here (see I am angry now, not sad) and she begged at the cars driving by, near a child no more than three asleep on the red clay curb, covered in grime and sleeping inside a diesel fuel quilt, under the midday sun. Then I hung my head lower, and grieved for my ignorance."

The next day we drove past a small park with trees and a sunburned field. I noticed there were men lying all over the grass. "Prostrate, bending the grass beneath them, the men pulled their bodies to the earth with gravity. And they prayed, fingers to the dirt. Face down, they would wait longer. A single plea articulated from this position- take me back. From the tissue kissing the ground, cells parted periodically, abandoning the men for the hope of distant futures. As the men pleaded, resolving the body beneath them to earth, there lasted a moment of dissolve. Energized cells to unite terrestrial bodies, countless more granules of earth than cells of these men, which were deafening against the silent red clay, who wished to leave their years."

I called it a punch in the face because it should hurt. It should leave a mark. It might even break something, just enough cartilage to heal differently. It won't make you ugly or anything, just altered, like you're seeing out of sharper lenses, smelling out of keener nostrils.

Look at the globe, in terms of resources. Where are the puppet governments? Where are the occupations? Where have the British been? Now look at it in terms of genocides. And poverty. And natural disasters. Where does the aid go? When does the aid go? How long until we stop paying attention? We are a strange species, incredibly adaptable, and yet drawn to the status quo. Someone said to me yesterday, it's easier to be afraid than to learn. What do you do more?

So when all of a sudden people started caring about Haiti on January 12th, I thought of Rwanda, and Yugoslavia. To those who devote their voices like ventriloquists to amplify the muted clamor of neglected populations, who watched as a disaster (regretfully common, actually, for this tiny nation, if not in this scale) catalyzed the media to bring microphones galore to the Haitian people, you must have been frustrated. Like the big red warning light was always on but no one else would see it until the quake. That's a bittersweet surprise, after working for Haiti and other forgotten countries, for it to be picked from the international cause lottery.

Suggested Reading/Viedos:
"Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer" (Haiti) By Tracy Kidder
"We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch
"Bush Was Responsible for Destroying Haitian Democracy" Randall Robinson on Democracy Now! (transcript and video)
"Confessions of an Economic Hitman" (Corporate, World Bank, and CIA involvement in international 'coups') by John Perkins
"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa" by Adam Hochschild
TED Talk: James Nachtwey's Searing Photos of War

That Balancing Act

Today I laid down on a table and let skilled hands hold my neck. They coaxed the spasm out of my muscle fibers, and the competing sides of my psyche into the diplomatic arena of my core. Together, my core, my pragmatism, my, for lack of a better word, wisdom, and her hands and careful words began to unwrap my resolve and thus, my energy, from its visceral constraints. With two words I felt skin, tendons, muscles, veins, bones dissolve into sand and spread across the table. No longer wound into a space, I was expansive.

I can.

A few minutes before I had confessed: "I crave the woods, that blankness, that silence. And yet I have all but avoided them. My body itches for escape. All I want, many times a day, is to see nothing but the interstate rolling out ahead of me. Or the trail."
"Why aren't you on the interstate right now? Why aren't you on the trail?"
"I have to be working. Because I don't have the right gear; I don't want to spend that money on the gear. I have to work to afford my next escape."
"How often do you need to escape? Listen to your body."
"I don't know, I wait until I have no choice. Maybe once a week would even be enough." My brain was stubborn, ignoring the pain in my neck, exercising my stamina for discomfort.
Then, as I felt my fingers become rocks off kilter with my body, weighted down by unfamiliar arms, the mischievous current of a plan negotiated the fibers of my body, gathering toward fruition. She waited for me to speak. Then, as though something inside me fell asleep and another part awoke, muddy patterns appeared behind my eyes. These unfocused black holes for the light shining in the window accompanied a blankness. My thoughts eroded, emotions receded, body weighted merely by gravity on the table.
"Wow. That was a huge blankness." She waited.

"I feel the need to exhale. Like something is going to happen that will open my days, so that they are not constrained and defined and shrunken by obligations and routine and expectations but as open as the woods or the road. I'm waiting for something to happen, I'm practicing patience for the moment when I can breathe out."
"What do you think that will be?" Her fingers loosen, find new targets of pressure.
"I know it's something I have to make. Patience is a good exercise, but I think I have to make that exhale."
"You just answered from a different place. Let me ask you this. Can you balance your pragmatism, that you need to work now, with your craving for the woods?" And of course I knew. That was the thread of exhilaration, the plan whose course through me was unwrapping all the bindings of routine, the absorbed, artificial urgency of those rushing around me.
"I can use my work to get the gear I need. I have enough time during the week to spend the time I need out in the woods. I can have control over my day just by falling asleep outdoors in silence, and waking as my body needs."
"Did you feel that?"
"It felt like my body let go and spread like sand onto the table."
"Your energy just became so expansive." With my eyes closed, a yellow light was radiating out from my heart.
"Where did that come from? The 'I can.'"
"My core."
"Good, now, what will give you control about sleeping outside?"
"I've felt my body want to change its circadian rhythm. I think I'm just craving silence. But sharing the house as I am prevents that change." As I laid there, a tear of relief gathered volume in the corner of my left eye. Her hands hovered over my skull, fingers touching the hood of the tissue connected to my spasm-ing shoulder. The pieces of my life I thought I might have to let go, the obligations I worried were sources of my stress, were not mutually exclusive with the blankness I crave. Sure, simplicity at the house I live in isn't going to happen, too many people who create clutter live here. But this isn't really my home. The trail was/is home, and nothing had earned that title since I was a teenager. The quiet calm of windy winter woods, the crisp vacuum of urban stimulation, could afford me something similar, if not identical to the trail. And those hours of solitude, that rest in the open air, that I have known I needed since September, might just balance out the rest of it. Because I also need to work, and play with friends, and write and write and write.
And then our time was up.