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
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
posted by Sara Haxby at
10:41 AM
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