Caring and Feeling

We have a saying out here on the east side of Uganda. “First you stop caring, then you stop feeling” It comes about from dealing with the darkness, danger, and human suffering that is part of living in a nation like Uganda.  It is not meant as a serious expression.  It’s more of a dark commentary on the psychological aspects of what it means to have this job, “The toughest job you’ll ever love”.  You learn to look past all the things that you cannot help which inhabit your existence.  It’s how you travel unrestrained in an overstuffed taxi speeding down a torn and crowded road, knowing one small mishap could be your death.  It’s how you run through traffic when the drivers are not liable and care little, then continue walking without a response even in thought when you get clipped.  It’s how you walk past a dozen street children digging through garbage on your way to a restaurant.  You can’t do any good if you go home every night and cry.  Giving all your money away to the point of your own poverty will only hurt you and perpetuate a cycle of dependence which is crippling development. 

If you want to make progress, affect change, be anything more than an economic stimulus.  You need to pick your battles.  Know what change can be made.  Know what interventions cause you to lose credibility.   As a teacher, I see caneings every day; teachers beating children, shaming; demoralizing them for what is often little reason.  If I were to stand up and try to stop these activities, I may well be successful in some small degree.  They might cease in my presence or just wait till I am gone.   But it would be the end of my effective service in my community.  They would think I am week, out of touch with their culture, trying to impose foreign values on the discipline they “know” their students need.  I am not here to protect my own sensibilities.  A Peace Corps Volunteer persists through hardship of mind and body in an attempt to make a difference.   So you take the slow route, the only route. 

You pick up a hoe, go outside, and turn over the earth around your house.  You do this because it is what those around you do.  It is there lively hood, a traditional way of life which goes beyond memory.  With sweat laden brow and blistered palm you great your neighbors as they walk past.  Sowing seeds, you tend to their growth weeding, watering, harvesting.  It’s not about being successful it’s about effort. 

Understand your best work is done sitting under a mango tree, sharing a cup of tea or ear of roasted maize.  Ask as many questions as you answer.  Open your mind, quit judging those around you.  Your moral sense, ideas of right and wrong, understanding of appropriate, image of the world and how people fit into it, these are just one interpretation on existence, an interpretation which may not be shared by those in your village.  If there is such a thing as validity in such matters, that judgment is beyond me. 

Every day you walk, greet, talk, share, laugh, and grow.  You do this without judging, condemning, or acting paternal.  You can never become one of them, but you can become accepted.  Perhaps, after six months or more you will feel it.  People smile at your presence.  Not because you are a symbol of pride for the community or the money you represent.  They smile with the warmth of friendship and trust.  You cease to be an interloper, a foreigner who does not understand or accept.  Somehow you have become a member of the community, a part of the tribe.  Reaching this point is a triumph in its own right. 

                This is when the subtle work begins.  Sitting one on one with a friend sharing a moment, you bring up a subject like alternative discipline.  In your time with them you have handled your class your own way.  Yes there have been difficulties, but there has also been success.  You have adapted to your students and they have adapted to you.  It’s just a conversation.  You are not saying one way is better.  They are simply different.  Perhaps there is some value in different.  If there is one thing I do know it is you cannot tell someone anything and expect them to take it to heart.  All the best lessons are learned through self discovery, when the genesis of action comes from within.  This may not be the fastest way to affect change.  But I do believe there is power in friendship and mutual understanding.  You do this because you do care, because you still feel, even if you can’t feel it all at once.  

It’s a hell of a thing really.  When pity and fear are replaced with understanding and acceptance, the mind becomes open to joys it would never have known.  It allows you walk down a dirty poverty ridden street in a torn city while you bite into the sweat juicy flesh of a floret of jack fruit and have the beautiful thought “this must be what sunshine taste like”.  You are free to sit in the taxi feeling the wind on your face that smells of charcoal fires and rain, enjoying the golden light of sunset casting the shadows of clouds on mountains of emerald and scarlet.  After all there is a heart behind every hand which holds a cane in violence.  If you allow yourself, you may just find that heart.  And find yourself better off with a friend. 

I was staying in Mbale one night when I was awoke at 2:30 in the morning to the sound of screaming.  A man was being beaten.  The impact of a cane clearly resonated.    The cries were broken by the fluid building in his throat.  It went on for an hour.  Eventually the screams stopped, but the impacts of the cane still cut the night air.  I sat there knowing I was safe, locked in a room, bars on the windows.  No one even knew I was there.  And I listened; it was all I could do.  My reach could not affect this. 

I don’t know what happened, who was involved or why.  I didn’t sleep anymore that night.  Instead I stayed up and wrote this.  As much as you want to be disconnected at times, no matter how much you need not to feel, the pounding waves of the world will eventually crash on the shores of your heart.