Their Blood Cries Out from the Earth
“Words aren’t enough—Dear God, help us all.”
If you look through the registry at Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda under the date of the 27th February 2007, you’ll find those words written. I know. I was there today.
We went, knowing it would be hard, hoping we had somehow managed to “prepare ourselves” as instructed. “There will be bodies in lime…and an over-representation of children…” they told us.
We arrived, met our guide, and walked past nicely built mass graves for the dead; the murdered. (Can you describe such a thing as nice?) Walked around these to a building—a long corridor with several doors opening onto it from the left side. It reminded me of an elementary school building, but was nothing like… Our guide unlocked them all, pushing open the metal doors and standing to the side. “You—go in!” He told us in broken English. (“My French is much better…” he had said.)
We stepped through the first door—dark and cool. Then we smelled it; something rotten; foul. Dead.
Bodies everywhere. Shrivelled. White. Lying on bed-boards with mattresses removed.
Room after room after room; bed after bed after bed.
Moved slowly in the dark confines of the room, looking. Covering my nose—but it didn’t work. You could still smell it.
I remember the story of Cain and Abel. Cain had just killed Abel, his brother, and God spoke to him.
Where is your brother? He wanted to know.
Am I my brother’s keeper? Cain returned, defensive. And God asked him,
What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.
And I look at the bodies and wonder, what have we done? Here brother has risen up against brother. Hutu and Tutsi and Tutsi and Hutu—they, who even sprang from the very same clan. How can this be?
I force myself to look. To look at each figure lying there before me; to memorise each face, gesture—every slightest detail.
A woman, clutching a baby to her chest. Vain efforts to shield and protect.
Here an arm extended out before the face; the figure raised up and resting on his shoulder. His arm extended as if to ward off a blow; his body permanently resting, raised up in that position—dreadful, fruitless waiting.
I count the rooms we enter—14. Try to count the bodies in a room but stop. The count makes me sick. For now it is enough to see the faces of these, the dead; the victims betrayed. Enough, even, to see but one. I need to know what to do with the faces—these expressions searing themselves on my mind.
Shock. Recognition. Horror. Resignation.
Pleading.
Hopelessness.
Dear God, why?
These are the faces of those staring out at me.
Help me understand this!
Tiny feet; toes curled and withered.
Shriveled ribs. Skulls dashed in.
I see the bullet holes shattering the bone; bone splinters sticking out like shards.
Beads around a woman’s neck. A man whose arms and legs nearly touch against his back—frozen in the wrenching distortions of pain, of agonizing death.
Tufts of hair. Teeth locked forever gnashing.
I look and wonder at it all. Think perhaps it is something I might find or should belong in the Tate Modern—an artist’s depiction of human sufferings. But these are not images created by an artist or creations formed from plaster, but the remains of once living, breathing people now covered in lime. This is no artist’s depiction of pain—it is the actual agony ruthlessly inflicted on my brothers and sisters; on their children and their parents and their siblings and friends. This is no art; it is a tragedy—a tragedy of life.
I leave the last room—room 14. Yes; 14 rooms of the contorted dead.
Stand on the pathway; funny how now everything is so different. Suddenly the flies whose buzzing sound barely annoyed before now makes me want to run. Run far away! I do not want to picture what their buzzing conjours up. Do not want to picture those same flies flitting just as happily around the bodies of those I have just seen. Do not want to envision their larvae growing in the eyes of those just gazing at me; crying out to me their stories of mortal anguish.
His blood cries out to me from the ground…Our guide moves us along, towards another set of buildings. Dear God, please no! I can’t bear to see anymore.
But now we see not bodies. No No bodies—but clothes. A room, big like a warehouse, with clothesline strung back and forth, wall to wall. Clothesline laden down under the weight of hundreds of blood-stained, muddied clothes.
I move slowly down the rows.
A child’s sock.
A bright yellow skirt.
Faded worker’s linen.
Clothes much like the styles I myself have worn.
Clothes ripped with bullets and shredded by machetes.
Oh God, why? Why this?
I look outside; turn, look around inside again. My companions—we are each turned away to the windows. Seeking solitude in our tumultuous thoughts? Struggling to reconcile the beauty of the surroundings with the tragedy we have now borne witness to? Asking the same questions that beg answer in me?
Our guide leads us back out, and the rust coloured path offends me.
He walks through puddles of water; I sidestep them—they do not look like water to me.
At the same time, I desperately want to wash the soles of my shoes—the bottoms of my feet. Want to wash off the dust of the dead. But I can’t. I won’t.
A deep ditch beside us—a mass grave, now exhumed. I look down into its epths. Picture the bodies I have just seen tossed into it; jumbled together. Some perhaps will alive.
Think of Daniel in the lions’ den. Why—why!—were these lions’ mouths not also shut? Where was the world in this? Before this? Where love which sees past differences, which embraces across ethnicity and titles? Why did we allow such hate to sprout and grow in our midst? What are we doing differently now?
What?
As we pull slowly out of the parking lot, the Rwandan flag waving a solemn farewell, I see the lone figure of a woman. She sits on a ridge overlooking the valley. Overlooking the dead. Her head is covered in lace, bowed low; her posture that of someone who bears too much of the weight of the world. Who that she loved met death in this place? Who, unlike me, never walked away from those barracks? And how many more will die the world around before her cries are heard? Hers and those like hers? Those who also have lost so senselessly?
I voice this question; but it is not mine alone.
Each of those bodies I saw today—they asked it of me. Their blood cries out from the earth.
Students I met with from the National University of Rwanda in Butare—students who have formed a peace organization and work so hard for the reconciliation and healing of their country. Who strive to find a history of peace within their culture; to bring a future of peace to their people and to those neighboring them. They each ask this question.
And that lady, shoulders slumped and head bowed; waiting. She asks this question.
And what shall be our answer?
What shall be our answer?
A Question of Peace
Picture for a moment, if you will, the violence you have personally borne witness to in your life. What images does your mind draw?
Any?
One or two?
When I was somewhere around the age of sixteen, I was walking home from the market with my sister. As we neared my house, a bloodcurdling shriek rent the air and a man burst through iron gates just down from the corner where we stood, transfixed. He wore a white t-shirt, and his strength seemed quite unchallengeable to look at his muscles; at the breadth of his chest; at the set of his neck and the baldness of his head. Yet, the scream that froze us to the ground exploded from his mouth.
And as we stood there on that corner, we saw him slump against the black car parked along the road. Saw two equally large men dash out the gates behind him, fury in their every move. One held a closed umbrella like a weapon in his fist—no ordinary umbrella; but a giant beach or table umbrella. And they both jumped him and pounded him. They dented the car with him and the weight of their blows.
Another scream of sheer, agonized pain and, perhaps, rage, and my sister and I scrambled off the corner and across the street. Not a moment too soon, either, for the man unpinned himself from the car and staggered to where we stood but thirty seconds earlier. We ran as fast as we could towards our house; somehow managing to simultaneously watch our feet and the unfolding scene.
He stumbled across the street on the other side of us, the two men right behind him. Still beating him. Screaming obscenities and calling curses upon him. As my sister and I burst through our own gate and dashed up the stairs to our flat, we looked behind. Saw the men leaving him; triumphant. Saw him slumped against the wire fence, his dead weight sagging it low towards the ground.
He turned out to have his arm broken in at least three places; his head cut, badly bruised all over, and his back bloodied through the remnants of the once white t-shirt.
That is the greatest picture of violence I have borne personal witness to which comes to my mind. Viewed from somewhat of a distance, acted out on someone I did not know. And see how much I remember, even all these years later? Do you see, too, all the words and feelings and horror that I could not put into words? Do you smell the smells and find the associations which I will never forget? Never separate from that moment in my history?
Now, take that, or take your own story, and multiply it. See how that one impacted you? Impacted me?
Here in Kigali, I meet peers every day—students much like myself or young adults the same age. And they have not just my one story. They have even up to fifty stories, or even more! Fifty personal horror stories—most of them acted out not on utter strangers such as the man in mine, but on family. On parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings, and children. On friends and teachers and schoolmates and neighbors. On people whose faces are dear and whose dying moments can never—will never—be forgotten.
Do you feel—can you begin to grasp or understand—the trauma? The heartache? The wondering… why did I have to survive!
Here I stand in the midst of it all; and I do not dare even begin to claim that I might understand the depth of pain. The depth of horror which must be worked through—silently, so silently! Each person alone with his or her memories. Some of those killed; others of killing. Many with both.
And the shame! The pain, the grief, and the shame. What if you killed your family in order to stay alive? How come you did not get out of the country earlier with your loved ones—they might still be there! What do you do with the burning shame that you were raped? Or that you turned the hunted away for fear of being caught yourself?
What happens when you smell that same smell again which was in the air when…it happened?
What happens when you see…that face again. The killer’s face. The rapist’s face. The face of the person who turned you away?
What happens when you see someone holding a shiny object?
I have had panic attacks before. I have even had panic attacks because something happens which happened in nightmares I used to have, and it all comes back to me and I remember… remember what? A dream? These people, they remember a reality every single day. They walk through the pain and the memories and the smells and the sights every single day!
Tell me how! Tell me how there is hope for peace, hope for hope in the face of such hideous horror. Such horrible pain?
I, 22 years old with one horror story barely my own; they, 22 years old with 50 horror stories directly related to and involving them.
There is no human hope for such inhumanity; no human possibility for reconciliation. And the idea of such atrocities finding redemption somehow—of those who committed such atrocities being redeemed—utterly preposterous!
So where is the hope in the face of hopelessness? Will there never be true peace—a peace in which people on both sides of clearly defined (but now technically illegal) lines stretch out their hands to each other in forgiveness, acceptance, and love? In which those lines are truly erased and not simply moved underground?
No government or NGO or any other body can dictate such a peace. No social strategist can arrange such a mercy.
Such a grace.
So can such a thing be achieved? Dare we dream for peace? Are we idiots who dare to hope for reconciliation? Who hope enough to strive for it?
Such a peace will not, ever, be spread from the pinnacles of government buildings nor from the darkest prison cells. But perhaps—yes, perhaps indeed—it can and will be spread one person to another to another. Spread by one who forgives and the restored forgiven in turn forgiving another. Spread in the manner of smiles—from one heart to the next until the country is infected not with the hate of genocide, but with the love of reconciliation and true peace.
And it is for this that we hope and we pray and we strive—one story, one person, one name at a time.
travel instructions...
We leave tomorrow for a four day trip here in Rwanda. Mostly we will be in or around Kibuye, and mostly we look forward to the trip. New sights; a breath of fresh air; time at a lake.
This has been a long week. Difficult emotionally. We study and observe and absorb so much; ask questions that have no answers or questions that simply are not allowed. What can we do with it all? Processing takes so much time. So much energy that has already been drained from us. We fall into bed exhausted at 21:30, with a migraine, with too many more questions.
This trip, we look forward to it, yes. But we also dread it. On the last day--the day we will return to Kigali--we will stop at yet another genocide memorial. "Prepare yourselves; you will see the dead bodies preserved in lime...and there is an over-representation of children among the dead."
Tell me, how are we to prepare ourselves for something such as that?
The only dead I have ever seen have been peaceful, laid at comfortable rest.
How are we to prepare ourselves for seeing so many dead bodies killed so horribly?
Or is that just their warning to bring lots of tissues and be prepared to be ill?
Because I don't know. I want to know. How...?
I Went to Court in Rwanda...
The year? 1994.
The place? Rwanda.
I was there today [Sunday]. Just a little glimpse, but a glimpse nonetheless.
How, you wonder?
The Gacaca Courts—that’s pronounced Gachacha, by the way.
All these years after the genocide, the trials roll on today, trying to bring the tiniest sense of justice to people whose lives have never been—will never be—the same. People whose loved ones were brutally torn away—and torn apart. Who were themselves torn up. Who perhaps were themselves, even, among those wreaking havoc and spreading death without quite grasping the horror and utter blasphemy of their own actions.
I went to the court today to observe the proceedings. I was there for six hours, listening to the accusations, the testimonies, the evidence, the debate, and finally, the verdict. Sitting there in a room where tension and raw emotion bubbled in the silence, growing steadily until becoming practically tangible.
Plain and small, the room filled up with people dressed in their best. Children played quietly at their mothers’ feet or suckled at their breasts. Men and women and youth crowded hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder on long benches—10 and 11 strong on raw wood planks only comfortably seating eight. In the air hovered the sticky-sweet smell of sweat, alleviated only by the occasional breeze through the open windows.
In the front, a panel of eight judges presided from a long table, sitting behind it and wrapping around on the end to the right, by the windows. They wore a ribbon across their chest, coloured in the three shades of the Rwandan flag, with Gacaca printed across the front. Male and female both, and at their entrance from the back of the room, all those congregated rose and sat down only when the judges had taken their seats. Behind them also draped the colours of the Rwandan flag, artistically swirling across the otherwise bare beige wall.
Five men were tried—four of whom had spent the last ten years in prison. Two of whom were acquitted of the charges brought against them.
I sat there today, listening. Watching.
In the afternoon, one of the defendants stood before the room, dressed in his all pink prison garb. And the room listened in an angry hush. Listened and rose up and testified against him in turn.
He dragged my grandfather out of the house and out into the banana plantation. Then he chopped him to pieces with his machete. He told my sister he was going to rape her…
I watched him strip my father naked, then beat him to death. He was our gate keeper, and in the genocide rounded up our family. I was hiding under the table, hidden by the cloth. But I saw the whole thing. I was six years old.
I saw him coming out of the school, and his sword was red with blood.
He killed my sister and her children…
And so it went. Testimony after agonizing testimony. Do you weep? No, wipe your tears. The eyes of those around you are fierce with holding back the fervor of their own. Now is not the time for weeping.
Tell us the names of those who killed with you.
I don’t know their names, but I can tell you the names of the people I killed…
Should you feel ill at the words colouring the pictures sketched in your mind?
Tell us where those you killed are buried. We want to know where they are buried. We want to know where our family lies…
But these pictures, they are nothing to the actuality you would have seen had you walked those streets then, had you seen the defendant then, when he carried the dripping red sword and seared you with the hate in his eyes. Chased you, and you escaped him…until today. When you face him again. Who will win today?
Who should win today?
If the government allows, I will take them to the pit where the bodies were thrown…
Should today be seen as winning something? Or is it just one more testament to a loss which cannot be measured numerically alone?
…He admits to killing her and her family, and asks for forgiveness…
Please do not clap or make any noise when the sentences are read, the judge in the centre instructs. He has a huge scar tracing an arc across the front half of his skull.
His was not the only scar borne by someone in the room, either. Others. Scars on their arms, their legs… hidden by clothes and scarves. Scars on the heart. Seared onto the soul.
30 years.
25 years.
25 years.
One is acquitted because of insufficient evidence. The other acquitted because he was falsely accused.
And how different are we sitting there, staring up at them? If our hearts were on trial beside theirs, what might that comparison reveal?
May God have mercy on us all.
Never Happen Again
Sometimes there really isn't much to say. And sometimes there is so much that words simply will not suffice.
Weary... drained...exhausted.
What do you do with a genocide?
Guilt...anger...resentment...fear.
What answers are you willing to accept?
Kigali seems so very unlike Kampala; I had not realised how great the difference might be. People here do not have the exuberance of life which bubbles endlessly out of the Ugandans I have met; I like the relative quiet of this city and yet it simultaneously disturbs me.
I enjoy a nice morning run through the streets. But I am loathe to think what this same street may have looked like 12 years ago. My view overlooks the city; what am I really looking at when I watch the world move around?
These stories...."my brother was 17. we never knew where he is buried." "I watched my parents arms cut off." And we walk through the memorials, pass flower baskets with signs which read "never happen again."
I love peace. I want peace for the world--that is one of the reasons I now find myself here, contemplating all of these things. But I don't know... I think it probably will happen again. Somehow it always does. Did they not say the same thing after the holocaust? I have seen the concentration camps of WWII, and I have walked through bombed out cities and been told where not to walk because of mine fields. I have passed through the museums and stood before the memorials. Read the names. Stared at the piles of hair and the piles of eyeglasses; at the addresses on mountains of luggage that never went home. I have cried with those who have never forgotten; listened to the stories of those who had nothing else left. Read the histories and the commentaries. Seen the tanks roll past and the planes fly overhead. Played with the orphans. Seen the faces of the dead.
And I think...it always happens again.
It makes a person feel so little and so helpless. What can one person do? Why even bother to struggle against such evil? When will it ever truly end? Not in my lifetime, sure.
Will it?
Will it?
Travel & the Measuring of Life
We are on our way to Rwanda now; left the park and have already passed the Rift Valley. Uganda is such a beautiful country. In this region, there are banana plantations everywhere, and tea plantations as well. They sprawl in all their teal and gentle green coloured splendor on the slopes of the rolling hills. Everywhere you look you find this soft lushness.
Occassionally a mud hut will pop into view; sometimes round with grass or banana roofing, still other times rectangular with tin roofing. Always built with a wooden frame holding together the mud brickwork. We pass through villages much like the one I stayed in on my rural visit outside of Mbarara, with the shoe-box style concrete houses. Each has a cool cement slab of a patio in front of it, and if coloured, usually either mustard yellow or bright turquoise.
I love all the tin roofs; the men cutting grass at the road’s edge with their machetes. School children walk along the way in their uniforms—sometimes green and gold, or all blue, or blue with red knit sweaters, and even pink gingham on occasion! Women with their babies tied on their backs, carrying enormous woven mats rolled up or baskets of bananas on their heads. Young girls lugging the yellow jugs of water through the reeds, trudging back from some water source far beyond eyesight—jugs which may contain even up to ten litres of water.
I love the bright colours and prints of the clothing, worn proud and elegantly even when well worn and dirt covered. Love the beautiful head scarves, and the cement buildings with their slab of wall painted that bright turquoise or mustard yellow—bursts of radiance in an already vibrant scene.
Here in Uganda, they drive as they do in England, on the left side of the road. It is, after all, a country colonized by the British, and though colonialism per se has ended, it is a period of neo-colonialism now. Remnants of the colonial years are everywhere; the influence of it still strong. Queen Elizabeth National Park. School uniforms for children. Driving on the left side. None of these bother me, but that the Ugandan Constitution is written in English…this does prick something.
While true, Uganda has so many languages that choosing one for the legal concerns would prove quite difficult, still at least if one must choose an international language not native to the country, perhaps Swahili at least would be a more pertinent option? This at least is a language of East Africa, and many people across the country understand it if they do not also speak it. This language they could own and use with confidence. Try arguing legal matters before an international audience in a borrowed language and you will likely loose the dispute; you do not have control over the language. Those who own a language have the ability to manipulate it.
It will be interesting to compare and contrast the experiences of Uganda and Rwanda.
On our way to Safari, we passed through a police check—a road block, really. They had down on the road (still paved at that point) boards with long metal spikes rising from them; metal hands flagging you to stop and ready to tear you apart should you ignore their warning. Our driver, happily, knew one of the police—a woman—and we were able to pass through without trouble. She had apparently just received a transfer from the city to that location. Moses (our driver) was not sure why the block was up, but said that the road we were on had many problems with burglars. We assumed that, then, was the reason, but who can really say?
Who can ever really say?
Everywhere we drive, people wave to us from the fields they work by hand under the burning sun. I have decided that the smiles which light up their faces and spread to our own are among the most beautiful sights in the whole world. Certainly they are an actual experience I would loathe to miss.
Papyrus and Eucalyptus plants line the roadside today as we travel down towards the border, and the earth runs a rich red beneath us. Indescribably beautiful. We are weaving our way through the hills, and occasionally they open up and we see beneath us deep, long stretching valleys. Occasionally a truck passes by, loaded under the weight of bananas and the twenty plus people clinging to the metal framework in the back, over which a tarp might ordinarily be draped.
And I wonder at the things we seek after, which we claim give us the quality of life, or the purpose of it. Because here, little of the things we seek after exist, and yet the richness found here runs deep, and cannot be measured on the scales we construct.
Announcement of Arrival
I have arrived today in Kigali, Rwanda. And I will soon have a good deal more to say about that and other things as well. So stay tuned!
What do you see?
We listened today to the heart of a man here who bleeds for this country, for Uganda. And he wanted to know what we have seen, and felt, and hurt for since our arrival. What we bleed for. I think it may take a long while to answer that question.
Friday morning I'll be on my way to Rwanda for the next good while. Friday morning will also make it 5 weeks of being here in Africa now. When I first arrived, I would have much preferred to be elsewhere. Now, there is nowhere else I'd rather be, nothing else I'd rather do, than living this experience.
It's truly that amazing.
And I cannot wait to see all you my friends in person and explain why.
speaking in church on Sunday
After church, lunch at a "Western place" that the pastor took us out to.
learning how to
dance...
At the orphanage Sunday afternoon/evening...
Just Another Day in Africa...
(Written Monday, the 5th Feb)
Every day in Africa means adventure for the misplaced muzungu… Today, of course, was no different. At 8:30, we begin our first class of the day at Makerere University here in Kampala… and a bus comes to pick us up and carry us there. This morning? No bus…
So, after a while, we call to find out what happened. Oh, you have class today? We didn’t realize that…
Ha. We only always have class at Makerere at 8:30 on Mondays…. So of course it would be natural to assume we didn’t have it today? Though we do rather wish…Development Economics for 3 hours on a Monday morning is not quite our idea of how to start off the week…
Well, we still don’t get a bus… we get… a matatu. That’s right.
For the 19 of us who usually fit comfortably in a bus… we squeezed 21 into a little old matatu—which technically only have maximum seating for what, 16 or 18? But it’s okay. There is always room for one more. Even if it means the conductor sits on your lap for the entire journey…
Expect the unexpected, we say…
After lecture, a few of us stayed on campus to do research and have consultations with our professor. All fine there… except that our professor went missing after a while and it is hard to make any sense of the library cataloguing system…
Now…usually the bus takes us back to where we live. But no bus today, remember?
SO, under an increasingly black sky, the 6 of us who stayed on campus decide we’re ready to leave. Right.
How?
We don’t know. We’ve only ever been driven here… Do we want to take a matatu back? Not really… oh right! We’re students! We don’t have money! So… we walk.
Do we know the way?
Of course we do! Look for the big mosque in the city and head towards it. When we get to it, then turn (almost a right angle) and you’ll be there no problem. It will just take…a while.
But we decide to experiment. Let’s just stay in the hills and not go into the city…do an arc instead of a right angle. It’s all in the maths…
So we head out, locate the hill that we want, use the mosque as our north star for orienting ourselves, and everything should be fine. Right?
Right. Although I suppose not many people I know can say that they walked a quarter of the way in the company of a half naked crazy man who muttered and flailed his arms and ran up and down and round about us. We were not sorry to leave him behind. Not sorry at all…
And up up up the hill we climbed, stepping over ruts, our feet twisting painfully in our loose sandals, dodging oncoming traffic that I am convinced speeds up at the sight of us in its path… Calling oli otya ebana to the children waving to us (here they do not cry at the sight of white skin) and smile… Commenting on the gigantic birds that roam this city (Side note: My roomie calls them “Walking Death” and I have concluded that they are the remains of the teradactyl or pterodactyl or whatever that flying dinosaur was called… And one of these days you will find a book called Guardians of the City and you will know it’s a horror-suspense novel I have written with them in mind) and shuddering at the sight of them holding open their giant wings to the breeze…
And finally, finally we make it to the top of the hill… having chosen our streets the whole way with the mosque and the hill we marked in mind… And we do not know where we are until suddenly, above us—heaven!
No, just our home. And so we trudge wearily back in, faces red; backs drenched with the sweat of our effort. Drop our computers that have beyond all doubt gained weight in the course of our walk; splash water and scrub with soap; and race to catch the end of lunch.
And we sit, sipping our sodas out of glass bottles with straws, and my roomie looks at me and says, “You know, it amazes me how so many people we know will never experience the things that we just did today. Who will never know what it’s like to squeeze 21 people into a dinky little matatu and hope you don’t tip over on the way…” And when she puts it like that, I have to agree. We did have a pretty amazing day… and I’m pretty glad that we were able to experience it. What a wealth of memories we get to collect! And all that to add to the wealth we already pull out and enjoy.
I love the adventure.
The getting sick and throwing up in a toilet is pretty rotten, but oh my goodness—I’m in Africa, hey! The hot nights that make you think of the snow everyone else is getting…and then smile because you got to avoid it and enjoy 8 months of summer instead… the men trying to buy you as their 3rd wife off of the guys you are out in the city with… I love going to the market with people who know how to work it… or learning to cook over charcoal on the ground outdoors… playing with little children… kneeling at the feet of elders and soak up knowledge. Learning to belly dance. (Yes, I’ve even got pictures of that!) To feel the cut and pain of learning a new culture; a culture which will never ever fully leave you, but find some ways to cling to you for the rest of your life. To remember that change is adventure, and that while lonely and frightening… it is also a blessed freeing.
So my love-hate relationship right now with adventure has finally veered again to the love side of it, and I am loving it even though I do not even still always like everything about it.
And today? Just another day here. But what days they are!
Morning Reflections
I sit here on the cool cement terrace, surrounded by the palm trees and beautiful tropical flowers and shrubs, breakfasting on Blue Bonnet covered toast and freshly brewed, steaming coffee. Below me rests Kampala, nestled softly in the morning mist covering the valley, like a sleeping child bundled up against the dark and cold. Kampala—the City of Seven Hills, as a sign by the parliament proudly declares.
From my vantage, the quietness of the morning seeps into my consciousness till I feel as much at peace and rest as the city below appears. Even at this early hour, though, I know that should I wander into its closer precincts, I would find it very much awake—teeming with life as the markets open, the hawkers raise their voices not yet hoarse, and the matatu’s honk their way through already bustling, narrow streets.
But I do not wander down, and instead continue to sip quietly from my coffee, aware of the awakening city but far removed from its fray.
It is strange to me sometimes, this city. Strange in its striking familiarity. If I believed in reincarnation, perhaps I might believe myself to have lived here once before, though this city as it is cannot be that much older than myself today.
Coming here—breathing this air and pacing these streets—why? What brought me here? Yes, my studies. Yet, why here to this place particularly, at this present time, this very now?
I watch the dawning sun poke its still gentle rays through the mist, light spreading slowly across the valley floor, reflecting off the minarets of the mosques and the windows of the high rises. Beautiful. Can I say more to describe it?
I know I came here seeking vision. A vision. I know not of what. And I am aware that, like the dawn, a vision is indeed creeping slowly—stealing softly—into my heart. Though I cannot as yet see in its light, I begin to feel its growing presence there.
Tell me, I asked someone the other week, what does the map of your life look like? She, a woman of strength and character, whom I deeply respect even after so short an acquaintance, replied she did not know, except that it all seemed very disjointed to her. This feeling I know well. Has my life not also seemed this way? Been this way?
Here I sit, nigh on 22 years, and the map of my life has taken me to seven countries already—this being my eighth—in which I have lived or studied or worked for varying but deeply relevant periods of time. And how many continents does that make now—4! And how many different schools and educational systems? How many cultures and languages? And what—what, I ask, have they all in common? Have they anything? My life, yes, also seems very disjointed. Even who I am one place many not be—usually is not—who I am in another, at least not at first glance.
Now here I am, in this yet another world. In this city where it seems I have somehow seen or known or understood or faced everything without having ever set foot on its red earth before. What, what hidden treasure does this place, the “Pearl of Africa,” have for me? I will not go away unsatisfied.
And that—might that be the key? Such a simple concept; satisfaction. What makes us satisfied? In the places I have lived, I have surely not always tasted the sweetness of satisfaction, of contentment. Yet who is at fault for that save myself?
Looking at the city, I know I can as easily be satisfied and joyful—content—here as dissatisfied and unhappy. Here or anywhere, even.
I believe that life is always offering us its fullness, and the great blessings thereof, but as with any offering, they must be first accepted to be enjoyed. I do not think everything in life is good or easy or comforting—my own tears would quickly make a mockery of such a lie. But I do believe, fervently; passionately, that there may spring good from the greatest evil; flow joy in the midst of deepest sorrow; peace in the worst uncertainty; and satisfaction in the most difficult of situations.
Vision is not seeing but believing. It is inexorably tied to hope. Hope is what we hold onto when all else fails. Hope in what? That answer determines whether our hope itself will fail and we fall into despair along with its ashes.
Joy springs from a faithfully held hope—a hope that is faithful and fails not; a hope we cherish and hold fast to no matter what, no matter where. Joy then, is not easily come by, but it is the most natural result, and perhaps the greatest reward, of a faith-filled, faithful life.
In a film I watched growing up (Anne of Green Gables, I think), one line in particular has long stood out to me; “To despair is to turn your back on God.” I do not know at this particular moment that I agree entirely with this definition, but I do agree that despair occurs when we fail to hold onto hope—onto the only hope which will not fail us, and the many promises of that great hope.
When we find ourselves beginning to despair, to feel hopeless, and to wander in the darkness of our own minds, we must stop and give ourselves a jolt. To what are we facing if we no longer see hope?
Hope is unshakeable, infallible, if it is the hope of God. And that being such, then it has not moved. Thus if we do not see it anymore, that fault is our own. Hope does not depend; it is dependable. God is dependable. He Is, and He alone.
And now I go back; back to the me sitting on a terrace overlooking a strange and strangely familiar city, deep in the heart of Africa. Back to the me seeking after a new vision. After a vision. After God’s vision, for my life. Do I know yet what it is? Have I “found” it yet? No, I think not, though again, I do believe it is beginning to grow in me.
But for now, for this moment, for this me looking out at the glorious sunrise over the hills, maybe there has been at least a lesson learned? Something spoken in the silence here?
I can be content; I can be discontent. I can have joy or I can reject it. I can choose to like and eat a certain food or I can wrinkle my nose and allow myself the displeasure of disliking it.
It is a simple thing… that life and love and peace and joy and true satisfaction do not revolve around where we are, what we have or do, nor whom we are with; but rather how we, in the deepest, greatest, most central part of our very being, our ousia, abide. Do we abide in the hope of God? This is our daily; nay, our moment by moment and breath by breath decision. And it is this choosing, this willing, this being that sets for us both the course and the satisfaction of our lives.
Our lives may be disjointed. We hurt; we ache, we puzzle and cry. We fail to understand. We get caught up in everything we are taught—both deliberately and unconsciously—matters. We hold on; fight, plot, and scheme; reaching for the light and groping blindly in the darkness. We forget, and so we lose.
But the truth is so simple.
Satisfaction is not in what we make in, of, or bring to life, but in accepting with open—if not yet joyful—heart the life God gives to us, and living that life in the hope of His unbroken and unbreakable promises.
“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord.” ~Jeremiah 29:11-14
“‘I took you from the ends of the earth, from its farthest corners I called you. I said, “You are my servant;” I have chosen you and have not rejected you. So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.’” ~Isaiah 41: 9-10
