This is from a friend of a friend on FB, so no, I can't post an attribution. But it is still an interesting read in the context of this particular time.
In Praise of Shitholes
At last count, I’ve traveled, worked, and lived in 68 countries around the world. Many were in the midst of war and famine themselves or were neighbors to countries suffering war and famine at the times of my visits. In short, they had many of the characteristics of what a person from a wealthy, stable nation might consider a “shithole.”
Here’s the funny thing: I loved those trips, and I have warm and vivid memories of people I met in those places. Suffering and strife tend to burn away the superfluous to reveal more clearly that divine spark that resides in all of us.
• In Rwanda in June of 1994, in the immediate aftermath of a nationwide, retail genocide, I roamed the country with a couple Tutsi members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a man and a woman. Bodies were everywhere. When we encountered someone they knew, their greetings were long, emotional and effusive. This was not a cultural trait – Rwandan Tutsis tend to be somewhat reserved. It was an outpouring of the raw, authentic gratitude at finding one another alive.
• In Mogadishu, Somalia I was at the port one day when it was controlled by three competing sub-clans in an uneasy suspension of hostilities. While I was there a firefight broke out about 200 yards from where I was standing. To avoid catching any stray 7.62 mm rounds, I hunkered down next to the wheel of a large wreck of a truck. Twenty feet away, in the open, a Somali man sat on a milk crate calmly chewing khat, the ubiquitous leafy narcotic of the region. He asked me, “Are you afraid?” I said yes, I would not like to be hit with a bullet. He thought about that for a few moments, chewing, and asked, “If you are afraid, why do you come here?” I believed it to be an honest query, not an insult. He could not imagine, for himself, dignifying an exchange of gunfire some distance away with crouching. And that was a common cultural trait among Somalis, one that helped me better understand the events of Blackhawk Down that occurred a year later.
• During that trip to Somalia, I also visited a very basic treatment center established by an international medical organization. Victims of gunfights were carried there and worked on by doctors, nurses, and physician assistants doing everything they could to save lives. There was no blood supply – family members of the victim were relied upon for that. One guy was brought in while I was there. He had been shot in the stomach and was alone – no family or friends. The nurse asked me if I could spare a pint of blood for him. I hadn’t given blood for years – the American Red Cross didn’t want it because of all my travel in Africa. I watched as the bag of my blood was taken into the other room and immediately put to use. I did not learn his name and do not know whether he survived that wound.
• In southern Sudan one year, I was in a famine zone where food was being airlifted in on a C-130 aircraft. Locals lined up well in advance of the plane’s arrival to be sure that they could get a share. When I was there, two men dressed in clothing made of rough blankets and burlap food sacks stepped out of line to ask me, a rare foreign visitor, if I might have a battery or two for their radio so they could listen to the BBC Africa service coverage of the war in Sudan. They were as hungry for news as they were for food.
• Years later, in a remote part of the now independent nation of South Sudan, I was in a camp filled with refugees from fighting in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. I spoke at length with one family composed of an older man, his daughter, his niece, and their five children who made the trek on foot over the course of 30 days. One of the children was just a baby at the time, and her mother carried her in a basket hanging from one side of pole across her back, balanced with their other meager belongings on the other side. They were a close family unit living in a well-tended compound that they had built for themselves with local wood and some materials provided by the UNHCR. The uncle had a beautiful, well trained dog, obviously devoted to this family, who had made the trek with them.
I could go on and on. The boy grilling goat meat at the side of the road in Guinea, the Afghan protection detail trainee who was late to class because he stopped to defuse a bomb near a school, the Lao Revolutionary Youth Brigade volleyball players who invited me into their game, the Liberian ebola survivor who struggles still with guilt and stigma.... So many stories.
These places of strife and struggle and suffering produce extraordinary, resilient, damaged, brilliant, brutal, holy, crazy, wonderful people. They are, like all societies, a mixed bag. But unlike those of us from non-shithole places, many of them have been tested in dramatic ways.
In some circumstances, just surviving is a considerable achievement. Surviving with one’s compassion and humanity intact is a triumph of heroic proportions. I’ve met some of these heroes – our brothers and sisters – in the shitholes of the world and I am much the better for it.
(And, by the way, I’ve also been to Norway. I really liked it there too.) |
