February 2008 Archives

This post is the body of an email I sent to my friends from the Uganda trip.

One of the things that struck me about the trip was that "macro" poverty - what we could see from the street, for instance - wasn't nearly as bad as "micro" poverty - the glimpse inside someone's home, the children playing with piles of burning trash. The more you dug the worse poverty looked and smelled and felt. The details are what matter.

I think that is what I'm struggling with in my own life - the details. I don't feel guilty for my life. I don't feel guilty about my comfort. I don't understand the massive inequality between what I have and what others don't. I don't understand their suffering and my relative lack of suffering. I don't understand how to pray given what I saw - especially in that cancer hospital. But I don't feel guilty. Neither do I feel like I am supposed to pack up and move to Uganda. I desperately want to go back but I don't sense I am supposed to move there.

But it is the details of how I spend my time - and, to a lesser degree money - that are getting to me. I feel like so many of the details of my life are frivolous. Reading an article or spending any mental energy on spectator sports seems absurd. Frittering away hours surfing the web seems like an affront to the time God has given me. Spending a nanosecond on the things of the entertainment world seems just pathetic. It isn't that I am supposed to deny myself pleasure or enjoyment but the details of my life need to change. Asceticism isn't the answer. But if poverty is ugliest up close, a "changed life" means the details of my life need to be radically different.

I need to spend more time volunteering to address the pain in my own city - there is plenty of it. It is very different in degree from what we saw in Kampala, but it is real. I need to spend time and energy addressing the needs I saw in Uganda - recruiting other people to Compassion, writing to raise awareness, using my contacts to try and help that hospital, giving much more money away, giving things away... the details... the details have to change. I think if I focus on these then perhaps I won't fall into that seductive trap Bono talked about after he was in Ethiopia during the famine: "...you just get on with your life, and you slowly find a place to put Africa, this beautiful, shining continent with all its ups and downs. Occasionally, you’d take it out, you’d look at it again, and then you’d put it back in that safer place called distance and time."

So please, please hold me to a change in details.

My new friend Shannon - beautiful blogging brain behind bold, brilliant Rocks In My Dryer made this comment yesterday:

Friends keep saying, "give yourself time," and I think, "time for WHAT? Time to forget just enough of what I saw so that my old life fits more easily?" I don't want that. And yet, I do. I'm a mess.

Amen, amen, and amen.

This fall, Abilene Christian University will be providing all incoming freshmen with either an iPhone or an iPod touch:

...freshmen will use the iPhones or iPod touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts.

"We are not merely providing cutting-edge technology tools to our incoming students," said Roberts. "We are also providing the web applications that ensure these tools will become critical to the students' learning experience. Because 93 percent of ACU students bring their own computers with them to college, we are choosing to take them to the next level by providing converged mobile devices."

All of this is part of something Apple is calling "iPhone University."

Almost makes you want to be a freshman at Abilene Christian University.

Thanks for your comments and emails about my blogging problem.

Thank you too for the exhortations to keep talking and processing and exhorting and confessing.

There is a single moment I cannot get out of my mind.

It occurred on my last full day in country. I was at the hospital, with the kids suffering from cancer, walking back into the building bringing something inside.

When I walked in, I saw the lone nurse - the completely, thoroughly untrained nurse... the one who didn't know how to change the dressing on a wound - injecting something into the IV port on a little girl's hand. She screamed, screamed. I chased the nurse down to figure out what she had done and she just casually said she'd injected a cocktail of antibiotics into the girl.

I flashed back to a moment in 2003 when I was lying in the hospital after my brain surgery and the IV drip of my antibiotics was turned just a bit too high. The veins on my left arm burned, my arm ached, my fingers grew numb. And that was an IV drip.

The nurse had injected a powerful cocktail of drugs directly into the little girl's veins. I had to steady myself against the wall. The blood had rushed out of my head. I walked outside to try and get air and my little video camera. I don't know why I pulled out the camera. It isn't that the moment was something I particularly wanted to watch over and over but I just wanted to record what was happening.

To my horror they brought in another little boy - a frail little boy who I had been playing balloon volleyball with moments before; a little boy who didn't have the strength to stand.

The little boy was screaming so hard he threw up what little food and water he had inside of him.

I spun - I just spun. There was absolutely nothing I could do. The moments of happiness we brought with a few pillows or balloons were overcome by the darkness. I was in a hive of suffering and nothing I could do could change it.

The complicated truth of the whole thing is that that boy and that girl were the lucky ones. Somehow they had actually gotten the precious antibiotics that might ward off infections - that might save their lives. There were many in that place who probably longed for those moments of agony.

But that is so much a part of the desperation of the place - even the good is wrapped in the horrible.

This image, this experience as much - more - than any other moment in the trip has broken me.

It has broken me because I am so close to it. I know a bit of what it is like. It doesn't require pure imagination I can feel it. I can put myself on the other side of the needle as both patient or parent to a child. It is a suffering I cannot bear and cannot understand. I can't get beyond that moment and the reality that even now as I write and you read this is happening. This makes it hard for me to care much about who won the debate in Ohio.

Part of the other problem is that this is all so UN-original. It is, frankly, so very cliched. I'm not even the 1,000,000th person to have come back from Africa with these stories - with stories far worse. Nothing I write here is actually terribly unique.

It feels like I have traded in my 10-year-old big, think cashmere sweater and faded jeans for burlap. Not only can't I get cozy, I just can't get comfortable.

I am having a blogging crisis.

I don't know what to write. I see the news, I see everything going on and yet I can't muster much (any) passion to write about them.

Yesterday I had a conversation with a friend who was on part of the trip with me. We were both talking about processing the trip and getting back to "real life." I said that problem I had that I'd always understood there was a fire burning on the other side of town. Unfortunately - fortunately - I have now stood in front of that fire. I've seen the faces and smelled the smells and heard the roars and now I'm back on the other side of town. Few things seem to matter as much as dealing with that consuming fire.