Through the Looking Glass

Week one: down.  Twenty-two to go.  It’s difficult describing what it’s like to be back.  Before I left, it was hard to put words to this place and this experience without an air of some utopian paradise.  But poverty isn’t paradise.  Quite the opposite in fact, in most intepretations.  And if there were no poverty, we wouldn’t be here.  It’s funny how much you can love a place when you think it is perfect, but then how much more you realize you love it when you realize it’s not at all perfect and yet you love it more completely with all of those flaws and hardships.  That resulting love is more solid, more real. I was in love with this place before, but now I love it. Truly, deeply, and profoundly.

Before I left here for break, it was difficult to remember what life was like off this compound, away from this tiny border town.  The States sometimes felt like a distant memory of images from a film I’d seen once, a long time ago. This was reality.   And that was after only three months.  Imagine how out of sorts I will be, come July.  During break, once I’d hibernated in DC for about a week, all of this, this life…this place, seemed like a dream.  Like Alice waking by the bank of the babbling brook, left to wonder how it all felt so real.  I’ll admit that readapting to the creature comforts of life in the USA (not to mention gaining almost 10 lbs by allowing myself every food I’d missed at any time I craved it), left me slightly hesitant to return.

My early introduction to this organization and life here was (I hope) abnormal for all involved.  I walked into what felt to me like a smattering of intense human drama and chaos.  As much as I tried to weather and utilize all my sensible faculties, it was hard.  People whose actions and behaviors turned on a dime, systems and policies seemingly wholly lacking or nonsensical, it seemed nothing could be easy or logical.  It was frustrating and I secretly wondered what I had walked in to and how quickly I could walk out.  Instead of walking out, I put on my rose-tinted glasses, embraced all I loved about it and worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life to try to serve it best. 

I found this place and this org after years of working for other organizations with seemingly similar aims.  Every one of them left me frustrated and looking for the right fit, Cinderella’s slipper, if you will.   No matter how much they tried, how well organized their efforts,  nor how much experience they had, there was always the underlying element of ‘We have masters degrees or PhDs or we are white or we are from the developed world or we are Christians or we are wealthy…so we know best.’  No matter how well intentioned, I firmly believe that nothing will ever be resolved so long as those beliefs are at the foundation of the approach.  All parties should have something to offer, whether it is technical expertise, deep cultural understanding, etc., but the belief that the community is capable, that all of humanity is capable of overcoming the adversity it faces, should be held deeply and firmly by both those who come to offer assistance and especially by the community itself.  I took this position because I believed I had found that glass slipper, but instead am coming to realize there may be no glass slipper, no fantastical and perfect fits, just people struggling to do what they think is right or best, regardless of how correct they are in those beliefs.

There is an air of weariness over what was once an excited and energized team.  We are pushing through and fighting for what we believe in, but even using the terms ‘pushing through’ and ‘fighting’ on our very first week back is a bit worrisome.  I feel a heaviness in my being that I can’t quite seem to shake.  Is it a shaky suspicion that missteps over which we have little control will likely continue and this will, in the end, be for nothing?  Is it a sadness that I can’t do more, a disappointment at my own limitations or the early onset of my exhaustion?  Is it the fear that in thinking I had cast off all the ill turns that came with the big and bureaucratic NGOs, I may have found myself at the early stages of much of the same, where we are only reinventing broken wheels instead of finding those precious meaningful and impactful ways forward, but all involved are in fierce denial that this is or could possibly be the case?  I want to believe this is at least part of what I was looking for, and I haven’t given up that hope yet, that somehow (as in Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday) all I am seeing is the back of things and could I only come around to see them from the front, they would be too beautiful and perfect even to comprehend.

 

And in that hope, what is left to be done is to continue striving to see the world and all it facets (including this experience) from all angles, but most importantly head-on, in all its glory and to continue working to make beautiful even the shadows that appear from the back .