Ebb/Flow

I was a smiley kid. All the time, I was walking around like it was a sunny day, with a big grin on my face. I must have looked like a complete dope.

Then one day, when I was in 7^th grade, some goth/punk burnout noticed the dopey grin on my face and asked me, in front of everyone, “Why are you smiling all the time? Did you just get done masturbating?”

Everyone who heard him laughed. And laughed. I didn’t know what masturbation was (I was a very innocent kid, which probably helped explain the dopey grin), but I could understand intrinsically that being labeled a chronic masturbator was something all the other kids would make fun of me for.

So I stopped smiling.

It’s not that it launched me into a deep depression or that I never laughed. It’s just that from that day forward, I never wore that dopey grin again. It’s come back from time to time, but it’s always been something I’ve kept hidden.

Two years ago, when I first came to South Sudan, I was excited about a new challenge, a new context, and finally achieving something I’d been working towards for years. I was mobile, which suited me well with my love of movement and rapidly changing contexts, learning on the fly, and adapting as best I could.

I naturally turned towards writing, and this blog, to pour that energy out into the world. Three posts in April, two in May, and then “Cowboys,” in June 2014.

Then it drops off. One post in August, and not another one until January 2015, another in April, and this is the first since.

What changed? I submitted “Cowboys” as a comms piece to the organization I worked for. We had a part-time comms officer who never did her job. I didn’t know I’d almost been hired as a full-time comms officer, so the fact that I’d published three pieces for the organization’s blog probably made it look like I was gunning for her position.

So she undercut me. Hard. She launched a campaign of sneering and mockery. A month or so after that piece was published, everyone was talking about it, and none of it was good.

People took to calling the mobile team the ‘cowboys,’ even though the article said that we weren’t doing the real work, the difficult work of helping communities knit themselves back together after a crisis. I could tell that I was quickly becoming an outsider in a place where you couldn’t afford to go it on your own.

So I stopped writing. 

I shut down the part of me that was outward facing. I kept my journal, but I couldn’t bring myself to really push my own boundaries anymore. 

And that was a shame because there were so many stories to tell. Not just mine, but the personal stories from a conflict that's raged now for over two years, displaced millions, and slowly ground down so many who hoped for so much more. 

I'm amazed that people still maintain hope. The Greek legend had it that when Pandora opened her box, she let out all the evils of the world - death, famine, plague, sadness, misery, poverty. She closed the door with one voice crying to be let free. That voice was hope. It always struck me that maybe hope was the worst of all, that hope helped people endure but that it also inured people to the suffering around them and prevented change. 

I don't know if I still believe that. As I get older and the thoughts in my head get more and more nuanced, I'm not sure what I believe anymore.

But if anyone asks me why I return to places like South Sudan (where I am currently), I'm reminded of all the hardship, all the pain, the death, the disease, the loss of a child, a wife, a husband, a home, a family, a community, the loss of dignity, the loss of even the most basic rights - food, shelter, safety, and I see that life goes on. 

No matter how dark things get, there is hope. It's there in brief moments, but it's the only thing that keeps you from breaking, that keeps you committed to life and everything in it, for better or for worse. 

This war, which doesn't get as much coverage as it should and will probably never get as much coverage as it should, will eventually end. Life continues, with or without us.

That doesn't mean we have to like it. That doesn't mean that we have to inure ourselves to the pain and suffering around us. The news calls it a 'migrant crisis' rather than acknowledge the thousands of women and children who are fleeing war and desolation. 

I can't end a war. I certainly can't end this one. But I can work to try to ally myself in others' suffering, to stagger on together in an attempt to demand dignity from a hard world, made harder by people who have doubted themselves, been afraid, lashed out, and taken one step after another down a road that sees another human life as worth less, as lesser, as expendable and exploitable. 

At my worst, like all of us, I have lashed out, I have done wrong, but I must remember to turn inward, heal my own pain, and open myself again. 

South Sudan has taught me many things. It's given me at times an awfully black sense of humor. It has shown me things that I've heard only in news reports, an unimaginable world far away from my own. It's shown me courage, true courage, the ability to carry on when everything around you seems impossible. 

I gave a copy of the Tao Te Ching to a South Sudanese colleague. In a place where books are hard to come by, he's read those simple poems over and over and over again. He's found wisdom there. And even though he lives in a country at war, he can read about peace and about the ebb and flow of life. 

He and his wife had a child a few months ago, their first. It's not an easy thing to do, to bring life into so much suffering. And to know that in South Sudan that no child is safe until the age of five. Child mortality is one of the highest in the world alongside maternal mortality, but child and mother have both made it so far. 

Even in the midst of everything, life goes on. There remains hope.