on kindness

I am about four miles into a five-mile run. The path is narrow, with a hedge to one side and wet grass and melting snow to the other. A woman stands ahead of me in the path while her dog sniffs around in the hedge. She starts to move to one side to let me pass when her (large, unleashed) dog suddenly hears me and starts charging toward me, barking. While I know that most likely the dog is friendly, I take no chances. Heart pounding, I make a very fast and very wide arc out into the muddy grass while the woman tries to grab her dog’s collar. 

Though individual dogs along the way have won my affection, I am not what one would call a dog person. And during my middle school days delivering newspapers, I had more than one unpleasant run-in with a dog. So I am not happy.

As the woman successfully catches her dog, various comments run through my mind. I am on the verge of yelling, “That is NOT okay!!” when I catch a glimpse of the woman’s embarrassed face, hear that embarrassment mirrored in her voice as she chides the dog.  

“Always be kinder than necessary, darn it,” I mutter to myself and continue on my way, swallowing everything else I want to say.  

**************************

For this past Christmas my mother gave my family a fun chalkboard with a bright red border. We found just the spot for it in our kitchen. I had been collecting quotes on a Pinterest board for months and scrolled through to choose what should be the first thing I wrote up there. It was an easy decision. “Always be a little kinder than necessary.”

When I first saw this quote I did a little research and learned that it is a paraphrase of a line from J. M. Barrie’s book, The Little White Bird. The original line reads, “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a little kinder than necessary?” I loved it.

Honestly, “kind” is not a word I would use to describe the me of the past four years. I recently wrote that one of the biggest surprises after my father’s death was how everything changed but nothing changed. Another big surprise for me was to find out that everything I had always heard and believed about how life-changing situations help us gain perspective was, for me at least, hogwash. 

I had lived my entire life believing that significant or serious or big things help us realize what is really important. Let go of pettiness. Choose the significant things. Stop making mountains out of mole hills. In short, help our perspective. And yet in the months after Dad died, the grief I felt over that loss, and the panic I felt when my newborn baby wouldn’t stop screaming in her car seat as we sat at a stoplight, and the frustration I felt when they didn’t have my kind of peanut butter at the supermarket — they all felt the same. Rather than gaining perspective from my experience, I seemed to have lost all perspective. And it certainly didn't leave me feeling kind. A sweet friend eventually helped me find a word that did describe me: raw. I was raw.

In this raw state, this suggestion to “always be a little kinder than necessary” spoke to me. Sounded like a salve to my rawness. Kindness. Calm, peaceful, gentle kindness. Yes. So up on the new chalkboard it went. 

 

The chalkboard, and the quote that just won't leave me alone.

**********************

With that quote staring my family in the face for the next little while, it begins to seep into my consciousness. I bite my tongue, change my response, reevaluate my position on various things as this statement plays on repeat in my brain. Over the next several days I am, frankly, embarrassed to realize how petty and mean and unkind I can be about other people in my internal dialogue.

Into the midst of this come the woman and her dog.
 

A couple days later, my five-year-old daughter and I are driving home from gymnastics lessons. She is feeling very tender on this day and thinks that several little girls did not treat her very kindly during various moments of the lesson. She is in tears as we drive home.

We talk through the distress, the unkindnesses. After a few minutes I ask her, “Do you think you always treat those girls kindly?”

She lets out a big sigh.

“Mama, it is so hard to always be kind to everyone,” she confesses. “Besides, not being kind is really my one sin. And if I have no sins at all that will be like I am trying to be God.”

I spend the rest of the drive home holding back laughter as I assure her that she is not in fact in danger of becoming God. But as I think back over the episode I am more and more undone by her honesty.

Because it is so hard to be kind to everyone. Some people, sure. Sometimes, no problem. But always be a little kinder than necessary? Kindness might be, as I romanticized it, calm and peaceful and gentle when one is on the receiving end, but on the being end it is hard.

And yet oddly alluring. 

everything and nothing

This is part three of a story. If you’d like to start from the beginning, you can do that here. If you missed part two, you can find it here. 

We do finally make it to Colorado. It involves another canceled flight in Dallas, and another bus taking us to another airport hotel. Then there is fog in Colorado Springs so we are diverted to Denver. And finally there is a rental car, and meeting up with friends who have been waiting for us at the Colorado Springs airport.

And then through the front door of my parents’ home at last and into the arms of my smiling father. We are four and a half days late, but we make it.

Thirty-four hours later he is gone.

**********************

Before Dad’s death, I had ideas of what life might be like for people who have lost parents, children, siblings, spouses. I couldn’t fathom how we would do it. In the final weeks of Dad’s life I remember feeling like I needed to prepare myself but I had absolutely no idea how to go about it. Maybe the biggest surprise since losing Dad has been how everything changes and yet nothing changes. Reading back on old blog posts from my time in Uganda and Rwanda before Dad’s death, I think by turns, “Who is this enthusiastic adventurous woman?” and, “Oh, so I have always struggled with this or that thing.” Death, too, comes right in the middle of everything.

I remember studying Robert Frost’s poem, “Out, Out—” about a boy who dies suddenly from a chainsaw accident. The poem ends:
 
     No one believed. They listened at his heart.
     Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
     No more to build on there. And they, since they
     Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
 
This ending horrified me as a young student. I didn't know whether to be more upset at the family for being so heartless or irritated at Frost’s low expectations about the love of a family for a lost son. Even now I find this poem very difficult. But I am a little less hard on both the family and Mr. Frost. Perhaps they did not “turn to their affairs” so much from heartlessness as from necessity. Because when we lose someone, everything changes and yet nothing changes. Our world has turned upside down and yet life keeps coming and we try to meet it.

My sister said the other day that she was glad I was writing all this down because she “just wants to hear people talk about Dad.” Yes. About nine months after Dad died, a close friend shared a funny memory of Dad from those final days. As my husband and daughter and I sat in limbo in Paris, friends and family gathered around my dad. While my friend was there one day, my brother mentioned reading that the singer Lady Gaga had to cancel some European shows because of the snow. Dad (decidedly not a fan) was finding it increasingly difficult to speak, but haltingly he said, “Maybe Phoebe will think it was worth it.” My friend, who had always appreciated Dad’s understated sense of humor, asked, “You mean she’ll think it was worth it to be stuck in Paris if it means Lady Gaga has also been stopped?” Dad just smiled.

I have memories of Dad that I come back to often. Some memories are 30 years old, like sitting on the sofa enraptured as he read the Chronicles of Narnia to my siblings and me. Or running around in the rain of a massive thunderstorm shrieking, exhilarated and frightened — with our Dad standing on the porch, laughing, egging us on. Other memories are much more recent, such as the one I shared of my dad and my little girl snuggled up together in his hospital bed. I think I needed to pause and put that there in the middle of this hard story to be reminded again of how life is a messy mix of beautiful and hard.

I think I will end this story with one final quiet, ordinary moment in the middle of everything. It is December 23 when I finally arrive in Colorado. The previous day, a kind family friend dropped by with an entire Christmas dinner already prepared for us. Ham, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pies. The works. So that when Christmas comes, we can have a “real” Christmas dinner without the need to think about it beyond warming things up. There are so many ways people can love us.

Christmas Eve is difficult. Dad dies just after midnight as Christmas arrives. At some point in the middle of the night, we all go to bed for a few hours. We wake late the next morning with Christmas Day stretching in front of us. What does one do with the first day after Dad has died?
 
It has been days since everyone sat down to a meal at the same time. As lunchtime approaches, my mother announces, “We are going to sit down and have Christmas dinner together.” She gets out a tablecloth. We lay the table with nice dishes, silverware, goblets. And we eat Christmas dinner.

a quiet moment -- and the journey continues

This is part two of this story. If you want to read part one, you can do that here. 

There is another image I cannot get out of my head. A moment six weeks before Paris.

Dad has recently found out that despite continuing treatments, his tumors are growing. He is actually feeling pretty good, considering. But he and my mother know there are very few options left. When I find this out, I know in my gut I need to get from Rwanda to San Diego where Dad and Mom are living, just to be there with them. Joe agrees with me.

I tell my parents my plan, which includes taking my little girl with me. I can hear in Mom’s voice that she wants me to come if possible. My dad, the consummate pragmatist, tries to talk me out of it. “You are pregnant ... That is a lot of traveling by yourself with a baby ... It’s a lot of money ... Don’t overreact.” My father has talked me out of various things over the years with his logical, pragmatic approach to life. Many times I could see later that it was a good thing I had listened to him. But I am not listening this time.

It is an enchanted journey. Flight attendants take pity on me and offer every hour or so to watch my little girl so I can stretch my legs, use the facilities. They bring her little things to eat, to play with. On the final leg, a tired young businessman ends up next to us. I can see that he is ready to sleep. My daughter decides he is her friend and wants to play with him. He graciously complies. “Thank you,” I say. “I’m sure this wasn’t your plan.” He smiles. “It’s good for me. My wife is expecting our first. I need the practice.”

We arrive into the beautiful November weather of San Diego. My little one has just had her first birthday and her Nonna and Papa get to give their gifts in person rather than shipping them to her. Dad’s most recent chemo cycle is finished and that means the side effects that accompany it are going away. It is a good week.

Together during our San Diego visit.

He has begun to struggle with too much calcium in his bloodstream and is going into the hospital every so often for IV treatments to combat this. He finds out while we are there that his levels are not good and he needs to go into the hospital overnight for one such treatment. He is not pleased. He may not have completely approved of my coming, but now that we are here he does not want any of his time with his daughter and granddaughter stolen from him.

“It’s okay,” my mother and I tell him. “We will stay at the hospital as long as we can. We will come back in the morning to bring you home again.” After getting him checked in at the hospital, Mom and I go to get some food for everyone. There is a pizza place nearby. My dad isn’t really a pizza guy, but it beats the hospital cafeteria.

So this is how we come to be at the hospital, talking and eating pizza with my dad who is feeling pretty good, but is dealing with nearly constant hot flashes from the cancer. He is sitting up in the hospital bed in shorts, and no shirt. It is getting close to my daughter’s bedtime so I strip her down to her diaper, getting ready to put her pajamas on.

“Bring her over here,” Dad says. “Let her sit with me.”

And so, for the next several minutes, they sit there together, my dad and my daughter. Neither is wearing a shirt. They are focused just on each other, as my little girl shows her Papa the new toy giraffe and lion she got for her birthday. Dad is rubbing the sweet skin of her back and her belly, giving her hug upon hug, placing kiss upon kiss on her gorgeous round cheeks. It is a perfect moment.

As a photographer, I momentarily regret that I have no camera with me. But after, I will always be thankful that I didn’t. I sit there and soak in this quiet, beautiful scene. To this day, I can see it — feel it — in a way no photo could have captured it.

****************

Back in Paris, I have spent a long time on the phone, trying to find out when we might leave. If we continue on to London, they tell me, it will probably be four to five days before we can get to the States. But that number might change because so many flights have not gone out, and so many more are still being cancelled. If we just fly out of Paris directly to the States, we might make it a day earlier. Nothing is confirmed or promised, but I get us on various lists and am told to check back at regular intervals.

After a few hours sleep, the bus arrives to take us back to Orly. In case by some miracle the flight can get out. At the very least we hope to get our little girl’s stroller, which had been gate-checked and we had been unable to retrieve the night before. For two more days we will do this back and forth between hotel and airport. Hoping.

We’ve arrived at Orly on Kenya Airways but Kenya Airways doesn’t actually fly to Orly. This means there is no ground crew, no one willing to open the luggage hold for any reason at all. We are never allowed to have our luggage or even our daughter’s stroller. Mercifully, we don’t know at that time that it will be 16 more days before we see any of our bags.

At some point we make it to a department store to get a change of clothes, coats. In the coming months and years so many people will say to me, “Well, if you are going to get stuck somewhere, Paris isn’t a bad place to be stuck.” It doesn’t work that way.

On the third day of our pilgrimage between hotel and airport, there is finally movement. The Kenya Airways flight has a departure time to travel to London. But we have had it reconfirmed multiple times that we will get to the States much more quickly if we stay in Paris. So we make the decision to give up our seats on the flight. Standing at the airport, just the three of us alone, having said goodbye to our fellow pilgrims and knowing all our belongings are still on that plane, we pray we have made the right decision.

With tentative seats on various flights that may or may not depart two or three days from now, we decide to move to the home of some friends Joe had grown up with, who had lived in Paris for several years now. They are much farther from the airport, but they are familiar faces and it will mean warm meals and playmates for our little girl. They greet us with open arms. After dinner that evening I call the airline yet again. A flight has opened up. If we can get ourselves to Charles du Galle Airport tomorrow, we have seats on a plane to Dallas. 

In the pre-dawn cold the next morning, we board a train to the airport, thankful for our new coats and, for the moment, grateful that we don’t have to deal with our checked luggage.




Part Three

So much depends upon...

It's mid-December. We are sitting in the airport lounge in Kigali, Rwanda, in the wee hours of the morning. We are waiting to board the short flight to Nairobi, where we’ll catch the long haul to London. My husband Joe and I have made this trek numerous times in the past three years. And even our just-turned-one-year-old is incredibly familiar with this scene. Maybe it is this familiarity that makes it possible for us to sit there so unremarkably. With a baby in my arms and another in my belly and four flights ahead of us, I think we genuinely are taking one moment at a time. No dwelling, no dreading. Just doing. 

We have a moment of mild interest as the lounge television announces that a snow storm is expected to hit Europe in the coming hours and then we climb on the plane. In Nairobi, Joe actually thinks to ask — has it started snowing in London? “We don’t know, sir, but the flight is scheduled to depart on time.” And it does. Eight of the nine hours of the flight pass uneventfully. And then, “Good evening, everyone. The good news is we are only an hour from landing. The bad news is that Heathrow is closed due to a blizzard so we are landing at Orly in Paris.” 

They go on to say that it should only be a brief delay. Heathrow is expected to reopen within the hour. And Heathrow does reopen within the hour. But the snow has continued to fall in Paris for that hour and now Orly is closed. And back and forth this goes for a couple more hours. We are parked in a far corner of the Orly tarmac when they finally decide we are going nowhere. They load us in buses to take us to the terminal. 

Joe’s brother and his family are waiting at Heathrow with our winter coats in hand (we don’t exactly need them in Rwanda), planning to take us to Joe’s parents’ house, to a warm dinner and soft beds before we continue the journey tomorrow. Our coats are in London but we are in Paris. And it is snowing hard. I wrap my little girl in a light scarf I have with me and try to dash off the plane and onto the bus as quickly as possible. 

Inside the terminal, dozens of cancelled flights mean thousands of people. They begin distributing emergency rations since many of us have been sitting without food and water on grounded planes for several hours. Being Paris, these rations include wine, two types of paté and chocolate mousse. Even in the stress of the moment we find this funny. 

Everyone in the airport seems to be fighting to get to a handful of counters to be given rooms for the night. Joe and another man with an eight-months pregnant wife and an 18-month-old son struggle to reach the counter. It is almost midnight. “We have pregnant wives and babies,” they explain. “Is there any way we can be given priority for hotel rooms?” Thankfully the answer is yes. Which means we only wait at the airport another couple of hours. I don’t even want to think about how long some of these people will wait for a bed. 

Finally tucked up in our hotel room, we call our families. Joe’s brother’s family has given up waiting for us at Heathrow several hours earlier and gone home again. We will let them know if our revised travel plans are still going to include London. I call my mother. She sounds worried — when do I think we will get out? How soon can we get to the States? Can they prioritize us? Do they realize our situation? I feel helpless. Because the answer to all the questions is simply “I don’t know.” We have no idea what is going to happen. We aren’t even supposed to be in Paris. We are supposed to be in London. 

The emotional phone call ends with my mother saying, “He’s waiting for you.” 

She is talking about my father. My wonderful Dad. As we sit in Paris, he has been fighting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma for about four years. The percentage of patients who get a remission with this kind of cancer is in the high nineties. But my dad never experiences remission through years of chemo and even a stem cell transplant. (And this permanently changes the way I hear statistics. Because if the percentage isn’t 100, that means someone has to be in the four percent, the five percent.) Dad has entered hospice care.

We are headed home to say goodbye. 

*******************

Wow, Phoebe. After years away from writing, this is really where you begin? Interestingly, this is not what I sat down to write. But it is what has come out. When people hear bits of my life like how I met my husband, or that we lived in Rwanda, the response is often, “That sounds like a storybook!” or, “You should write all this down!” And I want to tell all the parts of the story. About how ten days before the above story began, we were sitting on the beach in beautiful Mombasa, Kenya. About how two and a half years earlier my parents were walking me down the aisle, straight toward the incredible Teton Mountains and toward the charming British man I was about to begin the rest of my life with. About how three and a half months after this Paris story we would be welcoming another beautiful baby girl into the world.

 

My father performing our wedding ceremony.

William Carlos Williams wrote the famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow:”

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Had he written something similar for me at this moment, it might read:

so much depends
upon

a white air
plane

covered with heavy
snow

beside the Paris
tarmac

My whole life I’ve been told that I’m a talker. I’ll be honest — this never sounds like a compliment. Some people say instead that I’m a storyteller. This one I am more willing to admit to. I have begun to realize only in recent years that when people ask a question like, “Where did you and your husband meet?” often all they want to hear is, “At a wedding in London.” And then they want to move on. Or when they ask, “How did you end up living in Africa for three years?” I can save us both a lot of grief by just saying, “I was there with my job."

So when an unsuspecting soul gets a “how I met my husband” story that starts with my studies in England in 1996 and then moves through a trip to Bolivia in 2002 and goes on to why I resigned from my job in 2006 and volunteered in Africa before finally getting to the wedding outside London where I did meet my husband, they think that I chased bunny trails and got distracted and forgot what the question was. But I didn’t. In my head, all that is a direct answer to how I met my husband. And that Africa question? Well, you see, I think it all starts back in the 1950s when my parents’ families moved to South America. If I’m making “a long story short,” I let the story start when I was five and I visited South America myself for the first time.

All this is not actually because I just like to hear myself talk (though I know there are times that I do), but because I think it’s amazing how our long winding roads are in fact going a very distinct direction. How seemingly unconnected things so often are connected. Because to fully understand the nuance of the moment when my second baby girl is born three months later, you also need to know about that jam-packed airport in Paris.

As I sit in Paris, my father’s four-year battle with cancer is coming to an end. And the beginning of life without Dad is just around the corner. 

This past December marked four years since Dad died. Stranded in Paris, we were halfway between our home in Rwanda and my family home in Colorado, halfway through these past eight years that have proved so pivotal in my life and worldview. There, somewhere in the middle, seems as good a place as any to start.





You can continue to part two here.  

the middle

With this post I hope to launch a third season of this blog. When it first began in 2006, I had just quit my full-time job to become a freelance photographer and writer. I was headed to Uganda for two months and wanted to keep in touch with family and friends. Two years later I picked up where I’d left off, this time newly engaged, arriving in Rwanda for a three-year stint. But as time went on, between motherhood and moving continents and my father’s death, the blog fell by the wayside.

Uganda 2006

Rwanda 2008

For a while I’ve been thinking of returning to my writing, starting to put down on “paper” once again the thoughts, dreams, ideas, questions running through my head. What new adventure has prompted the desire this time? There isn’t one. Which seems appropriate given the fact that I don’t feel like I’m at the beginning of anything. In fact, I feel like I’m right smack-dab in the middle. Of everything. I will turn 40 in four months. The very definition of mid-life. My days consist of work and meals and bedtimes and gymnastics lessons and travel and friends and laughter and tears and anger and contentment. Some days seem like such a fabulous adventure and others are very very ordinary. But most days are somewhere in the middle of all these things. A big messy mix.

The hardest part

After years away from it, I started running again about a year ago. I decided to run a 10K with a friend and then realized I should probably do some training, since even back in the day when I did run, I was a sprinter and thought a 5K was a long way. So I started training. Sometimes I barely had time to squeeze in two miles, but other days I started increasing my distance. Four miles. Five miles. Six miles.

Victorious with my dear friend Jen
who inspired me to start running again.

And I noticed something. I hated the middle. If I planned to run two miles, the one-mile mark was miserable. If I was running five miles, I started to feel like life was over around two and a half. If I was running the full 10K distance, I was ready to give up at the 5K mark. No matter the distance the middle was just hard. Too far along to go back, not far enough along to see the finish line. So easy to get lost or give up or question myself or change my mind. And clearly I’m not just describing running anymore. I’m talking about life.

Years ago, I heard someone say, “Life is good, but life is also hard. And the truth is most of us live somewhere in the middle.” By turns I find this statement comforting and infuriating. But always I find it true. Sometimes the middle feels like a balanced, ideal place to be. Not too complacent but not too extreme either. Other days the middle feels so hard, not to say hopeless.

So here I am, friends, somewhere in the middle. Some days victoriously moving “further up and further in”, other days wandering lost or sitting down in a huff refusing to go on.

"The story of who I am"

Given my in-the-middle-of-everything existence at the moment, this space is bound to be a little all over the place. That messy mix I mentioned earlier means that some days I’m passionate about my work, about the world, about the “important things” while others I just want to spend the day on Pinterest and Facebook. Some days I am all about my newest DIY project while others I feel like I can barely get out of bed. Sometimes I am super mom, somehow having plenty of time to do crafts and play games with my children while still getting a healthy, delicious meal on the table. While other days require lots of TV time as I grit my teeth waiting for bedtime to come.

I have always written about where I am, whether Uganda or Rwanda – or somewhere in the middle of all this. Why am I planning to drag people through it with me? I guess I hope there are others who can commiserate – er, I mean relate. I think it is sometimes comforting to know we are not alone as we stumble along.

But I also have a somewhat selfish motivation. Brandi Carlile’s song, “The Story,” is among my very favorites. It begins: “All of these lines across my face tell you the story of who I am. So many stories of where I’ve been and how I got to where I am.” As 40 looms and more lines appear I embrace this idea. And I do love to tell a good story.

The main players in my story these days.
Photo credit: Allison Dubois Photography

And then the song says this: “But these stories don’t mean anything if you’ve got no one to tell them to.” I desperately believe as humans we were designed to be in community. William Nicholson, in his screenplay for “Shadowlands,” wrote this line for C S Lewis, “We read to know we are not alone.”

Maybe some of us also write to know we are not alone?

the long defeat

It has been 1 year, 3 months and 14 days since I last wrote something here. The last sentence I wrote was “I will do my best to update this blog again before June.” I didn’t say which June…

I could say that I’ve been so silent because I’ve been busy doing things like becoming a mother. But the silence probably has more to do with a year-long feeling of writer’s block. For someone who once wrote “I write because I can’t not write,” this dry spell has felt very long. I can’t say whether that spell is really over, but for today at least, I am back. This is going to get a bit long, but I want to ask you now to please stick with me to the end.

**************************

vivian. have you seen more amazing eyes?

I logged onto facebook today to find that a friend had posted this link: In Uganda, AIDS War is Falling Apart. This caught my attention immediately for two reasons. Not only is Uganda a country I know and dearly love, but I feel personally invested in the “AIDS War” in Uganda. Over the past 7 years, I’ve spent weeks at a time living with and loving and photographing the beautiful children at my friend Nathaniel’s incredible organization, Aidchild, and I’ve spent many hours interviewing and photographing brave and resilient families in Compassion International’s AIDS Initiative.

jack, one of my adorable friends from aidchild

According to the article’s author and the sources he quotes, there is little good news regarding AIDS in Uganda. While 200,000 are on treatments, there are 300,000 more who need treatment and can’t get it. The ABC (abstinence, be faithful, use a condom) prevention approach is, in their words, “flopping”. Globally, it is believed that 14 million people need treatment, while fewer than 4 million are receiving it.

I won’t rewrite the whole article here, but suffice to say that as I read I became increasingly discouraged. And then I came to the part that really scared me. In a nutshell, the author suggests that donors are giving up on the fight against AIDS. “Donors have decided … that more lives can be saved by concentrating on child-killers like stillbirth, pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles and tetanus.”

He goes on to state that President Obama’s administration, the British government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have all decided that they will focus their efforts on mother-child health, rather than the AIDS pandemic. Before I go on, let me say that I am all for globally focusing more attention on the health of mothers and children. Spend a few hours with mamas and babies in programs like Compassion’s Child Survival Program and you cannot deny a) the need or b) the incredible positive impact such interventions can make.

a mother and baby i met in a child survival program in uganda

But as I read, I thought, does it have to be either the AIDS crisis or mothers and children? Can’t it be both/and? Then came this quote from the author of one of the discouraging reports: “I think world leaders feel the heat is off [regarding the fight against AIDS] and they’re fatigued.”

That hit me hard. Especially that word “fatigued.” I understand fatigue. As the mother of a 6-month-old infant, I really understand fatigue.

I have been traveling to Africa for nine years and have lived here full time for two and a half. And the longer I’m here, the more often I seem to find myself feeling discouraged about the realities here. The long line of corrupt leaders, past and present, who stunt the continent’s growth and development. The wars. The abuses. The vast need that always outweighs the resources. The “if only they would listen to me, everything would be perfect” mentality of so many of us expats (and I do include myself here), wearing the titles we’ve given ourselves -- NGO/aid/development workers, missionaries, diplomats -- with arrogance and self-importance. Fearing the answers to the constant questions in the back of my mind: “Is this working? Is there really hope? Can things really change?”

abraham, whom i've watched grow up for the last 7 years

The fatigue doesn’t matter

So I understand this other kind of fatigue as well. The kind that isn't just physical but is emotional, spiritual. But then I think of Abraham and Vivian and Jack. Of Mary (not her real name) and her daughters. And the dozens of other names and faces of the incredible individuals I have spent time with over the past seven years, listening to their stories, playing games with the children in the late afternoon, admiring the roses that mothers so proudly planted. I love these people.

"mary" and her daughters

In the past I would have said these stories make the fatigue melt away. I don’t know if I can honestly say that now. I still feel the weariness. But I can say that these amazing people help me remember that the fatigue doesn’t matter. In the end, we shouldn’t have entered this war against AIDS because we thought we could win. We should be here because it is the right thing to do.

I have read and reread J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy numerous times through the years. There are points along the way as Frodo and Sam struggle to continue on their path to Mordor where I struggle to keep reading. The weariness, the sheer fatigue, the discouragement is so palpable that I have to take a break to catch my breath.

And I am always struck by the bittersweet realization that they are pushing on simply because it is the right thing to do. It is what they have been called to. So they keep going even though they have no idea whether they will make it. In fact, they keep going even though they’re pretty sure they won’t make it. And it is beautiful. And for me, in the end, the fact that they do make it is almost beside the point.

A shot in the arm

A personal hero of mine is Paul Farmer. He is a doctor who was responsible for practically eradicating tuberculosis in a rural area of Haiti when everyone said it could not happen. And now his organization Partners in Health is also doing a great work here in Rwanda. In the book Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, Farmer talks about the long road of bringing health care to the people and communities to whom he has dedicated his life.

“I have fought the long defeat,” he says, “and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory.... We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”

(Only today, as I researched it again, did I realize that he uses this term “long defeat” in homage to The Lord of the Rings, where the phrase was coined. So perhaps it was reading about Paul Farmer that first connected these ideas in my own mind and I had just forgotten.)

Reading that article today, I realized that I have grown lazy. In recent years, the West has engaged in a love affair with Africa. Money and attention have poured this direction in an unprecedented way. Much of both the money and the attention have been aimed directly at the AIDS pandemic. Fighting AIDS in Africa became trendy. There are lots of famous faces and Beautiful People whose names have been tied to the cause. And perhaps some of the urgency I had felt in earlier years -- when it was so difficult to get people to pay attention, when no one seemed to care -- had gone. I got distracted and busy with other things.

But the time was bound to come when something else would grab the attention of the public. It is the nature of trends that they come and go and are replaced with something new. Sadly it seems like that day might be coming. So what happens then?

I have no idea how this “War on AIDS” will end. One of the reports from the article mentioned at the beginning of this post stated that it’s likely that “a major [AIDS] epidemic will still be with us in 2031.” And that is discouraging. Heavy. Fatiguing.

the beautiful diana

But you know what? Statistics and predictions don’t take into account my little friend Abraham, who was given 6 weeks to live about 9 years ago and today is a healthy, happy, energetic boy who excels in school. They don’t consider the fact that Mary’s two daughters should be orphans by now but instead still have a loving mother who can care for them. They don’t even take into consideration little Diana who enjoyed several years of health and happy childhood and love and life before she succumbed to the disease.

So I needed this shot in the arm today. To remind me that we can't stop. Friends, we can't give up because it's hard, or because we're tired. Or because we think someone else will or should take care of it. Or even because we think we might lose.