How can I go from breakfast at my apartment to classes at a university to an AIDS support organization with tons of people to PCA with dancing hopeful kids with their inner sorrows masked by their smiles to a fancy dinner with mostly white people?
A professor once told me that “the world is a broken one, but full of grace and possibility. Its brokenness is what calls us to our duty to heal…Suffering of innocents, poverty, and yearning are all a part of our world. I have seen suffering, but I have also seen a great courage, warmth, kindness, joy and love, in the midst of suffering.” I think often of these words when I feel overwhelmed by the many injustices of the world, injustices that I am experiencing vividly now.
How can we go on living like we do when $75 would send one of the orphaned kids to school for an entire year? What do you do when they are living in the slums sniffing glue and drinking alcohol to pass away the time because they don’t want to return to their families or have no family to return to?
This is an excerpt from a letter I received from a teenage girl: “And you know I don’t care because I lost my parents but what thank God is that am schooling now and I know he will never let me down in all my life and I pray that he helps to get all the basic needs which I need for school.”
It is the poor who bear the largest burden of disease because they cannot afford hygiene, proper nutrition, or medical care. Often they are born poor and die due to this poverty. How is this just? Should I return to my life in America, knowing what I know and have always known, to live the American dream? How can we stand back and pretend like these things don’t exist, bury ourselves in the good things we were given and despair over our petty problems? The country went up in an uproar after September 11th when a couple thousand died. What about the AIDS epidemic that is killing off millions right now and leaving millions more as orphans without parents and without prospects for education or a real livelihood? Are they going to sell fruit or gum by the roadside the rest of their lives? Make beaded necklaces? It’s only going to get worse as more and more people die! But they’re not our problem; they aren’t our families or our friends. They are merely statistics a world away, right?
What about the children that die before the age of five from preventable illnesses? The 12 year old mothers that develop fistulas after being raped or forced into marriage and then ostracized from their communities? What about the men women and children forced to live in trash dumps in Asia with nowhere to go, and the hundreds of thousands of women stripped of their dignity, freedom, and identity in the sex slave trade? How are we going to fix this??
I realize my thoughts ramble and perhaps are illogically written. But I don’t know how else to create a sensible representation of what’s going on in my head. I have so many feelings running through me and this emotional rollercoaster changes so quickly. Some days I feel like nothing is wrong and everyday life here is just that- normal, everyday life within a separate culture. Other days I feel strongly impassioned by what I see. I’m not sure if I’m overthinking or underthinking, but I am surely overemotional. Am I just being melodramatic too?
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