"Malaria"

It has certainly been an interesting past few weeks. Lilu left for Nepal which means that I am now the project manager for the time he is away. A few days after his departure I became quite ill with apparently ’malaria’, though I’m fairly certain they call everything malaria. Myself, along with four others from my office, were all diagnosed with malaria (though the other cases were actually malaria). I was throwing up, sweating, cold, diarrhea, dizzy, weak, all of the good stuff. My housekeeper, Rita, who has became like a mother to me, walked me to the car to go to the clinic as I vomited all over her shoes and her clean floor. She stayed the night with me to make sure I was okay. I could barely keep myself sitting upright in the clinic as they tested me for malaria and gave me a bunch of pills for which I had to trust. I ran into my work colleague at the clinic who also had malaria and typhoid. And, well, that’s Africa for you!

My bosses from Kampala and Copenhagen came to Moroto for a field visit where I had to host them, after I had slept 2 hours the night before from being ill, on top of which my love told me he was getting married, over text message, and that it was time to move on… It seems to me that life really just happens all at once. It truly is just a divine comedy. Now I just look at it all and think: “Okay Sara, well this is how it is, you can laugh and continue on, or pretend like you have some sort of control in this matter and dwell over it.” So, I tried to laugh, and found that in the end, I made a great friend with my housekeeper, and feel an overall sense of relief from all of these events. It’s hard, but if we can take a step outside of an overwhelming or hurtful situation, breathe, and understand that ‘thy will be done’, a sense of clarity and calmness arises.

I am in Kampala now to meet with a colleague from South Sudan and have been having a bit of a party, meeting up with people I barely know for dinner, going bowling, getting my hair done, massages, it’s been great! I realize how much I appreciate the small things now. I flew over with an airline called MAF, it was almost a helicopter with five rows. The view was spectacular. We flew over the Nile and were able to see all the little houses and villages. I had a truly truly happy time despite the turbulence from the rain storm and my general fear of flying. After my adventures over the past few years, I am left wondering if I will ever go back to a more permanent existence in the West. 

That’s it for now!

 

Love is all there is!

It’s hard to believe that I have been here almost a month! Time really flies around here. I am feeling content and purposeful here, like there is some direction and meaning to it all. Mostly I think I feel happy because I am able to at least make the effort to give to others. It is a lot more difficult to find love in the west- in all of its forms. We are very closed off, so disconnected. We suffer greatly, but we suffer from ignorance, from attachment, from thinking that there is something ultimately wrong with our surroundings and that we need to keep working to change it. We do not suffer from a lack of worldly possessions. Here in Moroto, people’s suffering is so much more tangible, and when it is tangible, it is as if it can be changed with a simple act of love. Perhaps that is my ignorance!

I have an example. Yesterday I was driving back from lunch with my colleagues and we drove past two children lying on the side of the road who looked like they were dead. In fact I thought they were dead. This was nothing unusual to me, because the value on life here is so little. People kill, people die, it is a very accepted reality among the warriors. There is less attachment to life and being ‘alive’. Anyway, we stopped to make sure they were not dead and they weren’t. But they were two little children who couldn’t walk they were so ill, they were lying on the side of the road and nobody stopped to help them. We put them into DDGs vehicle (which we are not supposed to do) and drove them to the clinic. There is nothing groundbreaking about this act, who knows if it helped, who knows if they will live another day, but it is that tangible suffering that is so acute here that I feel one very small act can relieve.

It is easy to get lost in it all, to take on the suffering and to slip into guilt. But then I realize that it is not my role to feel guilty or pity or ashamed for my skin color or the life in which I was born, it is what I do with what I have been given! Someone once said that if you have money, it is because you were generous in your past life, but if you are not generous in this life with your money, you will suffer greatly in the next! I think about that a lot. Money, possessions, things, the manifest…they provide temporary relief to suffering, I can easily walk around giving everyone a few dollars and feel a sense of relief for my “generosity”. But I realize at the end of the day, the thing that will change the world, in reality the only thing, is love and kindness!