29

"To those who have not yet learned the secret of true happiness, begin now to study the little things in your own backyard."

George Washington Carver

Knowledge is the first step towards change

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization. MSF just released their "Top 10 Humanitarian Crises" List for 2009.

Read about it.

http://doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/topten/2009/

Arrival

So excited that Alban is coming home tomorrow.

Let the holiday olympics begin.

To look at it.

"I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it."

-Joan Didion
Commencement address at the University of California
Riverside, 1975

Car crashes

I watched a documentary tonight called "Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders."

It focused in on four physicians working in the humanitarian field in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The film made me ache with homesickness for places familiar and far away: the women with their babies tied snug in the smalls of their backs, the impossibly lush green hills, the ridiculously bright print fabrics against war-ravaged buildings and little alleys filled with trash. The drums. The guns. The assault of smells in the market. The endearing curiosity of children, the teeming human-ness in overcrowded hospital wards, the caring, giving hearts in the midst of so much nothing.

And the people.

A head trauma patient woke up from surgery and recognized his son's face.

A girl with a gun shot wound faced both the pain in her arm and the hopelessness of knowing her parents had been shot and killed.

Another stab victim.

Another emergency c-section and everyone's holding their breath because it took the mother so long to come to the hospital.

Another baby admitted to the malnutrition ward. Another death.

Another night with no electricity and the halls are full of courageous rats.

One doctor processed her thoughts upon leaving her mission assignment in war-torn Liberia:

When you see a car crash, you stop and help. She said.

It's the right thing to do. You can't just drive by. You can't ignore it.

The situation in Liberia was like a horrible, giant, car crash.

Horrible.

No words for it.

And there are car crashes just like it all around the world. In Sri Lanka. In Sudan. In Cambodia. In Angola. In Haiti. In Niger.

How can I sit at home, in my comfortable places, and do nothing? We have to go back, to work again, to put our hands in and start to pick up the pieces.

But must I now do this for the rest of my life? She asked.

Baby, it's cold outside!

A little homesick

I bought coffee this morning at the Starbucks in the Sacramento airport. The woman who whipped up my latte looked familiar.

Those striking green eyes, the creaminess of skin, the easy, shy smile. Her name tag was the final clue--Atsade.

I knew.

"May I ask you a question?" I said, "Are you from Ethiopia?"

She looked a little surprised. "Yes, I am."

"I used to live there for a little while," I told her, "In the west, near Sudan."

I paused. "You remind me of that home."

She grinned.

"The coffee in Ethiopia is the best in the world," she told me.

Yes.

I feel fine

I like this webpage:

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

Click on "Interactive Version." Play with the different "displays" of feelings.

The creators have found a way to search the web for any place on blogs or publications where someone writes "I feel," and then to gather and organize all the different feelings into a sort of gallery.

You can search feelings by location around the globe. You can see who's feeling happy today in Bhutan, or who's feeling gray in the parts of the world where it is currently raining or snowing.

How are you feeling today?

Baby Shoe

In Tchad I lived with a family that had five kids, and who ambitiously made it an even six kids during my months of occupancy.

Baby Six was born in January.

In French, when you are soothing a baby, you say, "Chut! Chut, bébé! Chut!" It sounds like " Shoe, baby, shoe! Shoe!"

Baby Six had a name, Dugay Grace. But no one really used her name, and eventually they all just called her, "Bébé Chut."

Suare would touch the baby's head in the morning and say, "Bonjour, Bébé Chut!"

R + A

Howes

Refugee

I'm standing by the heavy drab curtain of my tobacco-scented motel room here in Nowhere, Virgina, lifting it aside with a finger. Through the window I watch the gas station customers come and go at the service station below me.

The customers are unaware that they are the prime entertainment for my slow, slow afternoon.

A graying woman limps to the door of the convenience store, followed by her bouncing, blue-hatted grandson, flinging his arms into the air.

A young man in a brown jacket pulls up to the diesel pump in a shiny car, starts the fuel flowing, then walks around to open the door for his waiting lady to get out. They smile at each other, knowingly.

A quick succession of customers fly through Pump 5: young teenager kid, middle aged man with a messy front seat full of stuff and empty coffee cups, then a peeling-paint van packed with kids who are NOT ALLOWED TO GET OUT, finally followed by someone grumpy in a hurry who is scowling in every direction.

Many of them drive up to the pump, slide their plastic cards through the machine, pump their gas, and drive off, with not so much as a wave to the gas station attendant, sitting inside with the computer screens for company.

They seem lonely.

I'm on my way to Tennessee for Rika and Aaron's wedding. They're getting married! In just a few days!

But my car broke down and it's beyond repair and I can't get a rental car because I'm so far far far away from anywhere and I'm even too far away for my dad to come and pick me up and so I'm spending the night here, in the motel that reeks of cigarettes that's attached to the gas station/car garage/greasy family diner.

The phone rings. The sound of it startles me.

It's Mary Ella, the little old lady who's working the counter in the convenience store tonight. "There's a singin' tonight at th' church up th' hill, won't ya like t' come along?"

I hesitate. Would I?

Oh, okay.

I pull on a skirt and my Mary Janes. A few minutes later I'm driving in Mary Ella's car up to the Glorious Valley Holiness Pentecostal Church.

NO sleeping in this church service. No. The evening program is a untamed mix of singing, clapping, dancing in the aisles, healing, tongues, and excessive use of tissues as the members join before the alter in tears. There is no one in the congregation younger than 60, and yet they are bouncing and hopping like you wouldn't believe.

The preacher calls out for a laying on of hands. "Place all your hands on the person near you. Touch them, let them FEEL the POWER of the Holy Spirit!"

I am covered with hands, the hands of strangers who are supporting me in my time of trials. They pray, they wail, they cry, they even squeeze my shoulders a little tighter.

It's nice, actually. I feel very supported with all of them around me, all this touch and all this concentration of love.

Later, the preacher instructs us, "Take the hand of the person next to you and I want to hear you tell them, 'I LOVE you with the LOVE of the LORD!"

Mary Ella squeezes my hand between hers. She grins, hugely. "Honey, I LOVE ya wid th' LOVE of th' Lord!"