Dostoevsky

Hello Again!
Sorry it has taken so long to update but time is a funny thing in Africa. It moves so slowly, but it still seems that I don’t have time for anything. And there has been a lot going on. (also I apologize if my English doesn’t make sense but my current dialect includes German, English, Afrikaans, and Oshiwambo). If anything, I may be a little more poetic because this is the only time I can use the English language to its full extent and know that I will still be understood!
It has been quite a couple of weeks! But I thought I would make this entry about what I have experienced with HISA. To be honest, there really is no way to convey what it is like here so I apologize if my thoughts are choppy or jumbled.
My favorite days of the week are Monday and Wednesday because I am at Okahandja Park with my children all day. It requires me to walk about a quarter of a mile through the settlement in the morning because city cabs don’t go as far as where I work. Every morning I must see and walk thru where the children I work with call home. The homes are made out of stolen sheets of tin. The roofs only stay on because they load their trash on them to hold it down. There are no windows or floors and they average the size of 8 feet by 15 feet.
Trash is just thrown on the dirt pathways that wind thru the settlement where there is room and the smell is something that will never leave me. It is not just the smell of dirt, garbage, sewage, and death (because most people are very close to it) but it is a smell of stale desperation and a lack of hope. It is consistently the most humbling 5 minutes of my life. And for those thinking of my safety, I am perfectly safe. Namibia is safe when it is light out and most all of the children and mothers in the settlement recognize me by now (how many 20-year-old white women walk thru an unofficial settlement in southern Africa at 7 in the morning?) and they know where I am going. In the evenings Zoxa (a man I work with) always walks me to a cab). But the women and children make me feel welcome; not afraid. When I get to the soup kitchen I immediately enter the kitchen and help prepare breakfast (pap or bread and powdered milk). The children have already learned that when they arrive they enter the back of the building, grab a small plastic chair and go into the yard where they sit in their class circle and wait for us to come out with breakfast. But despite how miserable the evening before must have been for them, whenever we come out with our tray of food they never fail to start to chant, “Teacher is coming! Teacher is coming!” They eat their food slowly and deliberately because they don’t know when their next one will come but we have to watch them eat it because if we don’t then they will hide it and bring it home to their families instead of eating themselves. Then they put their bowls and spoons in a bucket and I bring it back to the kitchen. Specifically, I work with a group of about 23 children even though there are about 85 in these morning play-groups. Of these 23 kids: 20 are HIV positive, only 13 have a parent, 7 have two parents and 2 bring their infant siblings with them to class. For the next 4 ½ hours we do things like sing, dance, learn and draw to pass the time. I don’t mean to be so abrupt and brutal about the reality here but I feel like if you can try to understand the sorrow of the situation here, you will take even more joy in how happy the kids are when they are with us. Apparently, me trying to do a traditional Zulu Dance with them is just bout the funniest thing in the world. When they draw, all they need is a smile and a thumbs up to be proud and satisfied. They are absolutely starving for physical contact and attention. They always want to be lifted up or hugged or just want to hold your hand. When they don’t call me Teacher they follow me around and call me “Careful-Careful” because it is always what I am saying to them when they play (and Namibians tend to repeat words like: yes, yes or fine, fine). My hair is another point of fascination for them and it fills up my heart when we are mutually ecstatic to see each other every morning. That they have just a few hours where they can be a kid has given me a satisfaction that I have never found before.
With everything that I see I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes as said by Dostoevsky: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately because there are a lot of different approaches to the situation I find myself in. I have come to the conclusion that there are two different ways to deal with the current reality. To feel nothing or to feel everything. But I’m beginning to think that both ways are right depending on the person. Fortunately and unfortunately for me, I tend to feel everything. This makes my job very tolling emotionally. But my experience here so far has helped me understand that I wouldn’t want it any other way. It makes sense to not think about it and to work and know that you are helping. You can get lost trying to find reason in the way something’s are or in the way things work out; or don’t. And the sad fact of the matter is that they can’t be compared. It literally is two different worlds. You could go crazy trying to rationalize it all and it’s a very depressing business. If anything, there is some comfort in the fact that these kids know nothing else and can’t understand the gravity of the situation. But I think there is something to feeling it all. Even if its just so that these kids are felt for. That someone knows and feels what they’re going thru. And on a selfish level, one of the benefits of this type of work is your own ever increasing sense of a persons self worth. It does keep me up most nights worrying about…everything. But it also makes me appreciate even more the close bond I’ve formed with three of the girls I live with. I may cry a little hard every once and a while but I laugh even harder, and more often. Time moves very slowly here giving me plenty of time to dwell on the injustice of it all. But it also gives time to enjoy a good book and an exotic cup of tea and even better and more diverse company. On some cosmic level, the more pain and experience we let ourselves have will eventually bring more joy into our lives. Even if its just the appreciation of joy itself; for anyone. Maybe just to be worthy of our suffering is enough. To be equal to it. To not just cope with it, but to understand it for ALL that it is. To be worthy of what life gives us. Maybe that’s what this is all about.
Rant too long? Am I reaching or babbling too much? Oh well! I guess I’ve become a poet in my old age? My next post will be sooner and (luckily for those who might still be reading) a little shorter and less heavy!
Thanks for reading!
~Melissa