Wednesday, October 24, 2012

We're All Here Together


I wrote this yesterday... realizing that maybe I had a special angel yesterday. 

Sometimes, some of the things I see here, some of the stories I hear, the situations I grow to understand, some of the experiences I’ve had, can kind of get me down. And some days are definitely worse than others. Yesterday was definitely one of those days. I had just heard ten too many hard stories, had one too many hard experiences, come up against a few to many hard truths to accept, and I was at the end of my rope in terms of understanding the world.

How can such wonderful people be facing such hard situations? Why, in the face of everything, do people continue to harm each other, to spew such hate speech, to use violence, to dominate each other? And what makes the large discrepancy in living situations, when no one is better than another, but for some reason some people are always facing struggle, it seems? How can children die of such curable diseases like malaria? Why are some people born into such financial poverty in situations with such little hope?

These are questions I try not to think about all the time, because when I do, my brain starts going a million miles an hour, but cannot solve a single thing.

But last night, the questions all came in, overwhelmingly. And so today, I did my best to continue my work, despite the exhaustion and the questions.

But I wasn’t quite ok until my bus ride home from town today. I was sitting between a teenaged boy and an old man, and as they both had their phones out, the boy was awkwardly trying to figure out whether or not to send a text to his crush? Girlfriend? And halfway home, the man received a phone call from someone who probably was his wife, asking when he was coming home for supper.

For some reason, this experience was exactly what I needed. The sense of interconnectedness. Despite all other differences, all over the world, people share more similarities than differences. Teenage boys are still trying to figure out what to text teenage girls. Older men are still getting calls asking when they will be home. The world is the same here as it is there. And it continues to rotate. We all exist in some sort of space where we all need connection, we all need belonging, and we all need love. Despite any other divisions, differences, and problems, it all comes down to the same basic things. We are all the same.

How reassuring and great is that?


Sending love from Uganda

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