Changing Perspectives 1 – Rethinking Black and White

In an effort to post blogs on a more regular basis, I’m going to try something a bit different.  I’ve got a fairly broad theme in mind – trying to look at the world from fresh perspectives, ones that might challenge or call into question ideas that we think of as “normal” or that we take for granted – and I’d like to explore it through several specific subtopics.  As you can probably tell from the title, I’m calling the overall theme “Changing Perspectives,” and the first subtopic I have in mind considers the connotations of the colors black and white.

“He saw things in black and white.”  This expression, in one form or another, is fairly commonplace, and the expression itself might seem relatively harmless.  It’s often just a figurative way of saying that someone places things in strict categories of right and wrong, or of good and evil.  The symbolic use of the words “white” and “black,” or, in some cases, “light” and “darkness,” in place of “good” and “evil” can be seen all over the place.  Just think of one of the passages that Christians read every Christmas Eve, as candles shine in darkened sanctuaries: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:4-5).  Think of all the books and movies in which the struggle of good and evil is portrayed as a battle between light and dark.  In The Lord of the Rings, for example, we have the black orcs, the black gates, and the black towers of Sauron pitted against the white city, the white horses, the white clothes, and the white hair of figures such as Gandalf and Galadriel.  Is this simply a harmless way to add a splash of color to epic conflicts of good and evil, or could the use of these shades have potentially dangerous consequences?

The sentence at the beginning of the preceding paragraph was taken from a book entitled Things Fall Apart, written by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author who died last year.  Things Fall Apart was Achebe’s first novel, and most of it chronicles village life in his home area, before the influences of colonialism.  Near the end of the story, however, white missionaries come into the picture, along with colonial officials, and some things, well, start to fall apart.  A major cause of the problem stems from the fact that the colonizers saw their ideas as “right”, or perhaps “civilized”, while the native people were seen as “uncivilized”, and possibly even “savage”.

In one of the last chapters, Achebe describes the mindset of a white district commissioner using the figures of speech that we see as commonplace, and, in doing so, he shows how such language can be dangerous: “He saw things as black and white.  And black was evil.  He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of darkness.”  In this context, it becomes obvious that the expression “the children of light” refers to the white colonizers, while the phrase “the sons of darkness” corresponds to the Africans.  As we all know, this view of superiority, reinforced by our use of certain figurative language, lasted for many, many years, and it has caused terrible pain in the lives of so many.  Its effects are still seen today.

In The Economist’s obituary about Chinua Achebe, one of the Nigerian author’s essays was discussed as a way to highlight his impact on literature, and on worldwide perspectives.  The essay focused on Joseph Conrad, the author of the book Heart of Darkness:

“The real question,” [Achebe] wrote, “is the dehumanisation of Africa and Africans which [an] age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world.”  Re-reading “Heart of Darkness,” he explained, it became clear that he would never be on Marlow’s boat steaming up the Congo. He was one of the Africans Conrad described jumping up and down on the river bank, pulling faces. He realised how wrong it was – “terribly, terribly wrong” – to portray his people, any people, from that superior floating-past point of view. His essay changed Conrad’s place in English literature.

For a white person, like myself, it’s easy to look at expressions that use “white”/“light” and “black”/“dark” to represent “good” and “evil” and to see only a colorful figure of speech.  The idea of skin color might not cross my mind at all.  But, for someone whose skin is a darker shade, the expression might conjure up a long history of perceived inferiority and exploitation at the hands of the supposed “children of light”.  How does it feel for the color of one’s skin to be associated with one of the most common metaphors, if not the most common metaphor, for evil?  Personally, I don’t know, but some people just might.  Maybe we should think about adjusting some expressions…

P.S. – For the full article about Chinua Achebe in The Economist, click here:

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21574453-chinua-achebe-africas-greatest-storyteller-died-march-21st-aged-82-chinua-achebe

P.P.S. – I love The Lord of the Rings.  It’s just the first example of white vs. black that came to mind…

Are We There Yet?

Well, I finally made it back.  After about a month and a half of rest, good food, music, and friends, I left the US on January 7^th for another eleven months in Uganda.  I expected to get back to Kalisizo by the 9^th.  Almost a week later, I’ve finally reached my destination.  Obviously, a few things happened along the way to slow me down, but, for the most part, it actually turned into a pretty comfortable several days.  At a few points during that time, some interesting things happened that made me think, “Huh, this might make a good story for a blog post.”  So, I’m starting the whole blog-writing thing up again.  Hopefully, it lasts…

January 7^th: It’s the last morning at my family’s house in Pennsylvania, and I slowly, somewhat reluctantly, pull myself out of bed.  I have to wake up early (8:00 am, ouch), so that we can make it to the airport in time for my flight later that day.  In a partial daze, and shivering from the outrageously cold temperatures, I get myself together, pack the last few things into my backpack, and cocoon myself into my family’s van as we pull out of the driveway.  About twenty minutes later, my hand shoots into my pocket and I confirm that, yep, I left the ATM card I need for Uganda at the house.  After a few frustrated grunts, I inform the family, and we speed back home to grab the card.  We still end up making it to the airport in plenty of time, where I say goodbye to Mom and Dad and head into the airport, which is not busy at all.  I wait for about a minute before checking in and checking my two bags, mostly full of research supplies and presents, and then I wait for about another 5 seconds before getting through security.  I’m at the gate for the first leg of airborne section of my trip with time to spare, and it turns out that, according to the people at the gate, our flight from Baltimore to Detroit would be full.  Although, this is actually not the case, as the seat right next to mine ends up being empty.  It might be the only empty seat on the plane.

This first flight goes off without a hitch, and I land in Detroit with some time to find my next gate and to play around on the internet for a bit.  Actually I end up having several hours to do this, since this flight, from Detroit to Amsterdam, is delayed.  At first, it’s delayed by about 2 hours, which makes me a bit concerned, because my layover in Amsterdam was only supposed to be about 2 hours.  I’m thinking I may need to sprint through the huge airport in Amsterdam, but then the two hour mark comes and goes, and we’re still sitting in the airport.  Finally, after almost three hours, we board the plane.  It turns out that the weather outside was so cold that the catering company was having trouble loading food and drinks onto the planes.  The trucks use hydraulic lifts, which were not working, or were working very slowly, which caused all of the flights in the airport to be delayed.  Once on the plane, we wait for another half an hour before getting clearance to take off, and then the ocean-crossing flight finally begins.  As I sit in my window seat, trying to get comfortable, one of the flight attendants notices my Bucknell sweatshirt, and it turns out that her family is from Williamsport and that her son is a freshman at Bucknell.  We talk for a bit, and I tell her that I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer heading back to Uganda.  This statement causes a couple people nearby to become interested.  The young man next to me seems pretty interested in what I’m doing, and the young lady across the aisle says that she also served as a volunteer.  Amazingly enough, she was in Nicaragua, a country that was a pretty big part of my life while I was at Bucknell.  We talk for a while, and then settle in to watch our little movie screens.

January 8^th: I’m not great at sleeping on planes, especially when I have a vast assortment of movies at my disposal, so I am awake for almost the entire flight.  We land in Amsterdam around 11:00 am local time, which is an hour after my flight to Uganda was supposed to leave.  It did leave, and only one flight goes from Amsterdam to Uganda every day, so I am stuck for a day.  This actually turns out to be quite nice.  The airline seems to run into this sort of thing all the time, and they get me set up at a nearby hotel, with my room and all my meals paid for.  In not too long, I am on a shuttle bus heading to the hotel.  I’m kind of excited to see a bit of Amsterdam, but it turns out that the hotel is not in the city.  It’s about fifteen minutes from the airport, and the city is also about fifteen minutes from the airport, but they’re in different directions.  So, we drive down a fairly rural highway, and I get excited again, because I see wind turbines up ahead.  “Oh cool, they have wind turbines!” I think to myself.  Renewable energy has been an interest of mine for many years…

I get to the hotel, which is humongous, around 1:30 pm, and my room is ready.  The room is, of course, very nice, and I take a few minutes to get on the internet and let people know what’s happening to me.  Then, I realize that I only have a few more minutes to capitalize on the free lunch, which lasts until 2:00 pm, so I hurry down to the restaurant.  After lunch, I send some more emails, take a shower, and then it hits me.  I feel incredibly tired, and I decide to take a short nap.  It’s about 4:00 pm by this point, so I set an alarm to go off in an hour and climb into bed.  The next time I open my eyes, it’s 10:00 pm, and I’m still feeling pretty tired, so I just allow myself to fall back to sleep, which is not hard at all…

January 9^th: I finally get out of bed around 5:00 am, which would normally be unbelievably early for me, but, having gone to sleep at 4:00 pm the day before, it doesn’t seem quite so early this time.  I take my time getting breakfast, and then pack up and take the shuttle back to the airport a little after 7:00 am.  At the airport, I ask no less than five different airline employees about my checked luggage, since I’m not sure if there’s anything I need to do to make sure that the bags are on today’s flight.  It turns out that I don’t need to do anything, and I continue on to the gate, which seems to be at the very end of the airport, pretty far removed from all the other flights.  This flight hops from Amsterdam to Rwanda and then to Uganda, and as I sit on the floor reading my book, I realize, through a bit of eavesdropping, that I’m sitting next to a group of Peace Corps Volunteers who work in Rwanda.  A little later, I get up and walk around, and someone else recognizes my Bucknell sweatshirt.  It turns out that he lives in State College…  Crazy, right?

This flight ends up being delayed by about half an hour, but we eventually get moving.  I really luck out with my seat assignment this time around.  I’m at the very front of one of the Coach sections, and I’m in the aisle, meaning that I have a ton of leg room.  The weird thing is that the movie screen and tray table set up is completely different, and this takes all of us in the row a little while to figure out.  The screen comes up from under the seat, while the table folds out of the arm.  After making sure I understand the setup, I settle into the movie world once again.

We land in Uganda around 10:30 pm, and, after getting through immigration, I wait for my two bags, still wondering if they actually did make it onto the flight.  The big camping backpack comes relatively quickly, which makes me hopeful.  After another half an hour or so, that hope is dashed as it becomes clear that no new bags have been added to the conveyor belt for several minutes.  It turns out that a number of people were missing things, so there is quite a line at the baggage office.

January 10^th: After a long wait, I get to the desk and am told that the bag should be arriving on the next flight.  I let them know where they can deliver it once it arrives, and I finally leave the airport around 1:00 am.  After being swarmed by the taxi drivers who hang around the exit doors, I find the Peace Corps driver, Rashid, who by now has been waiting for me for at least two and a half hours.  Of course he is very nice about it, and we drive off toward Kampala.  I find out that I’m going to be staying at Ann’s house.  Ann is an American working in the Peace Corps office, and she oversees Peace Corps Uganda’s administrative and financial stuff (that’s the technical description of her job).  As expected the house is very nice.  Her husband, Lou, lets me in and shows me to the bedroom downstairs, where I will be staying.

After sleeping for several hours, I wake up and have breakfast with Lou, since Ann has already gone into the office.  Ann has been working in the country since July, but Lou only came about three weeks ago.  We talk about some of the things to do in the country, some of the national parks, and about some of the stuff he did when he was a volunteer in Fiji.  In the afternoon, we go out for a bike ride.  First, we stop at a wood-working shop, where Lou is having a table made, and then we stop at a market.  We lug back heavy bags of potatoes, eggplant, greens, and avocados, and Lou is also carrying a little pumpkin.  The way back is really steep, and I am going really slowly.  At one point, I lose sight of Lou, and this is, of course, when he turns onto another street.  I miss the turn and end up searching for several minutes to find the right street.  Finally, after going back and forth across roads that all look pretty similar, I get back to where I need to be, I see Lou, and we go back to the house.  I’m pretty tired after this extended ride, so I relax for the rest of the day, expecting to get a call the next morning about my bag.

January 11^th: The call doesn’t come.  I end up calling the airline myself, and I find out that now it’s expected to come on today’s flight.  I make sure that they know to deliver it to the Peace Corps office when it does arrive, and I proceed to spend almost the whole day relaxing.  We go out to dinner with Paul, Peace Corps Uganda’s director of programming and training, and his wife, at a restaurant with Ethiopian and Italian food (kind of an interesting combination).  We’re all pretty tired when we get back to the house, so we call it a night.

January 12^th: Again, no call, but I check online, which tells me that the bag should have come on the flight the day before.  So, I spend another relaxing day waiting.  In the afternoon, I get a call from Paul, who had gone into the office, letting me know that the bag was delivered.  Tomorrow, I’ll be able to go in and get it, and then I can finally travel back to Kalisizo.  I have to say, though, that this very gradual re-introduction back into Uganda has been quite nice.  In the market, when you buy a bunch of stuff, they might give you a few extra tomatoes or something, and they’ll call it a “bonus”.  I feel like the past several days have been kind of a vacation bonus.

January 13^th: I wake up pretty early, pack up everything, and go into the office with Ann.  My bag is right where it’s supposed to be, and I take a quick look inside to make sure that things are still in there.  We seem to be in good shape.  I send Max a text message, letting him know that I have the bag and that I will be heading back to Kalisizo later today.  Max’s response: “Thanks be to God.”  I spend the morning hanging out in the volunteer lounge, talking with some other volunteers, saying hi to some staff members, and writing most of this thing.  A group of us walk to a nearby restaurant for lunch, and I’m starting to feel like I’m almost back to being a normal Peace Corps Volunteer, and I realize that I’m very glad to be back.  (Of course, it helps one’s mindset when one is eating really good food at the time.)  After lunch, we head back to the office, and a few of us get a car to head back into town.  The car drops the other two volunteers off at the hotel, and I continue on to the taxi park.

Now, I’ve been thinking about the best way to travel back, with my three bags.  A bus would be the most comfortable, but it’s hard to find one that would go the whole way to my site.  I want something that will get me the whole way there, because otherwise at some point I would need to shove myself into a little car, which I’d prefer to avoid.  So, I take a look at the coasters (mini-buses that seat twenty-some people), but none of them are more than half full, and it takes them a while to fill up.  So, I continue on to the matatus (big vans that seat 14 people), thinking that they could put at least one, hopefully two, of my bags in the back.  Nope, they are putting other stuff back there.  I’m pretty much committed at this point, so I climb in, and one guy does take my big camping backpack to put in the back.  But, he doesn’t actually put it in the back.  He slides it up under the seats, until it’s right beneath me, giving me very little room to position my feet.  The other two backpacks are sitting with me, one shoved down as far as it will go between my seat and the back of the seat in front of me.  It gets stuck about halfway down.  The other backpack sits on top, and I pull out a book so that I can read on top of this mound of backpacks.  Now, admittedly, sometimes I use sarcasm or exaggeration to provide some comic relief in these posts, but I am completely serious when I say that I am in pain the entire way home (3 hours).  With the backpacks piled up in front of me in my seat, my legs are basically pinned into two specific spots, and once someone sits next to me, moving my legs is not really an option.  My knees are pressing into the corners of the seat in front of me, even though I’m sitting as far back as I can in my seat.  There is not much cushioning covering the metal frame of these seats, especially on these corners, so my knees are basically shoved into metal the whole way home.  Maybe the matatu was not the best choice…

As we near Kalisizo, the lady sitting next to me makes sure that the conductor knows exactly where I want to stop, which is very nice of her.  I like to think that I can do all of this stuff myself, but I have to admit that it’s a nice feeling to know that others are looking out for me as well.  After disassembling my backpack mountain and stumbling out of the vehicle, a guy comes up on a motorcycle and immediately recognizes me.  “Brick by Brick!  How are you?”  A few people in Kalisizo identify me so much with our little organization that they sometimes call me “Brick by Brick”.  Our office is much closer than my house, so I walk there first, so that I can drop off the two bags I don’t need right away.  On my way there, someone else recognizes me, and this guy, who spends his days making boxes from scrap metal, actually calls me by name, and we talk for a bit.  He seems happy to see me.  It’s evening now, so no one is at the office.  I open it up, drop off the bags, and walk home.  On the way, I pick up some bread at my favorite shop in town, and I talk to the owner’s daughter for a minute, who is home from school and is watching the shop.  Finally, I make it to my compound, and as soon as I step inside, I hear kids starting to shout my name.  They seem fairly excited to see me…

So, here I am, several days later than expected, but here safely and soundly with all of my stuff.  It was a very gradual process of moving from Pennsylvania back to Kalisizo, with some unexpected, yet nice, stops along the way.  I wasn’t completely sure if I was ready to come back, but, now that I’m here, I’m happy to be, and I am ready to get back to work tomorrow.

Three Confessions

One short and obvious, one sort of odd and maybe a little amusing, and one more serious and reflective...and longer...

1.) I stink at writing blogs…or at least at writing blogs regularly.  But, you already know that, so I won’t dwell on it…

2.) Sometimes I sleep on the floor…don’t worry, not directly on the cold, hard concrete.  I don’t know if my bony frame could make it through a night like that.  There’s a woven mat on the floor that’s about as long as I am, and I take a fairly thick blanket and do a sort of tri-fold thing with it (basically making a flattened Z).  The folded blanket goes on top of the mat, a camping pillow goes at one end, and I go inside the blanket, so that two layers are beneath me and I can use the third as a cover.  Why do I do this?  Because I also stink at waking up early, especially when I sleep in my bed.  After two years of use, I fit into the mattress like a baseball fits into a catcher’s mitt.  It’s a bit too cozy when I need to get out of bed early.  Sleeping on the floor is a bit less comfortable, but I can still go to sleep fairly easily, and, in the morning, I still don’t want to get up.  But, at least I wake up when my alarm goes off.  When I’m sleeping in bed and I need to get up for something, I set at least four alarms on my phone the night before, spaced out so that they get gradually closer together the longer I sleep in.  Even with those fail-safes in place, sometimes my barely-awake brain is able to silence all of the alarms so that it can go back to bed.  It’s a pretty impressive feat, considering I can’t even remember doing that when I wake up again hours later…  So, because I still have the sleep schedule of a lazy guy in college, sometimes I sleep on the floor.  (And I secretly hope that it helps my posture a bit, too…)

3.) Moving to something a bit more serious, I’ve recently come to a greater appreciation of how eye-opening this whole experience has been for me.  In this case, I mean “eye-opening” in terms of learning about myself.  Obviously, the past two years have given me a wealth of interesting outward experiences, but I’m looking inward right now.  Over the past week or so, I’ve been reading journal entries that I wrote during training.  Believe it or not, when we first arrived in Uganda, I was amazingly good about writing in that journal, just about every night.  This lasted almost the whole way through our 10 week training period.  Then I got to site, and I started to write in the journal only slightly more frequently than I wrote blogs.  In other words, there have been stretches where I didn’t write in it for months.  Anyway, the point is that I’ve been looking back at some of the first thoughts I had after coming to Uganda, and I’m realizing that I have changed a little bit.  Admittedly, I was kind of naïve, I was incredibly idealistic (sometimes to the point of writing stuff that seems excessively sappy and sentimental), and, although it was not explicitly said, it was implied that I thought I was a pretty good and special person for doing what I’m doing.  I also thought that I was this calm, cool, and collected Zen master who could handle anything with grace and ease.  (I may be exaggerating the truth slightly with my word choice, but you get the idea.)

I’m certainly not saying that I’ve made a 180 degree turn, here, but I definitely see differences between who I was and who I am.  I certainly don’t know everything I should know for the work that I’m doing, but I’ve learned quite a bit over the past couple of years.  I haven’t turned to ultra-realism, but my idealism is tempered now by the raw experience of things sometimes not living up to my hopes.  I may still get sentimental on occasion (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but that has become counterbalanced by what I think is a healthy skepticism.  In other words, I question things even more than I used to, which sometimes helps to find deeper truths that can emerge from previous ideas.

Perhaps most importantly, I know now that I am not, as I might have thought, a person with an extraordinary, Zen-like amount of patience and collectedness.  Indeed, I have found that there is a pretty intense temper that finds its way to the surface once in a while.  A few months ago, I read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, and a passage near the end really nailed it for me:

“Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them.  You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing, and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness.  Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered.  In other words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.”

In the next paragraph, Lewis goes on to discuss “nasty people” who try to be better and find out right away that they need lots of help.  As usual, I see some parts of myself fitting into the (apparently) “nice chap” model and some parts fitting into the “nasty person” model.  (I also think that other parts of myself are not encompassed by these two possibilities, but that’s not really relevant to my point right now.)  The past two years have, in some ways, helped me to bring my personality and my soul out into the sunlight, so that I could see some of the scratches and bruises and dents.  It’s hard, when you’re in the moment, or when you look back on a moment, and you realize that it’s not one of your best moments.  It’s hard to discover that the frustrations and realities of the world are threatening to make you jaded or pessimistic or devoid of compassion, that they are tearing down your abstractions and ideals about how things should work and how things should be.  It’s hard to find yourself, and to be not quite satisfied with what you have found.

In the end, though, I’m glad.  It’s important to realize these things.  I think it’s important to be “not quite satisfied” with what I have found in myself, because it pushes me toward a path of growth.  I think it’s important to understand that I could be nudged down a path that leads to pessimism, jadedness, or despair.  I occasionally see myself turning in that direction.  On the whole, I love what I’m doing, but it can be really easy to forget that when the frustrations and annoyances build up.  It can be really easy to become hard and closed, and maybe even a little unfriendly at times.  But, witnessing those parts of myself is a step toward overcoming those parts of myself, with help.  By closing myself off in an (often failed) attempt to shut out frustrations, I am also shutting out the positive influence of those around me.  I am now trying to make a conscious effort to remain open, even when things start to tick me off, and I have witnessed a positive impact, both on my thoughts and on my work (while still seeing much room for improvement, of course).

Some years ago, during a trip to Nicaragua, I wrote that I have no right to despair.  I would go beyond that now.  I would say that, for me, despair is not even a reasonable option.  I’m going to support this with passages taken from another British author, J.R.R. Tolkien (yep, I’m re-reading the Lord of the Rings right now): First, “Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.  We do not.”  Second, “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

I am so fortunate to have this opportunity, and to continue the experience into another year.  I have the opportunity to do something that I want to do, something that I love.  Doing it means that I also miss some things that I love, but they will be brought back again soon enough.  Though the joy and love does often mingle with disappointment and difficulty, perhaps this process makes the positive that much stronger.  Though I have come to see many of my faults and blemishes more clearly, perhaps, in the end, that knowledge is making me a better, and happier, person.