DRC

I must begin or I never will.
Inconveniently, words seem to elude my grasp during profound moments and experiences. It's baffling how quickly time and space can influence the memory/reality of those intense times. Hmmm. That probably means that I'm human.
I'm thinking right now of some experiences I've had in the last 2 months.

Some of my hesitancy to find those elusive words sprouts from the precarious position we have as citizens of this world. In my particular case, my European ancestors sailed the sea and I was born on land that had become known as the United States of America; I am of the "white" or Caucasian race; and I have also been endowed with amounts and types of resources that land me in "middle class" of the above categories. (I cringe even to inscribe these labels on my name plate because like unsolicited emails, they come attached with sinister "viruses" of ignorance and inequality, but, so be it for this point of discussion.) In addition, I am squarely in a handful of "upper class" world residents who have access to pretty much any and everything I need or want.
Don't even ask me how that happened.

...And yet they did! They asked. They demanded. They begged. With their welcome. With their goodbyes. With their pleading eyes. With exorbitant prices. In their over-attention to our ills or missteps. With their wordless hand motions from belly to mouth. They asked us in private conversations revealing very special requests for urgent personal needs. They asked as they flirted. They asked outright in blunt conversations. We talked as colleagues in an attempt to equalize. They asked among the table full of pastors. They asked as we boarded the tiny Cessna. ..And I ask myself. I demand of the world. I rage at WHY IS LIFE SO UNFAIR????!
*See Editor's Note

That's hardly a new question for me, perhaps for any of us. The essence of the question flashes my memory back to childhood, in color. At a single-digit age I remember wrestling with that question...and many other weighty problems for that matter. (So for anyone surprised at my going to "poor" places in the world, this has been a looooooooooooooooooooong time coming. That's about one 'o' per year.)


The glasses I wore for my visit to this peculiar village in DRC were fitted with lenses of Potential and Respect. In less than a week, I boiled over in the middle of hospital surgery and consultations, unable to absorb the painful realization breaking slowly over my consciousness: that
since I'd stepped off that plane, the villagers swarmed to me and assumed, or understood from prior experience, that the lenses I looked through were for Pity and Rescue, and they interacted with me accordingly.** It felt like they were forcing other glasses on me and plastering me with labels (not the least of which "Mundele!") without inhibition!

Thankfully, the latter P&R lenses are being re-ground to fit a new frame of mind. But the oppressed and manipulative ambiance was too much to bear without having any stabilizing ties and bonds of relationship with the people in whose homeland I was a guest. Without those cords, I am only another outsider to be sacked for all the inequality I'm worth. I realize that connection, trust, interdependence (give and take, and dignity) are as vital as blood. And what do we know from history? That blood and love are perhaps the strongest bonds in the universe.

*Editor's Note: This blog was composed on a full stomach.
**This is my assumption.