it's cold on my front porch!

i am sitting on the small, tiled front porch of my room here in the Kuka Lodge, and i can see my breath. the sky is already bright with sun and there is a cacophony of crazy bird sounds ... imagine a cuckoo clock with a bourbon drenched, smokers voice surrounded by chirpy song birds. oh, and the rooster. :)

turns out that getting to malawi is a long, long day of travel. LONG. but we landed in lilongwe without incident or lost baggage mid saturday morning. my first sights of malawi were unreal. on the bus ride from the airport we passed many large trucks, but no cars. almost every person we saw was on foot or bicycle, usually alone or in pairs, and the landscape was red with dust. in that short drive. i saw a group of boys washing clothes in a ditchside culvert, beautiful women carrying gigantic packages on their heads walking calmly along side the road as giant trucks barreled past, a boy of maybe 13 perched up in a small tree, just watching the world go by, a small herd of random goats and small vendors set up along the way selling avocados or potatoes. one man was selling giraffes that he was carving as we drove past, and i yelled 'GIRAFFES!' and caused a kafuffle on the bus that was unintended. :) if i had been driving, we would have stopped and i'd already have my first souvenier!

in an effort to stay awake, once we were settled we went for, what our hotel manager assured us, was a short 15 minute walk to local shops. 45 min later, we arrived at a collection of shops that more closely resembled a strip mall than anything else. grocery store, liquor store, pizza, 2 hair salons ... but no shops that sold what i was really hoping for. every woman i have seen so far has been wearing traditional dress - bright and tied up around them - and i was so hoping to find one to wear today!

we are headed to a church service, which our local habitat guide said will probably be around 2 hours (!) and then headed to lake malawi  for the afternoon. there is talk of staying til dark to watch the stars come out... there are so many stars! no street lights anywhere in lilongwe that we have seen, and a night of start gazing seems like a must do. after the lake we are driving to the salima district, where we will stay for the week and build homes for two local families. (see family bio's in previous post).

wifi is paid by data, so no pics now. maybe our lodge tonight will have a different policy? big love!

Privilege

tomorrow is the big departure...malawi, here i come!

i was struck by something as i drove to work this morning, running over the long list of things to remember as i was stuck in traffic. this is the first time i've packed for a trip where, if i forget my socks, i can't just run out to wal-mart and get a pair. think about that for a second. i haven't even left yet, and i am already face to face with the privilege i live with, and pretty much always take for granted. the convenience of my life and my access to ... things.

i have a lot of things. i have a lot of prividege. frankly, most of us do. what do we do with it? how do we use it? do we leverage it for others, or do we leverage it for ourselves? i like to thing i'm pretty generous, but i have a feeling that perspective is about to be adjusted.

...In the event of your kidnapping, please note that Habitat for Humanity will not pay any ransom demand...

Anne lives in the Salima district, a widow with 6 children ranging in age from an infant to 15. She farms to support her family. They live in a cracked and falling apart house with a grass thatched roof that leaks heavily during the rains and has no latrine or sanitation, and not all of the family can stay in the home at once.

Pelepetuwa is a widow in the Salima district who is raising her 5 children in the Salima district. Her home collapsed in the rains and they have had to move into her oldest daughter's house. The dirt floor, one room house has no windows and poor ventilation, and now houses 10 members of the family.

These are the two families we will be (trying!) to build homes for on our trip to Malawi. Leaving Friday, we arrive Saturday morning and will be met by local Habitat staff. The village we will be working in is one that Habitat Malawi is already working in, having identified it as a community of vulnerable people groups. If you are a person who prays, please pray for our trip! If you are not a prayer, please hold good thoughts and wish us well!

I will be updating this blog as I am able - we'll see what kind of inter-web-tubes are available to us!

dreams

i am frankly suprised that this page still exists in the vast space of the inter-tubes! my last post was over a year ago ... yet here it is. waiting.

i came back here because of the most amazing thing - i am travelling to malawi this month with habitat for humanity to build houses in a village and go on a brief safari in neighboring zambia. i want to blog my experiences, and this is where i'll be doing it - i hope you read them!

here's what happened to me, though, when i landed on this page. i read the last couple posts, and they reminded me how much i love to write, to think, to read. maybe netflix really is slowing stealing my brain? i am hoping that maybe i'll get in the habit again...

liberation

“I brought a lot of hurt onto myself in the name of liberation.”

A friend of mine wrote this to me in an email not too long ago, and it stopped me in my tracks. It is one of the most comprehensive and profound statements about being human I have ever come across. “I brought a lot of hurt onto myself in the name of liberation.”

Walt Whitman wrote, “From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines.” As a human being who has often found herself through fate and circumstance put into categories and boxes, I love this quote so much that I have it inscribed on a bracelet. What a glorious thought. Beholden to no one, unboxed and free from having to conform to anyone else’s values or ideals, or even our own values and ideals, it is the song of our culture. We are encouraged to live unfettered and responsible only to ourselves. There is nothing we like less than being defined and confined – being, as Renee Russo says in ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’, “a foregone conclusion.” Whitman seems to put his finger exactly on the pulse of our deepest desire.

However, we rarely stop to consider the consequences of our apparent liberation. Like my friend, too often the thing that we think will free us becomes the very thing that hurts and enslaves us. The examples of this are endless, but here is my own very personal one. I have taken to calling last year my lost year. I began to feel the weight of my life and relationships as a crushing one, one that limited who I thought I wanted to be. In an act of rebellion disguised as freedom, I began to make choices for myself… choices that “liberated” me from my relationships and allowed me to avoid responsibilities that made me feel boxed in. With every choice I was sure that I would experience freedom. Instead what I found was an increasing sense of isolation, loneliness and depression. Entirely apart from the hurt I caused to my family and my friends, I brought a lot of hurt onto myself in the name of liberation.

As some of you know, it is Lent…a time when we voluntarily restrict ourselves, confine or limit our choices, in order to find a way to pay closer attention to God and to our neighbor. During Lent we intentionally to say no to a freedom and in doing so we make it possible to see that we may actually be slaves to our “freedoms”. The woman who gives up makeup for example, though it’s certainly no sin, suddenly finds that she has been a slave to the lie of perfection and beauty-based worth. The man who surrenders his after work beer, again no sin there, is dismayed to realize that it doesn’t just take the edge off a long day, but takes him out of being fully present to his family in a low-level fog. Even the person giving up their favorite snack, who loses the five pounds they have wanted to lose for a year, finds that the food they treated themselves to is what has hurt them physically for so long. These seem to be simple things, but they have far reaching consequences. How much more so the choices we make in “freedom” regarding our hearts. We bring a lot of hurt onto ourselves in the name of liberation.

Lent is a good time to honestly and frankly consider our lives. Where are you holding onto a “freedom” that is hurting you in the long run? Or put another way, where are you experiencing hurt now? If you follow that hurt to its source, is there a false freedom at its root? These are hard questions to ask. They are, however, good ones to ask. Maybe even necessary ones. Because it turns out that we bring a lot of hurt onto ourselves in the name of liberation.

pledging allegiance

I am currently going through the process of naturalization to get my American citizenship. I tell you what – you haven’t lived until you’ve been fingerprinted for your FBI file. As someone with a very benign life, I actually think it’s sort of adorable that I have an FBI file! ha!

All of this has got me thinking….about citizenship, patriotism, community, the world… vast ideals! In all of it,  I was reminded of something that happened to me about 7 or 8 years ago, when I was a stay at home mom who spent a good deal of time each afternoon in the carpool line.

5th graders rotated through the responsibility of taking down the flag every day, and I would laugh to myself as I saw them struggle to fold it and keep it from dragging on the ground. It seemed like a very ponderous process. But when my daughter reached 5th grade, I learned that it’s a big deal (remember, not an American). I didn’t know that the flag wasn’t allowed to touch the ground, out of respect. I didn’t know that the way it was folded was prescribed. During her week of flag duty I watched my daughter’s careful clumsiness, the way she took her responsibility very seriously. Clearly, the way the flag was treated mattered.

I don’t know why, but one day, watching the whole process, I was struck by this thought: We treat this flag with more respect and care than we treat the people who pledge allegiance to it. We are up in arms when the American flag is burned, dragged, disrespected, violated, vandalized or ripped down. It offends our patriotism and makes us angry. Don’t get me wrong, I agree that our symbols and how we treat them matter. But it also matters how we treat the people who share them. The people who live under the Stars and Stripes are all too often treated entirely differently than its flag.

All you have to do is flip through the headlines – racism, classism, abuse, murder, rape, crime, poverty. But it is so much more insidious than even that. We are selfish and inward focused. If we bother to notice people outside of our “inner circle” it’s only to take stock of how they compare to us… they are the measurement of our success or failure. We are casually cruel to the immigrants and the poor. There is very little compassion for anyone who falls outside of our tidy guidelines. We don’t see people. We see “dirty (insert nationality here)” or “white trash” or “rich bitch” … the list goes on and on. As a nation and as individuals, we work very hard to keep outsiders out and insiders in. Everyday someone’s dignity and humanity is violated by our unthinking disregard. But the flag never touches the ground.

It’s interesting – when I say ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag…’ I am giving assent to beautiful ideals – the unity of a nation and justice for all of her people – but they are so lofty and so soaring that they are almost vague … too easily disregarded on a personal level. I’ve been thinking lately, what if we changed the words? What if we pledged allegiance to the people of our country instead of her flag? “I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America, and to the Republic in which they stand, one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” Now that is a scarily personal pledge. I give my loyalty to my neighbor, I promise fealty to the landscaper, I will live in unity with the woman in the hajib. I will notice the injustice my fellow American suffers for being black, brown, disabled, poor, uneducated, old or young, and I will stand against it and fight with them for equality. There is nothing vague about those things. Imagine what our country would look like if every child grew up pledging allegiance to each other every morning? What if we treated the people in America with as much respect, dignity and care as we treat the flag?

glowsticks

(the year of rachel was briefly interrupted by the martian death flu. we're all up and running now, though - go team!) 

while i was sick, i read 'paper towns' by john greene. it's a story of young adulthood, and an enjoyable mystery/character study. there are lots of small insights on what it means to be human, to grow up and the inevitable changes of our relationships, but this stood out to me as though it were lit from the inside.

"When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.” 

i hesitate to extrapolate too much  - the words speak so beautifully for themselves. maybe it's just worth noting that madly papering over our own cracks and maintaining our facade of wholeness is what keeps us from being truly seen, truly known. and if there is one thing i truly, deeply believe we all need, it is that. nothing is more powerful than knowing someone sees you. sees into your cracks, and recognizes the light that that shines out, however dimly. 

it is also worth noting, i think, that when we are so busy plastering over our chips and fractures we can't rightly see anyone else. if we bother to notice their presence at all, it's only to take stock of whether or not they see us as whole and umarred - they are only the measure of the success or failure of our hasty repairs. we aren't looking for the light in them at all - we are not "face to face" as john greene puts it. 


everything is presented to us whole - shiny and new. and if it's not whole, it's definitely less. we apologize for driving an old car even though it goes from a - b. we are embarrased to wear last years shoes, have 2nd hand clothes, to have a non-hd, non-56", non-apple tv. no wonder we are so ashamed that we are not shiny and new. our life has not fallen out of a magazine, and neither has our skin, our families, our beach bodies. and so we plaster and sand and paint and cover and rearrange the furniture of our lives to hide the stains. but in the long run, all that does is isolate us. keep us alone. keep us from being able to be seen - and maybe even more of a loss, keeps us from being able to be the one who sees. who is able to look into someone else and give them the gift of recognizing their light.