“The poor have an incredible amount to teach us about patience and thankfulness and an openness to life. We’re not poor so we’ve never had to wait. But that’s what the poor have grown up with – having to wait and having to share, because nobody can have it all.”
We witnessed our first death today. Only like everything else in Sudan, not even that was definite… I could not be so passive in the face of death or hunger or political maldistribution. But I’ve never been bombed or shot at or burned out of my home, either.
I am now convinced that hell is not the firepit of religious lore. Hell is the complete loss of privacy, dignity and self-determination.. It is bathing with a dirty cup of water in the street, defecating in an open field as people walk by, having no curtain to draw while you make love, displaying your sickness and sores to the world in the hope someone will make them better…
If my pen is shaking, it is fitting. Twice today, people have told Jean and me we are brave. Right now, I feel anything but. I feel shaken and scared and like having a good cry. Or a cold beer. Either would do. (Although a beer right now would certainly lead to a cry.)
The folks from the American Refugee Committee are wonderful, the kind of people with the inner peace necessary to tackle such a mission. And while they know that about themselves, they seem to harbor no disdain or even impatience for others who blind themselves to world pain and who refuse to be moved out of their own self-absorption.
The men bury Adara Hailu’s daughter just after sunrise Monday, Feb. 25. The gritty wind still carries a hint of night coolness, offering a few hours of reprieve from the searing punishment of the desert sun.