For the Days I Can't Remember

There's a saying that says that friends sing the song of your soul back to you when you forget. 

That's stupid.

My friends give me essays when I'm too tired to read.  They push me to think, to question, to get back up and fight when I'd really rather just taste iron as the countdown ends.  If I'm argumentative, if I am stubborn, if I tend to growl in public – this is why.

I'm depressed.

That's far too strong a word, but it was the first that came to mind as I was washing dishes in a fugue state one day.  Not only was I carrying out tasks on autopilot, I wasn't completing them to my usual standards, I  was skipping out on church events because they seemed like too much work, I was oversleeping, and food seemed like an unnecessary luxury.  I was okay during the retreat with the rest of my team, but going back to work left me listless and eager to be home.  Home home.


 I'd stopped worrying about how much time I had left here and started eying the eleven months left as though I was already on the other side of them.  I don't know why – relationships at work and within our team were getting stronger, I feel like I'd made a difference with some of my work, I was learning, I was still reading the Bible and praying.  But it didn't feel real – it felt like an in-between place, like too many shades of grey had left me unable to see my hand in front of my face. 

I'd given up. 

Even the deaths of MJ Sharp and Zaida Catalan didn't create ripples in my sea of no cares.  They were more people who 'didn't understand the reality of the situation.'  And they died for it.  They were murdered trying to find the truth and create peace in a land to which they had no connection because people would rather have fear and death and pain rather than admit guilt, lose money and power, and defy the stories their parents killed for.  You can't help people who don't want to be helped.  

“It's a black spirit within us,” said a friend, his round face shining with earnestness.  “[I would speak out] if there were white people among us – yes.  But black people eat each other alive.

“When you can fund us,” he continued conversationally, “be flexible with your budget.  We're not being paid anywhere near as much as we were during the war.”

This is not my fight! I wanted to hiss.  My fight is against corruption, against murder, against war – not to get you more money.  Why do I feel like we're not on the same battlefield?    

I couldn't fight this.  I was too tired.  I couldn't even stop myself from gossiping and backbiting, much less take on an endemic system of corruption in marriages, families, churches, workplaces, and governments.   

Another friend, who didn't know what he was getting himself into, asked how work was going. 

Terrible.  A project is over.  The funder is unhappy.  The field staff think the office staff stole money and didn't do their job.  The office staff think the field staff did the same.  All the work done for the audit needed to be redone - the first round had involved massaging the numbers to make sure they fit the budget; God Almighty only knows what the second involved.  The statistics were all wrong as of last June – this was discovered in September, but they likely continued being wrong until this March.  I thought I'd made a difference because people began parroting what I'd said when I'd walked away from the assessment team.  But I hadn't.  Nothing will change because no one wants anything to change – all they want is a bigger piece of the pie.

So?  You knew all that before.  Nothing changed.  You're still here to help. 

How can I?!  They look at me like I'm crazy – like I'm just another muzungu who couldn't possibly understand, like the end justifies the means.  But it doesn't.  The means is the whole journey.  What is the point of gaining the whole world and forfeiting your soul in the process?  I'm supposed to play my part here, take the money I'm being given, do my job, and shut up.  Sometimes I'm being asked to lie.  And everyone's doing it.  And I've done it too.  And now I'm pretending that being a foreigner and leaving in one year justifies my culpability.

And it does.  In one year, you'll be back home and they'll still be in the same corrupt jobs in the same corrupt country.

I get no pleasure from that!  I don't feel bad that they think I'm crazy, I--

You feel bad that they don't want to change.  That they don't see the harm they're doing to themselves in the long run.

Yes.

So talk.  Be honest.  Tell them what's wrong and ask why it happened.  It doesn't have to be confrontational, but you shouldn't feel complicit.  None of us should.

I...  But...  I believe in honesty.  I do.  But I can't talk to my boss!  How can talking to one person make a differ--

It does.  All you need to do is convince one person, and it's a daily struggle; it doesn't just happen.  

I knew.  These were my words – from the harshness of letting people make their own choices to the sweet hope that they would make the right ones to the firm faith that God would protect them and others if they repented from the wrong ones.  I had read them in the Bible, felt them in my heart, rolled them on my tongue, and staccato-fired them at others.  I knew individuals were important; I knew honesty was important.  How had I lost that?

The truth is that darkness eats us alive when we stop fighting.  The truth is that friends remind us what we’re fighting for. 

Speak the truth.  Live it.  Again and again.  Until you can't lift your head.  And then listen and watch your friends while you grit your teeth and take another breath to do it all over again.  That shouldn't begin or end with contract periods.  Neither will this fight.