How often have you heard people say, or said yourself, "Oh, I could never do that."
In the course of showing my photos of the Congo to friends, I've heard more than one person say those words, or words like them. My friends seem to think they could never survive being shot in the leg, or that they could never build and live in their own grass and reed hut, or collect water and food every day in order to prepare that day's meals.
My friends are wrong, of course. Hundreds of millions of people do those things every day, because if you have no choice ... you have no choice.
Are we in the developed world "soft"? Yes, most of us are. We worry about trivia, because we have nothing worse to worry about. We convince ourselves we can't do things, because, if the going gets too tough we can always climb back into our BMWs and Audis, turn up the heater (and CD player), pick up a coffee at Starbucks, and have a hot shower when we get home, before deciding between ordering Chinese or pizza for dinner.
When you have no choice, things are simpler. If you have to collect 20 liters of water per day per person in your family, you know you need to wake up early and get moving with that 5-liter jug. If your child is sick and the nearest health clinic or hospital is 20 kilometers away, and there are no buses or other transport, you know you need to start walking.
If you had to run out of your house right now because drugged and drunken gunmen were attacking your community, indiscriminately spraying automatic weapons fire, and you had to hide in the woods for three days without food, returning to find that your home had been burned to the ground and you'd been left with nothing but the clothes on your back, could you handle that? You probably could.
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I fell in love with my wife when she agreed with me that she could do anything if she really had too...we have wandered so far away from reality... these critical situations push us back to who we really are...I insist that everyone who attends my organic growing classes has to sink their hands into heavily manured organic soil...usually say something like people who don`t get there hands dirty, are no longer human...these wonderful people in the Congo are way ahead of us all...
ReplyDeleteI can one-up you on that soil story. I just read an excellent book called "Emergency Sex", a memoir by three U.N. aid workers about their work (and occasional bout of 'emergency sex', though the book title overpromises in that area) in Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, etc. during the 1990s. One of the authors, a doctor, says he met a crusty old European doctor who had been working in the developed world for decades, of course with few resources. The guy says to the younger doctor that if you ever need to do a rectal exam and you don't have gloves, you can just scrape your thumbnail against some hard soap. The (hard-to-clean) space under the nail fills up with hard soap and stays clean. The young doctor, reporting the encounter later, wrote, "I didn't doubt he'd done it."
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot to respect in seeing how the (ordinary) Congolese people live. Not because they're living "real" lives – they have no choice – but because they live their lives for the most part with great dignity in spite of the circumstances.