TIA

TIA-This is Africa.

This will not be like my normal posts.

This is Africa. Three little words that write off the horrors of a dark continent in seemingly endless turnover from one power after another. Words that men repeat with a beer and a cheers to find some peace of mind in a world spiraling downward in a whirl of violence. "TIA" is the acronym Blood Diamond coined with a South African colonel and his former soldier now involved in diamond trafficking the illustrious stones from Sierra Leone to Liberia where they could be seamlessly processed into the world market. Call me sentimental, but it is an entirely different thing to watch Blood Diamond when you are sitting in the heart of Africa. You suddenly realize that this happened here. Not some place where you set foot once upon a time. Not a distant land. Here. Where your own two feet are right now. It is an entirely different story when you're that close.

It's also an entirely different story when you watch it with native Africans. This week, Blood Diamond was the entertainment feature of our occasional movie night at the base. Having never seen it, I was initially less focused on who I would be watching it with and more focused on what I was about to see. And, on actually getting there.

By the time I walked into the movie, civil war had erupted in Freetown. I took a chair in the back, amid a crowd of Africans gathered in the back of the room and sitting on tables by the left wall. Some of their young children surreptitiously crept into the room, hugging the legs of chairs on the floor and letting out periodic whimpers. I didn’t know who was out of place—them, their kids, or me—but something felt very odd about watching it among them. It makes you wonder all these things you wouldn't think twice about if you were in your living room.

You wonder how they feel when they watch it, and how they feel when Leonardo di Caprio, a white South African, believes nothing but blood and conflict belong to Africa. You wonder how they feel about the white man's stereotype that “God left Africa long ago.” You wonder if they feel connected to Sierra Leone even though Tanzania is hundreds of miles away. And then you realize how dumb that question is, because Rwanda and Uganda are right next door to Tanzania, and Rwanda and Uganda did not leave their neighbors unscathed through their own bloodbaths in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. You wonder if it would be different to watch Hotel Rwanda by their sides, and after that, you realize you've been wondering away the movie because you're actually there. You're in the place, and you have already seen a lot.

The only hard part of my road to this place was resistance from many family and friends. Some told me I couldn't go because I was white. Some, because I was a girl. Others took a stand because of Blood Diamond and Hotel Rwanda. Their reasons went on. I'm here to say that they had no idea what they were so against, but that their reasons were not so far off.

I don't believe that the Blood Diamond stereotype is Africa. In some ways it's far better than that; in other ways, it's far worse than the most graphic motion picture you can dream. But what becomes more important to you when you're sitting there with these African parents letting their two- and three-year-old children watch this movie is how "TIA" this is to them. You wonder if they buy it, if they too believe “TIA” and go on with life perhaps believing that that same thing hangs by a few threads in their own country. You wonder because you can feel the solidarity of these people through the colors, the villages, the African spirit that engulfs every sense in your body as you step off the plane. These are a people who equally understand the struggle of a single life, feeling every drop of water hauled for hours to a dry village, every kernel of corn hand-shelled from its cob. This is Africa, too.

This sight was first given to me about three weeks ago when I realized that, although I came here to help, I stayed blind to the many deep struggles of this fascinating continent. Some months before I left I’d read of an African woman written up in some magazine talking about how her only work for the day was to get water for her family. At the time, the simplicity of her task overwhelmed me with a convicting finger—you focus too much on doing, Jory; doing too much is as meaningless as doing nothing because after awhile you nearly don’t know who you’re doing what for anymore, or what your motive is. I was touched by this woman’s interview and determined to learn from her simplicity.

Three months later I was sitting in a small house in the African bush, being served cow kidneys and chapatti by a tall Tanzanian who told me that the innermost niches of Tanzania are akin to a lost Atlantis buried deep in the bush. Tribes that once moved with the animals and the rains, but now because of white man’s ways and the concept of owning land had now settled on a dying plot of dusty land 12 hours from the nearest source of water. Every day someone’s whole life is to walk 12 hours on foot to get water for the village. Many a cavalier tourist who climbed Kilimanjaro or surfed the edges of Ngorongoro Crater would blithely tell you that that's not all of Africa. But that was the man's point. His point was that that was Africa, before colonization, and that that was what Africa became because of colonization.

The water is just one of many things that has pricked my soul in the last few weeks. The costa passed the Kilimanjaro National Airport on my fifth or sixth trip from Arusha since I’d been here. Just outside the airport there is the semblance of a village, where men carrying boxes of water and snacks lay in wait for buses and tourists passing through. The moment the costas stop they assault the buses with their wares, an odd mixture of persuasion and desperation in their voices. I’d been here nearly a month and passed this stop how many times before the words of a popular Switchfoot song came to my ears while I blocked out the sea of hands shoving maji (water) and pipi (sweets) through the windows. But as I tried to sink back into the familiar lyrics, “This is your life. Are you who you want to be? Is it everything you dreamed that it would be…,” I saw a deep contrast, like the etching from a print held up against its mirror image. Did these men ever want to sell water in the hot sun every day, feeling lucky if they made 500 shillings per bus? 500 shillings is less than 50 cents American money. I wonder how many people reject the water. At 500 shillings per bottle, a case per day adds up to less than six dollars of American currency. What these people labor to earn in a month my sister can earn in two hours as a nurse. This is Africa.

Gunfire illuminated an incandescent jungle in the chest of Sierra Leone like wayward, shapeless fireworks. Smoke curled up from burning villages where bodies lay scattered around. Red soil watered with the blood of its own people. Blood Diamond told only the end of one story of one war in Africa, and these bus rides only tell another part. But they share something in common, I think. They share the truth that this is not the African Dream. That moment on the bus, I realized that although all of us at the bus stop were in Africa, our lives were not at all the same and I was not so African as I thought. No matter how hard I listen, how closely I look, or long I spend here I will never understand this part of what it is to be African.. I could learn the language, live in the bush, walk daily for water…but I have been ruined by a far greater luxury than this world has ever been acquainted with. I have been ruined by the luxury of entitlement. I was brought up entitled to an education, to a home, to heat and warm clothes, to food and, thanks to 15,000 lakes in my state, scandalous amounts of water. I was entitled to walking down a road without fear, playing with actual toys, a driver’s license when I turned 16.

Somehow in all my entitlements, I missed the American Dream. But I think I saw my dream in Blood Diamond the moment it registered that part of film playing out before me matched the reality I was living in once I landed here. This is what I mean when I say it was different to watch it here in Africa. Here, you see a different color in the blood. You see the color of its dying reverie in the reflection on the ground. And something in that color causes you to break and to come alive simultaneously.

I broke the moment Solomon Vandy picked up his shovel and beat the rebel commander to death in the mines near Kona. So long after all the horror begins, I know, but I’ll tell you how it took that long. I lasted until then because that was the moment that ‘good’ broke in the story. Up to that point, Solomon Vandy was a man who could not even tell a small lie to a group of journalists in order to smuggle himself and his partner back into the war zone. Amid ten or so journalists who came across an overturned vehicle and dead and wounded victims scattered around the ground, Vandy was the only one who saw the child survivor in the arms of a dead woman. While 'caring' reporters attacked the mess with flashing cameras, Vandy attacked the mess to bring out a maimed child, the only survivor. In the midst of the rampant evil tearing apart his beloved country, Vandy still lived by rules of right and wrong, honor and deceit, moral and immoral. He was one of few who chose what was right, walked honestly and honorably. Vandy stands in stark contrast to the cynical white South African he is leading to a buried blood diamond in the heart of the war zone.

All through the journey, details reveal the golden heart of Soloman Vandy, who cannot understand the stone cold heart of the white man running beside him. No desire for a wife, or children, no concept of home; looking only for more money, Danny Archer is a greater mystery to Vandy than perhaps even the evil that robbed him of family, security, of peace. Vandy was no more naïve than a weathered soldier, but he was a man driven by more than diamonds, like the rebels, or hatred, like the disillusioned soldier. It was love for a growing son that carried Vandy back into the shambles of a dream, all the while telling Archer how much his son loved to learn English, how he would grow up to be a doctor and, one day, when the fighting was done, his son would live in the paradise of a beloved homeland restored to its former glory. You could say Solomon Vandy saw the world as it could be, as it should be, and he was my hero for it until uncontrolled rage led him to beat the rebel commander to death during the South African airstrike. One hit and the commander was down, blood oozing from the wide gash across his face. One hit was enough. But on and on he went, leaving the dream I saw to drown in the muddy water pooling around the commander.

In the end it is Danny Archer who surprisingly defies the ruling “TIA” for the sake of giving one man back his life, and his dream, through giving Solomon and his son the last seat on the rescue plane that was coming to take Archer to his freedom, and his fortune, somewhere far away from the guilt and fighting he was immersed in. Instead Archer dies in his Africa, just like his mother, just like his father, just like thousands who lost their dream of peace.

The film stirred no fear in my heart, though I am in a place many would fear. No, the dominant emotion was sadness—pain—that that's what we're all up against. In the face of that, who or what can come up against it? What can we do to heal from that? I came to Africa because I had a dream of working with unloved, unprivileged, unnoticed kids who had no right to life when abandoned on their own. Truth be told, this is exactly where I wanted to be, a place with those whose lives begin with abandonment because I wholly believe that their abandonment does not have to be a life sentence. And contrary to so many views about foreign aid, I saw this movement on my part as the one thing I could do to leave a resonating impact in a vast world. Love the unloved. Soften the bitter. Hold what is broken. I came knowing how small I was, but when I left, being small was still something. Next time you're in Africa, watch Blood Diamond and you will go from feeling small to microscopic in a matter of seconds.

A mirror was one thing I forgot to bring to Africa but I feel like I am standing before the looking glass now. The woman holding my gaze faces something greater than the image of her own reflection. She beholds a question, an unsolved mystery that has always been beyond the grasp of man. What does it take for us to care about others before ourselves? What do you have to do to get a man to see the heart of another life, and give his own to save it? To value it like it were his own? And protect it with every fiber and resource he has? Where do we lose that first compassion newly budding hardened hearts, and why do we replace it with compassion only for ourselves? There are some people in the world who believe that we are all worth loving, that a human life has immeasurable value and universal meaning that knits us all together. These men and women fight a great battle.

A battle that we're all in.

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."
Helen Keller