Things Fall Apart

A lot. 

Our aged water pump has been wheezing and gasping for months and we suspect that the electrician who comes just about every other week to “fix it” has no idea what he’s doing.

Every few weeks, we take turns running to the bathroom at all times of the day and night. Despite our best efforts to blast away the offending microorganisms with furious cooking and cleaning, this is still a regular part of life.

A politician from the governing party was stabbed in the heart last week, in broad daylight, not too far from the office where I work. The murderer tried to escape on foot, then by Lake Victoria--swimming. He didn’t get far.

A young man recently tried to set fire to the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, and we all get an official US Embassy Email reminding us to lock our doors at night and secure a “safe haven” in case of attacks...

After 10 months here, these situations do not faze us as they once might have. If anything, we are all the more determined to seek out and hold onto what is good, and beautiful and true. In a TED talk she gave last fall, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie spoke about “the danger of the single story”, that the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. The “single story” of Africa we’ve all heard is that it’s continent of amazing natural beauty, but one intractably mired in corruption, civil war, and extreme poverty. And it’s true! The corruption is tragi-comically pervasive, wars rage and every day people die at Bugando for lack of some inexpensive, uncomplicated treatment. 

But, there is good news. And there are good stories! Even if you have to fight to find out about them and fight not to let them get drowned out by the bad ones. We can’t speak much on the corruption, wars or ending poverty, but we can celebrate a child under Duncan's care overcoming sickness, abused wives learning and claiming their legal rights, and seeing that the staff of Kivulini are finally getting the concept of a “hamburger paragraph” after a few months of practice. And we celebrate friendship, laughter and kindness and fresh baked bread and birdsongs. And we'll keep doing our best to balance all the sad and difficult stories we share here, with the good ones.