Zuleka

Zuleka is 25 years old, mother of three young kids.  She smiles brightly and greets me warmly every time she sees me from the steps where she sits forty feet from our door.  Other than an occasional question here or there and our shared circle of acquaintances, those regular greetings were basically our relationship.

Zuleka died this morning, passing away suddenly and unexpectedly after a fever.  I was stunned to hear it, having not even known that she was sick.  Then again, everyone is sick.  I can’t get my kids for class without being told that 3-4 can’t come because they’re sick, or another two have to stay home because no one is around because mom is in the hospital sick.  My best friend’s cousin, only 18 years old, died of dengue fever on Friday.  My wannabe future son-in-law had to leave church suddenly Sunday morning, getting a call that his friend’s 6-year-old son had just died of fever.

The grieving process here is one of extremes.  Most of the observers mill about solemnly or nonchalantly.  Funerals are so frequent that the reaction just can’t be the same as in America…it feels like a steady drip of hearing and seeing about death.   On the other than, there will always be 2 or 3 people, always including the mother and/or wife of the deceased, who cannot contain their grief.  They wail, and wail, and wail, cry inconsolably.  I am hearing that wailing now.

An hour ago, a couple hours after Zuleka’s death but before the latest round of wailing, I carried my daughter into the hospital.  She was throwing up all night, can’t keep down water, has had fever for three days and throwing up for two.  Though she had appeared to be improving yesterday and her fever had gone, last night’s vomiting seriously dehydrated her and I didn’t want to take chances.   It’s a hard day when watching the IV go into your daughter’s hand is the best thing you’ve seen all day.  This is the 6^th fever in our family of 3 since April, the 4^th to require blood tests.  That’s par for the course for our community – it feels like every kid I know has had at least 1-2 fevers since hot season started, and some are on their third.  Even our middle-class friends are going down – our pastor has been away from church for a month, weak with typhoid fever.  One of the few foreigner friends we have left here is recovering from dengue.

What do I do with this, this steady drip, drip, drip of mourning and suffering, this constant fear of what comes next?  I want to lash out at the incompetent bureaucracies with their poor public health systems, the competent doctors who flee tough jobs with more need for less pay here when they can get cushy jobs with less need for high pay in the West.  I mourn the societal changes, all driven by profit and the short-term gains of those with power, which force more and more people out of the villages to concentrate them in the slums, where disease concentrates in return.  I have almost given up on my millions of wealthy friends in the West who have the personal and social resources to be here and provide some glimmer of light into the difficulty, but who simply can’t step out of the comfort zone of family and friends and community that they know for anything less than an acceptance letter from a highly-regarded university or a job offer that pays more than the comfortable income they already make.

Typing that should give the impression that bitterness is washing over me.  But it’s not.  I know why everyone with the means abandons those without to their “fate”.  I’ve learned enough to figure out the picture on a historical and societal and economic and psychological and theological level, to see where the power lies and whose decisions move this inevitable-looking push towards investment and security and investment and security, to explain why virtually everyone I know, no matter how much they “know” or how much stuff they “have”, still finds it practically impossible to break with everything their upbringing, their political party, their peer group, and the 100s of daily messages of commercial advertising tells them life absolutely has to be about, even if that way of life finds no true joy in the end, for themselves or anyone else.  I blame the wealthy enslaved to an upbringing obsessed with security in a society obsessed with economic growth little more than I blame the poor enslaved to an economics that absolutely guarantees that there can only be winners if there are enough losers to support them.  And even if Jesus and the prophets told us the way out long ago, who can really understand and accept the truth if all the dispensers and interpreters of that “truth” are the same ones who are most deeply invested in the security of the system that denies it? 

So I type here, with my beti, my daughter, laying in the hospital, me not being able to know for certain if she’ll make it out simply because so much has come so quickly now that I can’t ever feel secure in life any more.  The wailing outside my door is now three voices.  Tomorrow they will probably be gone, God willing my daughter will be back at home, and we will go on to the next day among the billions left behind by a system that will for one more day keep telling itself lies and pretending that all will get better if we just keep plugging away at the same crap that got us “this far”. 

This is Clinton’s globalist dream, this is Trump’s isolationist dream, this is the reality of the world that no one who gets voted into power in November is going to lift one finger to address if it means taking one dollar out of the pockets of those who put them there.

Our corporate-sponsored dreams ignore the reality before our eyes that those who hold the money will never stop believing they deserve even more of it, and that no theory of economics in line with reality allows the holders of money to keep indefinitely making more of it simply because they happen to own more of it, unless they take it from those who are already suffering for “lack” of it.  Our propaganda-infused dreams ignore the reality in our hearts that it’s not money, but the things we’ve been turning into money – our time, our relationships, our shared gifts, our land, our environment – that are what actually would make us happy.

I have a different dream.

A better world is possible.

It will come when we believe that something more is available than what we’ve been told to seek, and when we step off the cliff of uncertainty and embrace it.

I do not know how much more wailing I will hear, or make, before it comes.

May 8, 2016

There are few days I remember by their dates.   A few anniversaries and holidays stick out of course.  9/11 as well.   But I don’t really think about the “date” things happened.

May 8, 2016, has stayed stuck with me.  It will be in my mind for the rest of my life.

On May 8 I found out, with shock, that the hope of two young girls’ lives were being destroyed.  These young girls who were very close to us, who we had shared a home with, who had taught for me, were being married off in their mid-teens to men they did not know.  One girl’s situation I had known about for months and had been trying to resist in any way I knew, and this night was only the point of no return.  The other, even younger girl’s situation had been kept a secret from me until that moment, most likely to keep me from getting the police involved or in some other way taking drastic measures to stop it.

My first reaction was to yell at my friend who had hidden it from me.  Then I stormed out as I was asked to leave.  Then I stayed up awake, all night, in internal panic, not being able to sleep over the heart-brokenness of what had happened.  By morning I was committed – there was no way to undo what had just been done, but we would do everything in our power to ensure that these two girls still had some sort of shot at a decent life, or at least some sort of option out when things went bad.  Part of my resolve stemmed from the fact that I was certain that no one, no one else in the world, would be able to provide that help to these two girls.

It was only two days later that the next ball dropped, and two more girls in Rosey’s life, who had already had more trauma than any young girls should, in one bad decision saw their hope for their future likely snuffed out in a flash.  They are now in Mumbai, or not, doing God knows what.  We don’t know what will happen, or even what has happened to this point, because they are gone and we will likely never see them again.

In the strange world of unintended consequences, the decision of those two girls caused the NGO that had been trying to help them to make another decision which unintentionally cut off my supply of teachers for a nearby slum literacy project.  Five months later, my project there remains closed.

In an even more unexpected consequence, the decision of those girls thrust another young lady into an awful situation, and our willingness to put ourselves on the line to save her became her only lifeline to hope.  So in that moment, we became foster parents for a young woman with absolutely nowhere else to go and a whole lot of things going on.

Within another week, through a long string of bad circumstances and other people’s bad decisions and his own bad decisions, we became quite heavily responsible for a young man’s life as well.

And so in the span of three weeks, we gained significant responsibility for the lives of four people we love, all of whom were in the midst of precarious circumstances. 

It’s been five months now. There is no end in sight.

I want to say, “Things have gone better than I expected”.  But no, they haven’t.  Five months later, I probably have more concern in all four situations than I did when they started.  For one or two of them, I’ve almost given up hope.

In fact, there are another four, five, six lives which are caught up in the draft of the ongoing disasters now, people for whom I don’t feel complete responsibility, but where I certainly worry that the decisions and effort I make in those first four lives will significantly impact them as well.  Four, five, six more lives for whom I really don’t know who will be around tomorrow and who won’t. Who among them, if we leave, would make it, and who would not.

Today my wife went to the mental hospital to check my best friend out of inpatient care.  She was unable to do so.  He is doing terribly, worse than when he entered.  Yet again I worry that this is permanent, that I will never know Ali as “Ali” in anything but name only again.  That my best friend, my best teacher, is going to be in another world for the rest of his life.  I’ve gone through this process with two of my grandparents, but I never imagined it happening with a 23-year-old friend.  And if we step out of the picture, it’s almost certainly over for him.  Both his initial acute attack of the disorder and his relapse came as we were out on brief vacations, away for just a little bit while he dealt with one disaster after another at home until it became too much for him.  I don’t blame myself, because there was no way to know and no possibility of being around at all times, not to mention that I don’t know it would have gone any differently had we been here.  But I do know that without us coming back, it would have gone even worse.  Then again, what is “worse”?  No matter how much we’ve done, could he be any worse off than he is now?  His situation could be more hopeless, the disease’s progression more severe, of course, but with his mind where it is right now do we really have true hope to be realized or just false hope delaying acceptance of this dark night extending forever ahead?

The others, certainly, could be worse.  Suicide threats and attempts can be routine events to deal with for those who love the downtrodden and the struggling, the relationally isolated.  But I’ve had my heart plagued by more reports of suicidal ideation from those close to me over the past five months than in the rest of my life combined. If we’re not here, who makes it the next week, or the next year, and who doesn’t?

I could tell other stories – of psychiatrists who should have their licenses revoked for how they treated my daughter, of families who should have their children removed for how they treated their daughters, of NGOs breaking one promise after another because they were lazy or so that they could save face or because they got tired of dealing with a situation, of court systems that were basically designed to destroy victims, of government bureaucracies who keep screwing over the people I love, of one friend after another who just hasn’t been as reliable as we needed them to be when we really needed them.  Of feeling like the whole world is conspiring to take away our friends’ and family’s hope.

Not that there isn’t occasional hope.  But it is partial, fleeting, often surrounded by as many reasons for suspicion of hope as for hope itself.  Not to mention that any time there’s hope for one of them, the desperateness of the situations of the other three tempers it into the ground.  At times my hope has become so low that I was to the point of making deals.  God, can you make it so half their lives turn out?  Please, can I at least have half of them?

One?  Can you give me one? 

Can I at least make it to next year with some reason, any, to still have hope for any of them at all?

Some of you who have been aware of the stress that we’ve been going through during the last five months have encouraged me to take a break.  “Come home.”  “You can’t save everyone.” 

The thing that is so difficult to communicate is that if I took a break the stress would be worse.  Not knowing what was going on for them would make it worse.  Knowing that their lives were almost certainly getting even worse without us would make it worse.

If your little sisters, your daughter, and your best friend were in desperate circumstances, and no one else could help them, would you leave town to get away, abandon them so you could deal?  When would you give up on your daughter and just “save yourself”?

Is it okay for me to give up just because my best friend and my foster daughter and my “adopted” little sisters are a different color than me?  Or from a different country?

May 8, 2016 will be the date that I went from feeling responsible for the hope of a community to feeling responsible for the continued day-to-day sustenance of individual lives.  No couple should have to bear that burden alone.  But as long as every single person who could seriously help to bear that burden either refuses to come here, or leaves, or simply can’t be relied on to stay in the lives of anyone who is “poor”, then we will have to bear that burden alone.

And as long as God sustains us, we will.