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 6th fever in our family of 3 since April, the 4th 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.
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 6th fever in our family of 3 since April, the 4th 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.
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