Reflections on first field trip (part 2)

We visit 20-something year olds who have been trained in conflict resolution skills and entrepreneurship. They each have their own small business, selling drinks, gasoline in bottles, snacks.

Don't ask what I'm doing with my arm. I think I was resting it on my hip/ airing out my armpit

We visit a field high on a hillside overlooking vibrant green landscape with pockets of white tarp roofs of refugee camps. The potatoes grown here will go to feed those who reside in the camps and some of the residents also make a small living working in these fields.

We visit a club for teenagers to learn about how to address school and community conflict, encouraging them that there is a better way than violence and that they can be the generation to make a change.

We visit a crowd of people working together in community gardens, growing food they will eat and profit from in their agricultural co-op, re-learning how to trust each other and work for the common good.

Sweet pink leather jacket bought in the market for the cold ride on the motorcycle.

We change our plans of where we’re going because there is fighting on the road we had planned to take. The government army is trying to seize minerals collected by local miners. We watch from the doorway of our hotel as the army passes through the village, knowing that the miners rushed on another road to take out a bridge so the army can’t pass. Five locals are killed in the fighting. This is the work.

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Everywhere, people are surprised to see me, a white person, “Mzungu”. Babies are afraid of me, children ask me for cookies “bis-kwi”(biscuits), women chide me for not buying whatever they’re selling, men say I’m their woman, and moto drivers fight over who will get to drive me. I’m so tired of being yelled at “Mzungu!” A friend encourages me, reminding me that they are not intending to be rude but are just curious and their few experiences with white people are usually humanitarian organizations coming to give them something, not to build relationships.

I struggle to say simple sentences in French, sometimes getting the words out but they’re so choppy, Serge still has to interpret what I’m trying to say. I sleep under a mosquito net, in a room at the Catholic priests’ compound, in a dark hotel with one pit latrine for the clients and a door that is closed by rotating a bent nail. I ride, walk, bounce, and look, always trying to take in what’s around me, what it would be like to live here.

I am wrestling with how to love others in this context. They see me as so different in skin color and privilege. What is their faith like and how can we mutually encourage each other when our daily struggles are so different? Do I really believe that God is working here and that He is the Good Father to these orphans, displaced people, widows and single mothers, hard-working women and men, drunkards, combatants, fellow humans?