The Journey
By Barbara Gwanmesia

I have debated endlessly with myself whether to write about this… debated until my nerves frayed at the seams. It just seemed cliché at best to me to again rehash the seeming age old discourse on whether people are hopelessly self-centred or acting in a way natural to the natural man when they unduly concern themselves with minute daily irritants to the exclusion of the suffering, distressed, and helpless cries of some 90% of the world’s population.

This particular discussion can get very heated and intensely annoying for many people. The one group would say, look how many people are poor, suffering, helpless yet you sit there whining about your broken toe nail, the other group would say my problem is as big as anyone else’s because I am experiencing it in its fullness in the here and now and you who stand there judging me know nothing of my reality, my pains, my fears and my survival boundary and so on and so forth. The kern of the argument is that people are, on the one hand, either self-centred, unfeeling, narcissist, or, on the other hand, too uncultured and eerily insensitive to the human character to appreciate the dribbles of personal psychological hells (be the hell of rich people or poor people). Here is what I say.

Forget about all the guilt trips that someone might want to heap on you. Forget about they who insist you think of helpless, sad, suffering people to the exclusion of your own issues. And, turning to the flip side of the coin, as for those who insist that your psychological dramas are so big that relating to the sufferings of others is an exercise at futility, forget about them too. They are not doing you any good by having you believe that being fixated on your inner-world is justified - simply because your own inner quandaries are as momentous to you at any given moment as any other person’s challenges. Just forget about all these contenders, instead, pull up your sleeves and let’s get to work. Okay, maybe I exaggerate a little here. We are not really getting to work; we are going on a little journey.

Please, permit me to take you on a journey that might at times feel unnerving, disturbing, humbling. Gentle reader, be my guest, I want to spend some time with you. And if I speak in a whisper here and there relegate it to the pressure of my own emotions. Ah, my lovely one, I wish not to sob at any given instant, but I might, so you may have to take my hand now and then just to whisper to me that all is well, that it is okay, that I too am growing - growing out of the impact of this hospital scene. What hospital scene? The one we have just arrived at. My friend Jane is the medic who told me about this place, this scene upon which we have now just arrived. She told me of people with sores so deep and so wide a human fist could drive inside up to and beyond the ankle… she told me of wounds that often would call for padding wools as thick as a little football just to fill up the hole, she told me all this so we could pray for and join our spirits in solidarity with the heart cries of these peoples. I know the sight of all this is freaking you out, the sight of people with gaping holes in places where eyes are supposed to be, people with long tubes running down their nostrils and throat. I know you cannot stand the stench in which that woman there, that man over there and that little child is perpetually subsisting, subsisting in it because of human entrails whose putrid condition have decided to defy death and treatment, people kept alive, aware, defeated, unable to rise and walk up to us with dignity by a fate that could just have easily been yours. I know the fact that that beauty queen over there walks around the street with a bag hanging from her side collecting excrement because she cannot excrete naturally like any ordinary human being and must constantly empty her bag when or if she realizes that it is full and should now be prevented from flowing over and setting her surroundings into an acerbic grotto, is causing you to want to vomit. And I am sorry. But these spectacles make you think, don’t they, my sweet one? They make you shiver that you allow yourself to explode into rage about someone mistakenly smashing your feet, or someone insisting you walk in the snow to go get your family that piece of meat which you forgot to buy.

Oh no no no no, I am not entering the camp of those who say you must stop complaining about your toe nails and start thinking about the hungry and the hopeless in this world, this is not about them. It is about you, about what could well be your lot, like losing your job and being pummeled out of your home by a landlord who has his own psychological headaches to think about. Like catching a flue one day and suddenly discovering you have a disease without a pronounceable name because you fall asleep for 13 days at a time and no one can help you. What about having dyslexia and not being able to really read well or write well even though you are a closet genius? And what about not being able to recognize your own face on a daily basis or the faces of people around you two or three minutes, sometimes seconds, after meeting them? What about losing all sense of feeling, not being able to feel your own body or sense anyone touch you? Yes, I am talking about conditions that sound like sickness, yet are for many people a living reality. Imagine for a moment stepping in the shoes of these people, won’t your ability to walk to the shopping centre, to go to school and study, to be able to wake up at that horrid morning hour and head for a job others do not have, to be able to buy a travelling card, even to have your heart broken by the one you crave for, to be able to talk, to hear, to SEE, to read, to laugh, to feel, to kiss and be kissed be a resounding joy? What then prevents you from always being thankful that you have these little things and are in a position to be honoured with little irritants? What makes you not pause for a moment to empathize with those who live existences that are beyond the pail for you, what stops you from instead gossiping about those who are under difficult situations, thinking of ways to be meaningful to such people, even if it means just saying –  you care... we care…. I care?

On this note then, to anyone out there experiencing what seems an excruciating situation, I care, even though I do not know you, with this little letter, I need you to know you are not alone, if only because someone realizes that your situation is possible and calls not for judgment but empathy and a word of encouragement and hope. If only for this reason, know, my tender friend that someone cares.