AUGUST 14 — One day I said the most outrageous and erroneous statement that to this day makes me cringe.
I had just landed in the USA after having spent the previous five months in Africa. I was sharing some of what had happened during my time and was telling about one of the villages I work and spend a lot of time in.
It was bittersweet, I was holding a glass of wine and eating delicious cheeses but already missing the home of my heart. I was sharing about my trip to visit the home of my second “mother” and how we had briefly gone into Kenya on our way to visit more family. Everything was fresh in my mind and I was excited to share.
In the middle of the conversation I said, "They had nothing, but they were happy."
As I said it, gall filled the back of my throat as I realised what I was speaking. Shame and repulsion at my own words filled me as I realised the error and arrogance of such a statement. Yet at the time I was unable to come to grips with just what it was that caused me to say it, was there a root of truth?
Grass huts, mud floors, tin roofs, handmade bricks, the shade of a tree, the underside of a bridge, cardboard tacked up beside the sewer to protect from the wind and rain.
Some porridge for a mid-day meal, perhaps some starchy vegetable for a dinner. Perhaps nothing today, and nothing tomorrow.
The first cries of a newborn baby, instead of joyous tears, fear of another mouth to feed. Mum already living on next to nothing, her breasts will never sustain this little one's needs. Four others clinging to her torn and dirty skirt. Protruding bellies and reddish patchy hair; signs of malnutrition they cannot hide.
No education to even sign one's name; an “X” marks every paper they have ever put their name to. No health care to give even the most basic of medicine. No safety from rape. No safety from more children, no protection from STDs.
I take no pictures. I will not further take from them by taking pictures of their nothingness. It is my general rule, yet I had broken the most basic of rules by an exaggerated self opinion of the state of their happiness.
They have nothing, and I had dared to call them happy.
The woman from across the globe who had never truly lacked and even when I lacked I had more than them. While I dined on cheese and wine.
Then someone, another foreign, wealthy woman, dared tell me later the same thing, that somehow she believed "they had nothing but were happy."
And I became indignant, righteous, seething anger which shook me to my very core. We truly had no right. None at all to say such things. Would we be happy if we had nothing like that? If all was stripped from us, would we be happy?
When we complain about our phones, our car, our house, our clothes. When we are always seeing something around us that we want and even usually believe we need.
So what was it that I saw in them? The life I thought I saw and what appeared "happy" to my ignorant foreign eyes. For I look around at the abundance around me most times and I do not see what I see in the middle of these villages. I don’t see the smiles that I find in the hills and the mountains and the jungles. I don’t hear the tinkling sound of laughter as kids play; play with sticks and dirt and fabric rolled up to make footballs.
Us with our everything, yet always wanting more, and I don’t find a lot of happy. Many days it is even difficult to find happy in me. So what was it that I called “happy”?
Perhaps it is freedom, true freedom. Perhaps they have what I have never truly known in my political social democracy. Freedom from all the things in life that have dragged the developed world down. Freedom to truly appreciate, and truly hate, life. That both are acceptable emotions with this freedom when life has been mostly cruel.
But I think what was probably the most difficult to realise was that in them I saw contentment. Not that their life was good, or that they didn't yearn for and need better. But they had life and were content with that. And that contentment, when combined with such cruelty of circumstances, is a powerful, powerful thing to witness.
Contentment, freedom and yes, even happiness; but let me never be the one to say so.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
