I miss direction most

I remember being traumatized by images of WWII’s concentration camps in elementary school. I literally felt my innocence burning away as my face would tingle with discomfort and rage. I’ve lost that physical reaction against human cruelty and have, in some ways, grown accustomed to the existence of hunger, violence, and overt injustice. Imbalance. I wish I still felt that utter horror at the concept, but I do not. All I have is some intellectual or spiritual aversion to the current reality. Maybe that’s enough. Rather than slowly watch that flutter away as well, maybe I can choose to engage.

I have started applying for jobs again. I am restless. Maybe it’s discontentment. Is it healthy?

Children endure horrific abuse daily. I have seen the rows upon rows of filing cabinets documenting the discovered cases of abuse. I have also seen children taken from the care of their families because the definition of neglect is nearly inseparable from the definition of poverty. People in my city are hungry. I have seen the anger of people who show up to food lines and leave unsatisfied. It’s real, and it’s close, and it only seems to get worse. (Cue Music)

Sometimes I think social work holds no answers to these problems. And as a social worker, I have felt myself becoming cynical trying to create change amidst competition, manipulation, aggression and other coping mechanisms that originated in people, communities, and organizations from some line of injustice or imbalance that seems to me inescapably cyclical. Which might be why I cannot see my friend community’s desire to farm land and live relatively isolated from the world as anything but escapism. I want that. I want to walk away from the cities and the islands of rural towns and find a place to hide. I want to tend to the land and my own spirit; the things I can more easily control.

But

I feel as though, at some point, despite the hurt and rage and nonsense of humanity, you have to be willing to say, “Ok, I’ll be part of this world”. Not only because it’s an illusion to assume you are not, but also because, in engaging, I have also seen the hope. I have seen strength and trust and empowerment and self-discovery and balance. It is much like the food line: I resonate with the feeling of being fed but unsatisfied. It's a frustration to hope. But watching the slow unraveling of a very complicated knot, you sometimes witness it break open in a burst of freedom. And it is freedom for us all.

"Although the world is full of suffering,

it is also full of the overcoming of it."

-Helen Keller

On the road to find out

I leave this week for Honduras. More specifically, I'm headed to a children's home.

I spent two summers at this home in undergrad. I look back on it as one of the most defining experiences of my life.

In undergrad, my worldview broadened exponentially. For the first time, I was exposed to international politics and national as well as global poverty. I devoured the words of Freire and Gutierrez. I was full of passion and optimism.

The Honduran orphanage added a healthy dose of cynicism to my otherwise idealistic understanding of a world of revolutions. I stopped romanticizing poverty after that experience.

While at the home five years ago, I wrote this:

Little hands, deep brown eyes

scarred and barred, get free!

Or are you cursed eternally?

Penetrated.

Your childhood terminated.

A lack of food has left your stomach inflated

And all we can do

is coo

"how cute".

Life: a brute.

How has it treated me so well?

My much larger hands have not known your hell.

I moan and groan in the ripples of your past

The curse it cast

Does change stand a chance?

You are David, but where is your stone?

Doubt cuts to the bone.

But giants will topple

and cycles will break.

Brown Eyes,

I can't wait to see

what your little hands make.

As you can see, I stood at a point in my life with one foot in youthful faith, believing that all ends well, and the other foot awakening to the harsh realities of this world and a growing sense of hopelessness. Several times throughout my journal I used the phrase, "All to the good". I believed that everything, in some mysterious way, worked to the glory of G-d, as well as my own personal benefit.

"Someone stole my favorite shirt while it was drying out on the line, but it's all to the good, I want to overcome material attachments anyway".

The phrase becomes more bothersome in the context of, "These children come from backgrounds of extreme abuse and abandonment to a home where violence and neglect are perpetuated realities. All to the good."

I needed that blind faith as a nineteen-year-old to face daily life at the home.

For the past two years I've been living under the rock of graduate studies, pretending to learn how to come up with creative ways to address the roots of societies ills. I changed my mantra from, "It's all to the good" to "It's all up to me and you".

But I still believe in the mystery. There's a human resiliency unaccounted for in the mathematics of sociology.

I'm not sure where I stand now.

I'm on the road to find out.