Us, Ourselves, and We

In the spirit of relieving you from all the alien talk, I'd like to fill you in on the book situation--the reason I started blogging in the first place. I'm going to Uganda for a month in about six weeks to do research for a book I'd like to write highlighting the lives of the orphans there. The following is adapted from my project proposal:

All too often, when we think of Africa, images of half-naked, fly-covered, big-bellied children immediately flash across our minds. In the last several decades, we have been covered over with pleas for aid and money and prayers. We look at these children and wonder what will become of them. We feel sad for them, and we despair of them, and we turn away. We're not hard-hearted ethno-centric monsters. On the contrary, I believe we desire to help these children, but the task is so enormous and the need is so great and the problem so very distant that we don’t know where to begin, so we never begin.

The images with which we’ve been bombarded for so long have, in many cases, served the opposite purpose than that for which they were intended. They meant to show us suffering at its most shocking, at its most bleak, so that we would be compelled to act on behalf of those who suffer. What they have instead accomplished on the whole is the widening of the already great chasm between Us and Them. We are snug in our homes with our healthy and happy loved ones gathered around us. They are cold and alone and in great need. The chasm has widened so much that we don’t even have a point of reference from which to relate to these widows and orphans thousands of miles and three worlds away. We have labored under the guilt of not helping the poor and neglected of the world for years and years, but we have failed to discover the key that will prompt us to action.

I believe that the key is a change in our perspective. We must see the world's needy in a different, more accurate light. As long as We see the hopeless and needy across the chasm as Them, as Other, We will not be moved to action. It's not in our nature to help the Other. But if We can begin to understand the truth of the matter, which is that They are not Other at all, but simply another part of Us, we will take the suffering that our little brothers and sisters on the other side of the world face and will make it our own.

How do we, then, begin to make the shift from seeing them as Them to seeing them as Us? We take a look at their whole lives. We don't see them just as orphans. We don't look at the flies and the disease and the lack alone. We look at them as people—as musicians, as scientists, as gigglers and dancers. We add to the images of their tears images of their infectious laughter. We see them from the inside out. But we don’t forget the outside. We take the whole person—hardships and triumphs, fears and joys, need and abundance, and we see that we are not all that different after all. We will see that the chasm that separates us is man made—and that it can be not only spanned, but eliminated altogether.

I have been fascinated in recent years by the genre that Barnes and Noble has called the “Travel Essay.” These are not the Lonely Planet travel guides you see in the back pocket of wannabe explorers all over the world. The travel essay is a mix between a memoir, a history, a journalistic narrative, and an ethnography. It is the story of a place told through the eyes of its people, and the story of a people revealed through their place. For some of my favorite examples of travel essays, see “An Unexpected Light” by Jason Elliot, and “Dark Star Safari” by Paul Theroux.

My goal is to spend my time in Uganda interviewing key orphans and doing life with them over the course of four weeks, learning about their lives and gathering research. I will also read several books on the history and politics of Uganda as well as other travel essays. My plan will then be to come back to New York and spend several months to a year writing a manuscript that will offer a picture of Uganda’s orphans which we have not yet seen. I will show how the history and politics of that part of the world have shaped the lives of the orphans and how the orphans have shaped the politics and history of Uganda.

The aim of the book is twofold: to offer a new voice to the orphans of Uganda as I tell their stories, and to inspire the church and the Western world at large to act on their behalf. In the end, I hope to show that acting on behalf of the poor and needy of the world is indeed nothing more than loving our neighbors as we love Ourselves.