That Moment.

A friend  from home came to visit recently. She had volunteered for a while in another East African country and hopped over to Tanzania for a few days. Sitting atop a ten storey hotel in downtown Dar, watching the smoke from the shisha pipe spiral into the night air, she told me the story of going to the largest public hospital in the country during her volunteering. The organization was there to ‘choose’ some abandoned new-borns to nurse back to health and eventually to place with a foster family*.

We’ve all heard the stories. Lack of equipment. Lack of motivated staff. Lack of medical supplies. Lack of space. People sitting in the waiting room for days and giving birth on the floor. Premature babies abandoned in non-functioning twenty year old incubators. Babies that have had nothing to eat for days  because the milk from the hospital store was sold to supplement meagre public servant salaries. Or maybe the money just disappeared into a Swiss bank account. Does it matter in the end?

Babies thinner than sticks, barely able to breathe**. My friend’s eyes glazed over for a split second as her voice faltered. I could tell it was one of “those” moments.

Those moments that touch you deeply in a way written words and vocal syllables cannot convey.

Those moments make you sad, then angry, then furious. Helplessness eventually settles in while optimistic determination struggles to sprout through the cracks. Those moments always float back to the surface of your consciousness, leaving you to either frantically push it back down or pull it further up.

I believe we all have them. To some they are fuel. To many they are nightmares to be forgotten. To others they may be daily life.

One of those moments for me was when I lived in Nyandira, my first time living in a Tanzanian village, working with dairy goats and orphans***.  I visited the only secondary school in the village. Two hundred smiling, young, bright, eager-to-learn students and four textbooks. None of the only four teachers at the school were qualified to teach science. Science national exams were coming up in two months.

I went back to Canada after a few weeks. I entered lecture halls with three hundred students in various levels of caffeinated sleepiness. Laptops dotted the bright, high ceiling room, flickering with a familiar white page with a blue band at the top. Hands raised into the air, followed by questions of what will be on the exam. Waiting for these sights to become normal everyday life again was a bit of a journey.

Mind you, not that sipping imported white wine, a bottle of which cost 1/3 of the monthly salary of my office’s security guard, beside a beautiful beach, surrounded by other restaurant guests, who earn five times (and probably more) of my monthly salary, is any less disconcerting. This time, I’m afraid this will become the illusion of normal everyday life.

I wonder if, one day, I’ll try to ignore those students in Nyandira.

*Orphanages are controversial in development circles. It’s actually very damaging to take a vulnerable child away from extended family support networks, in most cases. The recommended action is usually to find ways to strengthen existing family support networks.

**I’m only writing what my friend said. It might have been worse. It might have been not so bad. The point isn’t really how bad it was (for everything is relative), but how it is perceived, as this post is about personal experiences.

***I want to emphasize that I’ve had these moments in many places around the world. Watching interviews of whole families that live in 5 square metres in Hong Kong (paying rent that is, per square metre, more expensive than luxury private houses). I’ve felt the same in the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, Canada.