Escape Artist

This Tuesday afternoon I am scheduled to head to Washington DC for a meeting on research agendas in HIV/AIDS and Nutrition. I am super thankful for the chance to go. Professionally it's a great opportunity to stay current on issues/emerging questions in my field and maybe make some helpful connections for post-graduation. I'll hopefully bring back some ideas and contacts that will help the clinic where I currently work with their work. While I'm very interested in the meetings professionally, I must confess to being more excited about the chance to visit good friends in the Philly/Baltimore/Washington area. The meetings are Thursday and Friday but I won't be flying back to Haiti until Monday. I already have lunch/dinner and other social plans in place for every evening and the weekend.

October 15th marked my 1-year mark of working more or less full time here in Port-au-Prince. I've out of Haiti quite a bit over the last 12 months. Every 6-10 weeks or so I've managed to escape for at least a weekend in Miami - thanks to the generosity of my parents who have helped pay my way and other friends who have hosted me. I'm being very intentional about using the term escape - that's pretty much what it has felt like every time I have left. What am I escaping? The poverty? The responsibility of my PhD? The lack of freedom to go out and about? Perhaps - but I've been deeply convicted by the fact that I am trying to escape something much more fundamental. I've been trying to escape who I am in this context.

This is a bit more personal than the direction most of my blog entries head, but if I am trying to give an honest window into my experience here, this has been the underlying current through all of it. I do not think I have ever lived through another season where I am more fundamentally discouraged by my own thoughts and feelings as I have been during this this past year (although the entire grad student endeavor has been challenging in this regard). Closer to the start of this season in Haiti, there were several months there when I was disconcertingly depressed and totally overwhelmed - when I would wake up every morning at 5 am and call my parents in tears. I am thankful to no longer be in that place.... but I also know that part of the way I've gotten beyond it is by creating a pretty tough shell around myself both physically and emotionally. I have gone days without leaving the basic confines of our apartment as the effort that would need to be extended logistically, emotionally, relationally, and sometimes financially did not seem worth the effort. I have become incredibly critical of some of those around me and find myself actively trying to avoid others. Just yesterday I had someone come up to me and (quite bravely/kindly) tell me that something I said had really hurt their feelings.

What is this change of personality (and hopefully not character...though sometimes I worry it is) rooted in? I think it's rooted in loneliness - not aloneness or boredom- but a deeper kind of loneliness that is in a way a testament to how much I have actually been blessed. Over the years, I have developed and sustained an incredible family network - both biological and extended by friendships. These are people with whom i feel totally safe - free to express my greatest joys, my fears, my questions. They are my home - my mobile home - that has been added on to everywhere from Chicago to Kenya to Charm City to Ithaca.

For some reason though, Haiti feels like an exception to that trend. Please don't read this and take it as an accusation of the people I have encountered here in Haiti. There are many truly wonderful people who I do enjoy getting to know and be with when I have the chance. There have been a series of people who have come and gone who have taught me tremendous lessons - many of them hard but important. There are several other people who have passed through and offerred a small taste of home and hope. Many people from my more distant home communities have been there to listen to and love me through calls, emails or visits.

I have had plenty of moments when I find myself blaming those around me for my loneliness and frustration, but I know it is simply not true. I wish I could say that I have reached out to God in my loneliness - but instead I've just managed to get pretty pissed and doubtful - not something I am particularly proud of and definitely not something that seems in any way productive. It feels like a bit of a vicious cycle - a need for community to build and sustain faith and a need for faith to recognize and have the strength/hope to build community. There could be potential family-like friendships all around me right now, but I do not seem to have eyes to see them or a heart ready to receive them.

So where do I go from here? In the short term I will happily get on another plane out of town...but I know in my heart that I have to go back to the fundamentals - back to core issues of who I am and what I believe is true. I really want to embrace the image of the beloved captured by Henry Nouwen's beautiful essay Moving from Solitude to Community to Ministry - a reflection on Luke 6:12-19.

"Your freedom (from fear/guilt/loneliness in my case) is anchored in claiming your belovedness. That allows you to go into this world and touch people, heal them, speak with them, and make them aware that they are beloved, chosen, and blessed. When you discover your belovedness by God, you see the belovedness of other people and call that forth. It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved....... If we do not know we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, we're going to expect someone in the community to make us feel that way. They cannot. We'll expect someone to give us that perfect, unconditional love. But community is not loneliness grabbing onto loneliness: "I'm so lonely, and you're so lonely." It's solitude grabbing onto solitude: "I am the beloved; you are the beloved; together we can build a home."

Regaining a sense of my identity as beloved by God is the only way that Haiti - or anywhere in this world for that matter - will ever feel like home. I am a bit overwhelmed by the idea of adopting the disciplines of prayer, meditation and thought control that will be needed to get there. A PhD seems simple to earn by comparison. But I know I need to be hopeful - hopeful that there may be a day when my plane ride out of PAP is no longer an escape but rather an extended commute between the many places I happily call home.