Building a brain

It's the night before I start my eleventh year of teaching.

I should be be in my bed. I should be sleeping.

The thing is, I get anxious about things. Anxious about almost everything.

I get anxious to go back to school. I get anxious when we have a week off. I get anxious for summer vacation. I get anxious to travel. I get anxious when I have too much to do. I get anxious when I don't have enough to do.

It's an internal angst that gnaws at my insides for days, sometimes weeks, as change approaches.

It's something that I've come to understand about myself, something that I've been able to identify over the years.

So here I sit, unable to fully rest, knowing that I'll regret the missed hours of sleep when my alarm goes off in the morning, unable to do much about any of it in the present moment.

And in this moment, with nothing but quiet and time to fill the space, I find myself reflecting on my time in Nairobi.

Once BuildaBridge arrived I moved out of my host home and across town. I had been staying within walking distance of the school, but soon found myself on the other side of the city. The distance between where we were staying and where we were working was probably about 15 miles, give or take, but the commute was at least an hour both ways. 

Driving in Kenya is no joke.  

I prefer my vespa in New York.  Taxis and all.

This car ride put me in a shared, confined space with some of the people on this planet that I respect the most. When we weren't fearing for our lives or gasping for air, we were engaged in conversations that I will keep in my pocket for the rest of my life.

I can say that with confidence, because I've been keeping conversations from these very people in my pocket for the past six years.

One conversation that I'm marinating in tonight focused on trauma and overcoming and resiliency and the brain. We talked about how the brain physically changes when in the presence of trauma, but it also physically changes in response to overcoming trauma.

I pulled out my phone and started taking notes.

Overcoming changes the brain in positive ways. The more you overcome, the more you internalize that you have the ability to overcome, which leads to greater resiliency and more confidence to overcome the next challenge.

I have thought about that ever since that moment.

I have thought about everything that I have ever overcome. I have thought about everything that I never thought I would be capable of doing, but did. I have thought about basic things that feel like tiny victories on a daily basis.

I have thought about my brain and how all of that has changed the structure of my brain, changed my psyche.

I don't often feel capable of overcoming the challenges that I face everyday.

I'm not talking about major issues concerning health and survival.

It's far less noticeable than that.

It's going to school for the first day after a two month break and seeing people that I haven't seen since June.

That's scary.

But you know what?

I've done it for the past ten years and I'll do it again tomorrow.

And all of the other pieces of my life, all of the other anxiety-inducing parts that keep me up at night? I'll face those, too.

I'll remember all of the tiny hurdles that I've already jumped. I'll remember that I have traveled to different countries for the past five years, lived in new places, and come home again.

In every fear faced, my brain changed.

It's stronger than I give it credit for. And so am I.

Maybe sometimes you have to travel the world and realize that you can live anywhere, just so that you can come home with the confidence to go to a job that you love more and more every day of your life.

Life is like that.

I should probably get some sleep.

Goodnight and thanks for traveling with me.

Until my next adventure...

Litter and life

Sometimes it feels like the problems in the world are so great, so vast, so beyond me, that there isn't a damn thing I can do to make a dent in the situation.

I feel like that all of the time.

These things are systemic and institutionalized.  

They're bigger than I am. They're stronger than I am. 

They mock my efforts and attempts at reversing what they have set into motion.

It makes me feel so small, so insignificant. 

One of the best examples I can think of is the problem of litter.  

It's a problem in Washington Heights, in that it makes our streets ugly and lowers the overall perception of the neighborhood.  In Nairobi, though, it's a way of life.  

Unless you're in the middle of the city you aren't going to find a trash can on the corner of the street. There isn't a system for waste removal on public roads beyond the most traversed neighborhoods of the city, so every other neighborhood drops their trash where it is convenient.  The streets are lined with garbage. 

I'm being literal. The streets are literally lined with garbage. 

I'm staying in a slum in Mathare where I can't see the ground where I'm walking because a layer of plastic separates me from the sewage beneath it. 

There are sections of the street set aside where people toss their garbage, should they choose to collect it in a bag to begin with. 

Tiny piles of trash burn along the edges of the walking paths, a futile attempt to eradicate the litter that can't be contained in one area.

I've lived here for the past two weeks.  I've collected my trash in a tiny plastic bag and I've given it to the woman that takes it out twice a week.  I haven't thought much about it beyond that.  I'm not throwing it out of the window, so it feels like I'm doing the right thing.  

And then it dawned on me - my trash is going the same place everyone else's trash is going.   It's part of the pile on the road. 

I can ignorantly collect it and pass it off in a sealed bag, but it's all going to the same pile. 

I don't throw my waste out of the window, so I assume that I'm not littering.  

It's not that easy. 

Unless I collect my own trash and take it to a public waste can, I might as well pitch it out of the window. It's the same exact result. 

I can convince myself that I'm doing my part by gathering my waste in a bag, and I might sleep more soundly at night because of it, but it's just ignorance that lets me rest. 

The truth is that there is so much more than I'm responsible for, so much more that I need to be aware of in order to actually be a part of the solution. 

Anything less is the same as adding to the piles of trash that make me hold my breath when I walk the streets. 

These things are systemic and institutionalized.  

It's bigger than trash.  It's life.

If I don't see the big picture and my role in it, I'm contributing to the problem. 

My work in the world can't end with a tidy bag of my own waste and a clean conscience because I don't openly throw it on the road. My work needs to look at developing systems that address the core issues, not just making sure that I put some volunteer time in.  My work needs to be about sustainable programming that meets the needs of the community, not just teaching a class for a week or two.  Volunteering might help me sleep at night, but the pile of trash is growing and I see my wrappers on the street.  

I might not be able to take care of these problems.  They might always be bigger than I am. They might always be stronger. 

But If I can see them for what they are then I can work to disarm them.

And I sure as hell won't convince myself that I've done something good for the world in order to get a better night of sleep when all I've done was litter in a different way than my neighbors.  

New eyes

The first time that I saw poverty, I mean true poverty, the kind of poverty that takes the air out of your lungs, was when I went to the Dominican Republic in 2012.  The kind of poverty where hungry, naked, thirsty, and roofless are accepted normals for daily life.  The kind of poverty that hasn't begun to think about infrastructure, waste disposal, or sanitary needs because they are all further below on the hierarchy of needs - not enough mental and emotional space to give to anything but meeting the most basic survival needs.

I remember pulling up to the Bateye and seeing tiny people waiting for our arrival, waiting for the education we had come to provide.  Some without shoes.  Some without clothing.  All with empty stomachs. 

It put my world on pause.  I had to create space to process.  I had to figure some things out. 

A month later, after I had been in that exact environment for a month, I expected to see the very things that had initially been so jarring. 

I don't mean to suggest that I was desensitized to abject poverty.  My heart still bled at the sight of naked babies sleeping on a cement floor, children eating rationed spoonfuls of rice for entire meals, hair that had turned orange from a lack of proper nutrients, and humans living as slaves right before my eyes. All of that still pricked my heart, but it didn't cause such pause in my world as to alter my entire state of being.

From that time on, I had a better framework for what to expect when traveling to places of crisis and poverty.  Still, every time I saw a new community for the first time I had an initial moment of hesitation at first sight.  The time it takes to process the new information lessens significantly in every new context, but it is always startling at the onset. 

So here I am, living in Mathare, a slum on the eastern edge of Nairobi, working in Kibera, a slum on the city's southern edge.  

Trash covers the ground.  Everywhere.  Layers and layers of garbage blanket the soil.

Houses of mud and corrugated iron define the horizon line. 

Sewage runs congruently with walking paths. You can't imagine the smell. You can't. 

Kids play openly in their environment, wrestling and chasing one another through the trash and sewage.  

It's poverty as I've never seen, besides when I was here the last time. 

I knew what i was going to see and smell and touch and experience. I knew what I was getting into. I knew what to expect. Still, it's shocking to the point of causing pause. 

Every morning when I walk out into the community, I am more and more prepared to see the world that's waiting.

It's adaptation for the purpose of survival, I suppose, because I don't think that I could emotionally function with an openly bleeding heart for such an extended period of time. 

Initially it startles, then I process it, then I prepare myself, then it becomes routine.  

As I reflect on that aspect of my own being, I start to think about my own community. After all, if none of this helps me love my neighborhood better then I have no point being here.  

So I think about New York, about Washington Heights, about my school, and I wonder how I would see all of those places with new eyes, with eyes that haven't processed the extreme poverty that I actually have been desensitized to.  

I wonder what you would see in my world. 

Would it startle you?  Would you notice all that I look passed on a daily basis?  Would your heart bleed where mine has mended itself?

I don't know.  

Ten years of adaptation can alter a person's framework. 

Having new eyes every summer reminds me that it's not too late to see the world again, to refocus my vision.

There's a fine line between the kind of empathy that promotes solidarity and the kind that leads to emotional breakdown, so I want to make sure that I am deliberate. Always deliberate. 

But I think that it might be healthy to be shocked again, to feel the need for pause in the city that I love so dearly.  

New eyes.  

It's so clear when it's new.  So clear that I can't help but think of how foggy my vision must be. 

I guess there are some things that I never want to get used to seeing. 

I am.

I don't know if anyone has noticed or not, but it's an election year.

Election season for me means annoying social media posts, signs in yards, bumper stickers on cars, interns on street corners, divisive conversations, and higher quality Saturday Night Live skits. 

It also means the celebration of a government by the people.  I'm not sure that's as dependable as high quality Saturday Night Live skits and I'm pretty sure Bernie would agree with me.  Maybe it means the celebration of an idea, which is a government that was originally intended to be for the people. 

I digress. 

The point of this specific blog is to confess some aspects of my character that I have noticed through the overlap of world travel and the current election season. 

Election years make it really easy for me to identify people that I want nothing to do with. Put a sign in your front yard with a certain name on and I'll instantly know that we could never be friends.  

I know, in my head, that the sum of an entire human cannot be contained in the endorsement of a candidate. But damn, it's so easy to do that.  

Especially this year. Every endorsement feels like a proverbial wall giving me permission to actively stay on my side of the partition. Attach yourself to a specific candidate and I've given myself permission to write you off. 

I can rationalize it pretty easily.  

I teach in a community of students that are first generation Spanish speaking immigrants. I've spent years working towards helping my kids get citizenship before their 18th birthdays. I've walked that road with them. I know their stories. I'm part of their stories. 

I'm also a woman. And I have a radical idea that my gender is equal to other humans that have different genitals. 

Additionally, I work really hard to use the privilege I was born with, based on skin color, in order to level the playing field for my brothers and sisters that were born into a world of ignorant racism. 

A few more - I think that wealth and resources are to be shared. I think wisdom rests in the most lowly, most disregarded in a society.  I think leaders are meant to serve.  I'm a pacifist that believes in subversive opposition to systems of oppression. 

See? Easy. 

You stay on your side. I'll stay on mine. 

There's just one problem with the ease at which I segregate people of differing viewpoints from myself - It doesn't align with my own value system. 

I operate under the premise that we all have more in common than not.  I go across the globe and see entire cultures that live in a world with no resemblance to my own. 

Politics, culture, worldview, gender roles, societal norms, agriculture, cuisine, rituals - all different. 

The first thing I see, regardless of where I find myself, is all that we have in common.  

Love of family, desire for community, appreciation for celebration, need for expression, respect for the sacred, disdain for disgust. All the same. 

See?  Easy. 

I can spend a month with a group of people, living and laughing and learning one another, to the point that I feel eternally connected.  I feel really good about the world when I think about that, about how we are all so much more alike than any of us realize. 

That's beautiful to me. I want more of that. 

I can live on the same block as someone that I will intentionally avoid meeting based on the sign they have in their window.  I feel really good about myself when I think about that, about how I can write someone off so easily, dismissing them as humans because I think that they are ignorant.

That's abhorrent to me. I don't even want to admit it. 

But, it's true. 

It's true and I need to admit it. I need to say it. I need to address it. I need to weed it out of the garden of my soul. 

I want to see people.  Whole people.  Entire beings. I want to find all that connects me to them, all that we have in common and let that be my starting point. 

No labels.  No branding. No generalizations.  No categories.  No affiliations. 

Just human. 

I have to work on that. 

If I don't, I'm just adding to the problem. I'm just adding to the "us vs. them" world that I actively work to piece back together. 

The problem, I suppose, is that I don't want to have anything in common with these people.  I want to arrogantly state how ignorant they are and how different I am because of that. 

And I guess, that makes me the problem.  

I am the problem. 

It's an odd revelation to have, especially when I'm walking through Kibera, the largest slum in all of Africa, and actively seeing every commonality between myself and the people living here. 

But if I can't do it at home, what's the point of being here at all?

I have to work on that. 

I suppose if I do, if I work on that, I can be the solution, too.

Giving Birth

I don't have any kids, at least not any that required me to give birth. I have an entire school of kids for 10 months every year and I have a niece and a nephew (see photo) for always. That's good enough for me. I know that there are women that don't get that. I know that not having an intense burning desire to carry, deliver, and mother my very own children isn't something that most people understand. Add it to all of the other reasons that make me a square peg.

 It's fine. I embrace it.

For me, spending a month in a foreign country every year is my very own version of giving birth. 

I suppose that that thought was originally planted in my head after my first trip abroad in the summer of 2012. I remember being in Colombia after 6 weeks away from everything that I had ever known and desperately wanting to go home. I was deep in the Andes debriefing my experience and I thought, “This is probably going to be a once in a lifetime experience. I'll probably never do this again.”

Then the next summer after I came back from Israel (round 1) I swore I would never go back. In fact, I remember walking the streets of Jerusalem for two straight days and thinking, “Soak all of this in. You'll never be back.”

I spent the summer of 2015 walking those same streets.

Today, I leave for Kenya for the second time in three years. And yes, the pattern is the same for my Kenyan experience. I thought I would never go back.  Yet, I'm 45 minutes from putting my backpack in a car and heading to the airport.

When I think back to all of my summers for the past 4 years I keep replaying my sister's voice in my head after she gave birth to my niece. I remember sitting in her living room with her first tiny offspring in her hands, just a few days old, and listening to her tell me that she was glad that she didn't have to make any decisions on future children in that moment. She said that if women had to decide about getting pregnant again just after they just had a child, that no one would have more than one kid in their family. The pain is too great to conceive of willingly giving birth a second time. But then, time passes, the memory of the pain dissipates, and the beauty of the life that was birthed is so great that it makes you want another one.

That's why I have a nephew, I guess.

I feel like that after every trip. I feel like I'll never do it again. There are so many parts that are too difficult to conceive of wanting to do a second time. Specifically, the thought of returning to the same country is unthinkable, especially at the tail end of a trip. And yet, here I am, going back to Kenya in a matter of hours.

It's giving birth.

The product of traveling to a new country for a month creates a different version of myself, one that is born from this new experience. I have to strip myself of all of the comforts and amenities of my daily life, lose the routine that the hold so sacred, and figure out who I am all over again.

It's painful. It's hard.

It changes me. It makes me new.

It breaks me. It rebuilds me.

Every year I think that i'll never go back, at least not to the same country that I just left. But enough time passes, enough space elapses between the old me and the new me for me to see the value in repeating the experience.

So I go. Again and again - to the point that I don't know who I would be without the losing and the finding of myself over the past 4, going to be 5 summers.

I guess that makes me about 8 months pregnant right now. Late in the last trimester, ready for a month of labor.

Ready to break the old me and reform the new one.

I won't know what she looks like for a couple of months, because it takes some time for her to grow. But I know she'll be a better version of anything I've known so far. A better version for the world, for my friends, for my neighborhood, for my students, for my family, and for myself.

So I go.