existabovethenoise

The terror attacks in Kenya have weighed heavy on my heart. So much so that it’s taken til now and with great deliberation to even discuss my disdain for the entire affair. My peripheral intersection with the events in Nairobi’s Westgate Mall have left me grieving — perhaps for a sense of youthful immortality that has, apparently, died a quiet death.

Like 9/11, Nairobi’s attacks affected me around the edges in a way that some might say have shaped me. When those four planes headed West ward they departed from both a town I’m from and a town I was residing in at the time. Only years later when I moved to New York for almost 7 years would I associate those events with those towers. My fears, at the time, weren’t for people in the WTC, but for people possibly on those planes. Had my aunt Trudy traveled for work that week? Wasn’t a friend’s parent traveling from Logan? Such were my thoughts then and thankfully my people weren’t on those planes. I wasn’t touched – some might say – because they weren’t touched. Yet, sealed in that close call somewhere was the feeling that if it could happen so close to home and spare me and mine, perhaps this would always be the case.

Kenya undid all of that. For the reality is that as the events unfolded, I quickly thought “Of course, I don’t know anyone in Nairobi.” The same way I’d thought, “I don’t know anyone in Libya,” “in Syria,” “in Afghanistan”… But I did know someone in Kenya. I knew someone in Nairobi. I knew someone in Westgate Mall. In fact, I knew two someones – one who lived and one who died.

The irony that these two people would be my two people, in the same place at the same terrible time, is haunting. They’ve been part of an interwoven story in my life that’s left me speechless and afflicted with writer’s block since the realization dawned on me.

She hosted me at Barnard on prospective weekend. In deciding if I’d chose Barnard over Hopkins, over UNC, over… I’d slept on her floor and tried to live her life and be one of her friends. In deciding to choose the college, I chose her shadow – taking courses she had taken, being similarly disappointed with the administration’s ‘color blind’ shenanigans, sharing a suite with her my junior year. The cake may have been that, but the icing and the irony is that she went to Ghana in 2004. On an otherwise unprecedented trip led by British novelist Caryl Phillips, she and a cohort of Barnard women made the reverse transatlantic journey. From what I hear it was chocked full of white girl guilt trips and Black girl breakdowns. Soon after, she graduated and headed for Harvard Law, as she’d always planned. And I headed into my final year.

I, too, joined Caryl’s course and I also went to Ghana. In 2005. Similar tales resulted, except that my cohort upped the ante with multiracial girl ambivalence. I, too, met with Ghanaian students, had an amazing Ghanaian tour guide, and spoke with Ghanaian intellectuals – one of whom was Kofi Awoonor.

He met our group throughout the ten day trip. He introduced us to the students of University of Ghana’s Cape Coast campus. He dined with us and entertained us with diplomatic war stories at an Ivorian restaurant in Accra. And he even took us out to a resto-bar overlooking the Atlantic. Or maybe I’m mixing up my boys born on Friday and he only went to the dinner with us. Or maybe there are other punctuations I should remember, but don’t now. Nevertheless, he was a figure and remains a phantom – tireless and effervescent – in my Ghanaian memories and my West African dreams.

Just shy of 7 years have passed since that trip. And in those 7 years of separation, I’m sure he’d long since forgotten us – she from ’04, me from ’05.

Some twist of fate made these two individuals, my people, show up in Westgate Mall that day. One could say it was no coincidence. Neither are Kenyan. Months earlier, maybe even weeks earlier, neither was even in the country – much less in the mall! I bet they didn’t even know that the other was there. I suspect that even if they’d passed one another, they wouldn’t even have recognized each other by name or face. But there they were, fighting for their lives.

Unfortunately, he lost.

There are requiems that must be written for the loss of such lives like his. But you could google such memorials and they’d be more intimate than anything I could produce. Yet her shattered serenity I know more dearly and could argue that it too deserves commemoration of its own. I could pity these two people and praise their bravery or simply honor their greatness – tragedy not withstanding.

What these events have raised in me is the nagging knock of mortality at my own door, followed by – not the fear that life is too short – but the fear that the world is frighteningly small.

I know people in Libya. I know people in Nigeria. In Afghanistan. In Iraq. And in Washington, DC. Safety has become its own mirage, now more than ever. It’s trigger finger, though, remains brilliantly, divinely, randomized.

Perhaps if it weren’t these two people, these uniquely separate individuals, whose lives intersected almost a decade ago for just ten days…

If they could find themselves deeply entangled in danger in a foreign country, far from, distant from, their own…

Were it not them, were it not now, maybe I’d still feel spared the disruption of the world’s violent explosions so closely to home…

Ifs and buts get us nowhere…

So it was them. So it is now. So far, but so close.

I wish we were close enough to hug, but weren’t not. We’re just close enough for tragedy, but not enough for comfort. I’d like to hug her to let her know that I love her and that I’ve always appreciated her shadow. I haven’t the words to express both condolences and respectful distance. I haven’t the vocabulary to say that I’m happy she walked away, bruised but breathing. That these events aren’t hers alone to suffer. For, we are all utterly too close, too shamefully close to a Kenyan mall near you.

And I am so sorry, so deeply sorry, for her loss and for the loss of Kofi.

…We’ll always have Ghana.

Delhi is a city of extremes and contradictions. For me, the issue of giving to the poor, perhaps, is a combination of the two. I have found the begging children, elderly, and disabled to have generated – in me – emotions that are in extreme contradiction to my nature. I admit that I am repulsed, not by the poor, but by the business of being poor. It’s one thing to see “Slumdog Millionaire” and to sigh at how sad those people over there are living. It’s an altogether different thing to see those people every day. Every single day, with their hands outstretched in the same conditions – after you gave them food, after you have seen others give them money. Every single day, those people are on the same street corner, sometimes holding different drugged and drowsy babies each day.

It’s a pathetic scene. It’s sad to hear that most of these people are part of a racket. A racket that pays them a minimal salary of chapati and a few rupees so that they won’t dare starve, but survive to beg another day. The money those of us passersbys fork over goes, instead, to gangs who collude with police to ‘own’ street corners like drug dealers in inner city America. It’s hard to see the value of giving, when there’s such a senseless market of taking.

I can say that I have been deeply affected by this situation. For all the community service I’ve done in my life time, the food banks I’ve donated to, the Salvation Armies I’ve frequented, I have been very reluctant to engage India’s poor. For, while this poverty seems so abject, it also seems so self-induced. While it seems so self-induced, it also seems so inexplicably, dramatically exaggerated in the direction of downtrodden. It is not poverty that causes children to beg in the streets for a pittance, when government schools are free. It is not poverty that causes women to re-open gash marks on their bodies to produce more gore with which to guilt givers. The poverty itself is not pretend, but these theatrical advances are all too frequent and all too irresponsible on the part of the actor. The whole scene has turned me off.

Delhi has left me with a bitter and miserly taste. I find myself despising street children, because I know it’s just a matter of time before they come begging and whining incessantly for something I will never give – money. They’ll touch you. They’ll poke you. They’ll touch your feet as a sign of respect and also as a nuisance – hoping that you’ll be so annoyed that you’ll give them money to go away. And, I must admit, I do want them to go away. Not because I don’t want their poverty in my face, but simply because I know there’s nothing I can do to help them. Their extremes can’t be helped by money, and this sick theatre won’t be abolished by my guilt. Yet, as I am gearing up to leave a city that has – despite all my complaints – allowed me to make significant progress personally and professionally, I have decided that I will learn to trust.

Finding a charity that one can trust in Delhi is like differentiating melted chocolate from fresh cow dung – not using your sense of smell. It’s a dirty and involved business. It requires research and personal investment. Or else the consequences are grave. Word has it that there are over 3 million non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in India, hundreds of thousands of which are New Delhi based. Corruption is commonplace and an ever-present crime of opportunity. Yet, in my quest to accomplish #24 of my 30 before 30, I found 3 charities that I’m willing to support.

While at a work organized volunteer day I finally got a chance to engage with the children of Salaam Balaak Trust. I’d heard for years that these street children gave city tours (dare I say, slum tours), but I never could actually find time in my schedule to go on one. Over an art project with children of all ages, I came to find out that the organization takes in children who are found in and around Delhi’s train station. Many are runaways who left abuse, prostitution, and/or child labor in their local villages and towns. Also, they work to serve children who are not orphaned, but whose parents are otherwise slum residents or homeless. So, this art project outing rekindled my interest in the organization and has compelled me to again revisit the sore subject of street children.

While browsing the web for some academic research I was working on, I came across Deepalaya – a non-religious, NGO focused on eradicating urban and rural poverty. With options to sponsor a child or support specific projects of health, sheltering, or girls’ education, it seems this almost thirty year old organization is doing good work. My contact with this organization is new and, for lack of time, mainly financial. Yet, I suspect it will be sustained. As the communication between the organization and sponsors is really detailed and steady – understand that this is not usually the case with other organizations I’ve been in touch with – I can believe that I will continue to build confidence in the organization and a relationship with the child I sponsor.

Kamalini came to me in the mail. I received an ad about a women’s vocational school that was not only accepting volunteers, but also in-kind donations of any kind. I had long grown tired of donating my old clothes to the same organization and wanted to build a relationship with a new organization. I found the organizers at Kamalini to be a dedicated and concentrated group of both foreign and Indian women working together to provide vocational skills to women in urban villages in and around Delhi. While some chose to use these educational opportunities to get better at their professions, others were just starting out and seeking the financial independence needed for traditional Indian women to make tough personal choices. Kamalini has teamed up with a local tour guide to give a guided tour of the Shahpur Jat Village neighborhood and then a tour of the Kamalini facility. See below photos of my tour, which has effectively changed my relationship with this city and my feelings about philanthropy.