I would do well to remember my own words.

In the past few weeks, the weight of the world has been stifling me. Suffocating. The burden of all the things that need to be done, and the knowledge of the simple fact that I can't even keep up with email or do my homework, much less restore the brokenness of the world.

Will Watson

Wright Bentley Merit Scholarship Application

07 April 2009

What have you done to make Sewanee a better place?

“If you came to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you came because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us walk together.”

-Anonymous

One year ago today, I came home. I had spent my gap year volunteering, traveling, and photographing in East Africa. I traveled through 5 countries, going 2500 miles with only a backpack and a camera. The physical miles were only surpassed by the miles I traveled in my heart and in my mind. I wandered, sometimes with purpose, sometimes not. Sometimes safe, sometimes not.

For four months I pursued love and peace with purpose and passion, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, sometimes loving, sometimes hating. Yet amongst the poverty and the death, there was always a pervading sense of hope. Stories of new life and change.

That remained true until I crossed the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to one of the world’s most violent wars. One morning, I found myself standing on a dirt floor under a roof made of tin, in the midst of 22 women raped during the conflict. Some had been raped years ago by Rwanda’s fleeing genocidaires who took refuge in the jungles of Congo. These women were assaulted time and again by the rebel soldiers who conscripted their pre-teenage sons into their armies, killed their husbands and forced them to flee their homes.

One woman told of how the rebels forced her husband to watch as they raped her and her daughters. After they were through, they killed him in front of her eyes. With pent-up emotion in her voice, she related that the rebels with AIDS would rape the women to pass along the disease. Most of the women in the room had the disease, which they had passed along to the babies they held in their arms as a result of the rape.

What could I say in the face of such stories?

I remember standing, silently listening. The tall, redheaded mzungu (white person) from an affluent family in the richest country on earth. Amongst the poorest of the poor. I was, and still am, utterly incapable of understanding their pain and suffering, but after hearing their stories, I was instantly committed to living for their liberation for the rest of my life.

But then I returned home, and lived for 8 months with rage and passion trapped inside me. But that rage and passion had nowhere to go, and I lived with the anger and guilt that I had yet to say something to someone about these women. I had yet to tell their story. I lived in hesitant silence, unsure of what to do with the images and stories burned onto my heart, burdening me in powerful way.

I felt a responsibility to do something, to change the lives of these women by changing the lives of those around me here in the United States. However, as time went on, I realized time and again that the life that had been changed in Africa was my own, and the life that was continually changed as I shared the story here in the States was also my own. I felt shameful of my affluent life and frustrated at the complacency I saw in many of my friends and family even after hearing my stories and seeing my photographs. I began to despair, because the lives of the women were not being changed, and the world around me didn’t seem to want to change. This only increased the weight of the burden I felt on my shoulders to change the world.

Coming to Sewanee did not lift this burden from my shoulders, but rather exacerbated its effect on me as I lived in a place where affluence is the norm rather than the exception, and the student body spends its weekends living in what I saw to be an alternate, inebriated reality. My bitterness and rage at my inability to change both the world and Sewanee grew day by day.

That was until I saw the aforementioned quote on that sticker in the Outreach Office. I remember getting chills up and down my spine, realizing that my motivation all along had been to help (which was synonymous in my mind with changing) the people around me, not realizing that I was the one who needed help, who needed to be changed.

My liberation is bound up with theirs, and yours.

As I dealt with this realization, and sought just to walk with the people around me, not trying to change them, I began to realize that the world around me began to change when I began to live without the burden of changing that world. And I began to change Sewanee the instant I stopped trying to do things to change it.

I now understand that I make Sewanee a better place by not trying to do that exact thing. I now see it happening in the small things: a smile, a hug, a word of thoughtful love and grace to a struggling friend, the sharing of the cup of the Eucharist at Growing in Grace, the hope that is born in conversations that naturally come out of our classes and activities, the passion that is inspired as a body of students lives their lives together on this mountaintop haven. Sewanee is made a better place not because I, or any of us, have done anything to make it so, but because of the simple fact that I am here—that we are all here.