why...

is it so easy for me to escape my pain from seeing

and so impossible for you to escape your pain from living, 

when the pain from which we both run

is yours?

to the families, warriors, leaders, rebels, soldiers, aid workers, refugees, and whistle-blowers in eastern congo right now...

i pray for your liberation. 

and that we will blow our whistles unceasingly. 

fallingwhistles

Falling Whistles is a non-profit organization trying to raise awareness to the horrors, sorrow, and rapidly escalating violence in the Congo.

www.fallingwhistles.com

Excerpt from Sean's journal about a trip to meet Laurent Nkunda, general and charismatic leader of Congo's CNDP rebels. 

Get involved. 

May we blow the whistles unceasingly. 

GO (home)

This is about withdrawal and culture shock. or whatever "it" is. 

We held an invisible children screening tonight of the new documentary GO. 

A friend brought me home. And I walked up to my room, opened up my computer, put "Heaven" by Angels and Airwaves on, and began to write. Not that I have anything to say.

GO is the documentary about students who went to Uganda with Invisible Children after winning a competition to raise money for schools affected by the war in Northern Uganda. (see invisiblechildren.com) These students from all different types of backgrounds and all different places around the US "go" to Uganda to witness firsthand the reality of the situation. 

And two things always happen when i see it again. when i see it move. 

i turn off completely. 

or i get this knot in my chest and i can't talk or can't think except this blinding, spinning movie of images and places and names and people and feelings and just the... africa. 

tonight it was the first. but it went back and forth between the two. and heaven is playing still... i think it's on its fifth time through... and i'm remembering hearing it the first time in the bed at momma tom's and on the bus from arusha, TZ to dodoma, and again on the train ride of death... and the words always going through... the song about life and death and the pain that's everywhere. 

Do you see the hills beneath the clouds? 

The stars as trails to lead you out...

Can you sense the pain? It's everywhere

And if you try, you'll never care

And the love you had when you were young

Is right outside for all to come

if you see the light break through the clouds and fire up the distant towns....

I don't have anything to say really. Just random. It all comes rushing back. Like wind in my face or water across my back. 

The hard part is the pain and the suffering and the deplorable conditions we saw. Because it's on the tv in front of me. And the girl next to me gasps, but I didn't feel anything. The girl off to the left moans later on, and I look at her, and she's crying. And I turn back to the screen and see blood and bodies in the street and the face that was destroyed by war. Am I just dead inside? Or even more alive? And then I remember what it was like before I saw it in real time, real life. When I got the sick feeling in my stomach that's coming back even now... And the picture of his head that I'm scared to show flashes on repeat through the eyes in my head... the picture i took from behind a lens. that photo is all i have now.... but i saw it with only the lens of my eyes. against the green backdrop and the red dirt and the boy to his left and the yellow shirt and the fly on his left eyebrow and the dead eyes and the pain. of the burns. 

and the world spins. and i get sick. and cry. 

i'm coming back. little boy whose name i don't know. the man with his ribs showing. the boy kigoma's streets. the baby in bujumbura's. david, vianney, miracle, peter, james, regina, samuel, cliff, john, hannah. i'm coming back. not because i can help you. not because i can save you or make your life better. but because i have to. because we are human. both of us. all of us  together. and when i forget you, my humanity fades. 

i'm coming back. because you know what it means to be alive. you talk to each other. you know silence. your hands are dirty. but your spirit clean. 

i'm coming back. because the sky is huge and the dirt is red. i feel free and alive. and riding that piki into the sunset amongst herds of zebras and buffalo... wind on my face, through my hair. 

i'm coming back. because my liberation is bound up with yours. 

"if you come to help me, then you are wasting your time... but if you come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together."

please stay, don't go... 

heaven. 

when i walked into my room, 

the walls were orange, ablaze

with light off the leaves 

through the windows. 

when we didn't have a watch

it started as a cool thing to do. "yeah man, let's sleep outside for a week." 

but it's become something more. maybe it's an escape. 

but God knew we needed to slow down. 

so it's become a place where we fall asleep 

with starlight on our faces, 

and wake up to the sunrise. 

wake up as the earth rolls over

and lights orange and red trees with soft rays.

then we sit on the view and be

still. 

and my friend at the green house said that you come back with your packs and get your mountain man breakfast and look around at all the kids stumbling in and you feel so alive and think, "take that, bitches, i just slept under the stars last night." and there's no better thing in the world. 

made me laugh. 

sometimes i lay awake and in those soft moments before sleep, there's something of clarity. and i see where i'm at and where i'm going, if only for a second. that happened a couple nights ago, and i saw my life and realized it was november; realized that yesterday was august 20, and that yesterday seems like it could have even been september 28, 2007, with a father holding the guitar that british airways wouldn't let me bring and a mother's tears mixed with one last sweet embrace. and the last year flashed before my eyes like the pages of my journal when i sit and flip through, too scared to slow and read them, but magnetically pulled in nonetheless. and then the memories come and speed up to something like light speed and my stomach gets knotted and scared and i start breathing faster and faster and it doesn't stop and then... my head drops and my throat closes and i'm exhausted. and sometimes it seems as if i don't want to remember. but i do. 

sometimes it really feels as if life is happening to me. 

though i've had times of peace and rest and even stillness in that year of my life, overall it just seems like a wintry day, where the sun comes up and goes down and you didn't even take time to stop and notice. a wild ride. an out of control car on a dark road. and i don't want life to happen to me. i've been thinking the speed of my life of late has a lot to do with all the other things that are stealing my joy, like a beginning of a crack or the stream that first breaks through the rocks. 

i woke up this morning in my sleeping bag and rolled over to see the soft morning light dancing through blowing leaves on the faces of loved friends, and i had this deja vu. in the cumberland forest on the edge of the plateau. 

and i missed the days when we had no watch. when there wasn't a phone with the time and messages from far away. when all there was was the life and the death and sun and the stars and the sky and you. right there. in my lens. standing there in front of me. 

and it was simple and real. and i could find the stillness. and i knew myself. and i didn't wake up and have to get away just to be me again. 

so again, here i am and i struggle with the balance of who i was, who i became, who i came back to, and who i am, deep inside. but i know it's in the journey and in the journey we're getting closer to something and farther away from something else. it's beautiful. and it's real. and we're learning. and moving. God, life is beautiful. 

tunapenda maisha. 

strangers in a foreign land. on our way home. 

calm and swirling. 

peace. 

Renewed fighting in DR Congo.

This is a link to today's BBC article about the renewed fighting in Eastern Congo. Right before Jill, Bethany, and I traveled into Congo in February of 2008, a large peace deal was signed by many of the rebel groups in the North and South Kivu regions of Eastern Congo. Since that time, the peace has held somewhat. Lately however, fighting has begun anew, causing over 100,000 Congolese to flee their homes. Many are caught in between the lines of the UN peacekeeping force and the rebels, preventing relief agencies such as MSF, OXFAM, and Merlin from being able to reach them. 

Images are from the BBC. 

For more information see today's BBC article about the fighting: "UN fears grow over Congo unrest."

For historical background, see the chapters on Congo and Mobutu and the Rwandan and Burundian conflict in: The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith. 

The BBC article has links to other articles about the present conflict. 

mysterious ways

i'm exhausted, but the world... 

is beautiful. when you 

slow

down

enough to see it. 

on the flight up to calgary, we looked out the window and watched as the plane chased the sunset around the horizon, leaving behind strips of color that washed the tops of the clouds with orange, yellow, and then that gray blue that happens after the colors spin off and away. those colors caressed our faces, and turned the hair that red-gold. 

but then, the moon started chasing us. maybe it wasn't the moon, but the moonbeams reflected off the river far below, winding its way along next to us. and those moonbeams just danced along, twisting and turning far below...

as we sat, speechless, 

the light lit our faces, 

and there was that 

gleam in our eyes

pure wonder. 

"johnny take a walk with your sister the moon

let her pale light in to fill up your room

you've been living underground eating from a can

you've been running away from what you don't understand,

love

it's alright, she moves in mysterious ways."

then that last night, the cold wind blew across the wheat field where we had been not six hours before, spinning through the grain lost in the love and the joy. geoff stopped the van on that dirt road and we stood. the four of us in a line gazing up into the ether, as aurora flickered. her lights waving across the stars, almost akin to the wheat waving in the cold, north wind. 

so we stood, silent, 

her undulating light

moving in those

mysterious ways.

i just didn't

understand.

"johnny take a dive with your sister in the rain

let her talk about the things you can't explain

to touch is to heal, to hurt is to steal

if you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel.

on your knees

it's alright, she moves in mysterious ways."

and tonight, after coming down off the rocks, we climbed those stairs to the edge of the plateau, to gaze across the valley below... as the fading sunset threw its paint across the horizon. we stood and watched, and reed said the star was blinking. jupiter rose up in the south, and for the first time in my life, i saw the oranges turn into yellows on their way to the blue. but in between the yellow and blue, the sky turned green. a band of green, just like in manalive when chesterton awes you by his words, about the sierra nevada sky. 

and i slowed down, silent

eyes on that green band

sunset's bracelet, as she pulled 

her hand away

into the darkness

of night. 

"one day you will look back 

and you'll see where you were held how

by this love while you could stand there

you could move on this moment, follow this feeling

it's alright, she moves in mysterious ways.

lift my days, light up my nights, 

love."

the earth, she was just

a'praising the one watching

it all. she, silent and still

while we were too loud, 

too full of noise

to notice

and those pictures are all stuck up in my head and i've no words to describe them. 

because true beauty and love and passion are just too big for words.