Let it be...

Don’t let it be

I have let far too many things in this world just, “be…”

On Tuesday one of my 1^st grade pupils died.

I have another pupil who got a blister from a burn, kept picking at it and it turned into an infected blood wound.

I live in a 6-bedroom house by myself while other teachers share similar 6 bedroom homes with two families of 5.

My teachers are so afraid of being lynched for the truth that they are having to lie to make their innocence sound more believable.

One of my pupils is deaf. His parents send him to dorm at school because they don’t know how to manage his special needs. He is known in the community as being a bad kid because he steals and gets in fights often. The school wants to kick him out, the only restriction being the knowledge that after this he will be living in the streets.

I have a girl who comes to my house everyday to talk in hopes that I like her enough to invest in her schooling and sponsor her to get ahead in life.

Nayonga died on Tuesday from fainting after running.

A lot of pupils faint whenever they run because dehydration and hunger are very common. Teachers don’t react in worry. They act with what they know they can do. They carry their bodies to the shade and call other pupils to blow the one who is unconscious air. In dire cases they bring them powdered glucose and feed it to them slowly.

This is not neglect. This is doing the most with what you know and is available to you.

Life has to be more than just self-preservation and survival. Not just for me and my family. But for my friends, my students, my teachers, my neighbors, the stranger I walk a little faster for in fear and the child I hug in pity.

Yes, we are all living a world of greed, corruption, complacency and acceptance. But I refuse to let it be. I refuse to make treaties and try my best, only to say that it is not enough, not enough right now, when it is needed the most. When reality is that people who have little to no action in their fate suffer from people, actions, systems that never have to face the reality of the lives of the people they hurt.

A 7 year old died on Tuesday from dehydration, lack of accessibility to resources that treat fainting spells and possibly the ignorance that regular or any medical checkups shouldn’t be a luxury but a preventive method of detecting heart defects and health complications.

Somedays, like today, I wake up to the sounds of life around me.

Men and women waking up at 6 am to start weeding their land before heading off to work in the morning.

Children bathing their bodies behind the cover of a wall in preparation for class.

I sit in a classroom correcting paper after paper where my pupils copy incorrect answers from each other, sometimes summing up to be incompressible list of letters they hope can somehow make a right answer. The teacher turns to me and asks me how it is that Ugandan children don’t learn. 

I want to scream, punch a wall and be angry and bitter for the rest of my life.

I want these feelings of frustration and unmeasurable anger to be enough to make a difference, to be an answer to change all of these lives.

I want there to be an answer.

I need it to come from something more than a religion, another corrupt self-preserving system

an excuse, a band aid,

But outside of a selfish political revolution that will probably end in fulfilling my own selfish ideals and desires

All I can do is cry and mourn a life that was cut way too short before it even had the opportunity of attempting to make something of itself in this fucked up world we live in.

So today I listening to the Across the Universesversion of, “Let it be” and Calle 13’s “El Aguante” (The withstanding/putting up with/ things human beings’ experience from worse to inhuman for no other reason than because we say it is just life).

I decided to rip all the treaties of armistice I had with spiders around my house to shreds and was wrecked with violent tears as I pounded a dust sweeper over my head and exterminated my life of things I live in fear of.

I think I live in fear of change. Of creating any form of change. I keep trying to confront this fear in palpable doses that I try and measure out to still have some form of self-satisfying difference.

Jumping into the ocean is world shattering. Shattering to the comfortable world of personal development and professional fulfillment I have tricked myself into following. 

I just don’t have an answer. But I don’t want to let it be. I don’t want to continue waking up to circumstances I know could be and should be better. I don’t want to keep encouraging a world of excuses where the knowledge that we are but a drop in a bucket is enough to freeze our actions.

What is an ocean but an accumulation of drops.

I know you have a lot going on. Maybe there are difficult things happening in your personal life. Maybe you are in love. Maybe you just had your first child or your third. Maybe you were just diagnosed with cancer and your grandfather died. But I could have a lot going on as well. They could have a lot going on as well. She deserves to have a lot going on as well. But you know what, she doesn’t, not anymore, not ever again.

It can be so easy to lose our sense of humanity in the day to day. To feel an ounce of pity from a statistic listing the lasted number of refugee deaths and be content.

I really want to fulfill my time in Peace Corps.

There just doesn’t seem to be an answer. Every attempt out there seems to become tainted by the very evil it is trying to combat. So, I always relish in this excuse and come up with temporal actions that will fulfil my internal need to change this world.

I think that come the end of my service at least I will have taught children the alphabet, how to read and how to have a sense of self-accomplishment. I hope that my actions here will inspire pupils to finish school. Maybe even for some to become teachers or civil leaders in Uganda.

But I wonder if this is enough. If this is a worthy use of time. Not that their lives, the education and service that they need here isn’t important.

but

I need to acknowledge that I have an education and privileges that most don’t. I am an American citizen. I am an active participant of a democracy that has a leading role in the world. I am a queer first generation woman of color. I state these identities not because they limit me but because they empower me to need to do more. They inform me about the injustices so many others don’t have a voice to speak up about. My identities, my experiences demand of me, that I act. That I at least attempt to find and try an answer.

Because living a life of “I am too small and evil is too great” is stupid. It is quite literally ignorance and propaganda and self-preservation/selfishness to the comfortable extreme. Giving up before even trying is not good enough for this life.

We can do better. We need to do better.

There is still a chance that we can make this world better for the stranger, our enemy, a person on the other side of the world, our neighbor, our friend, our daughter and ourselves.

We deserve a better world than what we have created.

I see my pupils laugh carefree, give their lunch money to help a family pay for a burial and I know that the human soul is capable of doing better than this.

 I will no longer put up with excuses and small answers.

I will make it be a better world even if I have to live a dry lonely life trying.

However, I have a feeling that this answer, this change is one of love and togetherness.

Of sharing stories, listening to one another speak and having the conscious compassion of doing something about what we know of the world we live in, so it will not always be this way.

We will not let it be.