Love at the Speed of Email (4 page)

There was not a lot to do at night where we lived besides
sit around together in one of the apartments in the complex we all shared,
curled up on ratty old couches, drinking wine, telling stories, and chewing on
similar questions over and over again.

What drove us toward this work and kept us going?

What was it granting us, costing, and changing?

At this particular point in my own journey, I felt acutely
lonely and more adrift than ever. But as I listened to my
classmates
talk of their own turmoil, hungry for answers and metaphors and safe places to
store their experiences, I started to wonder whether this might be my niche
after all. And whether, if I could learn more about how to help people grapple
with their own inner turbulence, I might also find some tools for tackling
mine.
 

I would go to Los Angeles for two years, I decided. If at
the end of that time I didn’t feel as if my work with the institute was
worthwhile, I’d leave. I’d pursue human rights in Africa.
Again.

Nairobi,
Kenya

Eight months after starting my new job, I found myself
kneeling on the cold cement floor of a dormitory bathroom in Nairobi. I blinked
the sweat out of my eyes and tried to read my watch. It was hard to focus.
Three hours since I had started throwing up. I’d given up trying to figure out
whether it was malaria or plain old food poisoning. By 3 a.m. I was past that.
I was just sure that whatever it was, I’d be dead by dawn.

I was not dead by dawn, something I did not feel well enough
to celebrate with anything but a trace of disappointed resignation. At 6:30 on
a chilly Kenyan morning, I faced the fact that it was probably food poisoning,
that I would probably live, and that in exactly two hours I was scheduled to be
standing in front of twenty humanitarian workers from all over Africa, teaching
about providing peer support after trauma.

The first three days of this four-day training that I was
facilitating had been … character-building. Character-building, as usual, being
code for
experiences that suck so much
while you’re going through them that the most effective solace available is the
firm belief in future noble and virtuous personal benefits.
One good thing,
though, was the location. Back in Africa for the first time in eleven years,
I’d recognized the shape of the trees, flat against the horizon. The red dirt,
the taste of warm Sprite from a dusty glass bottle, dark clouds of pollution
billowing from every second vehicle, the awareness that I was a walking dollar
sign – all were familiar from spending my teenage years in Zimbabwe.
  

What was not so familiar was the role I now wore like an
uncomfortable suit, that of an expert in stress and trauma management. Coming
from Australia with all its insistence on uniformly sized poppies, being
proclaimed an expert in anything never sits well. And I was finding the ironies
inherent in being a supposed expert in this particular field at the ripe old
age of twenty-eight difficult to ignore. But as soon as I stepped into my role
with the institute, I began to relearn that important lesson I first grasped at
sixteen when we moved back to the United States and I convinced my entire class
that in Zimbabwe we’d occasionally ridden elephants to school and summered in a
giant
treehouse
: Other people will believe almost
anything if you say it with enough confidence and conviction. It’s just that I
had always thought that being a “grown-up” would mean actually
feeling
that confidence. By the time I
landed in Kenya, I was starting to think it just meant being better at
pretending.
  

“At least,” I consoled myself, “I must be getting better at
the pretending.”

Moses, one of the participants from Kenya, stopped me as I
locked up the conference room one night. “Can you ever turn it off, the
psychology, when you’re with your friends?” he wanted to know. “Or do you think
like that all the time?” I knew what he was asking. During the past couple of
years, I’ve encountered this over and over at dinner parties, in airplanes,
basically any time I introduce myself and explain what I do. It usually boils
down to one basic question: Can you read my mind? And one basic fear: Can you
see my secret shame?

My standard response is to tell people that my psychology
specialty is forensics, so unless they have criminal tendencies they’re safe
from my powers. When I really want to freak someone out, I’ll pause after that
piece of lighthearted banter, narrow my eyes and look at them speculatively.
Moses, however, was without guile, and I didn’t have the heart to try that on
him.

I paused, searching for a way to reassure him that his
innermost thoughts were safer than he could imagine without making me sound
completely
clueless. He didn’t wait for
my answer, though.

“I think it must be very uncomfortable to be around you,”
the 6-foot-3, muscle-bound giant said, beaming at me without malice, white
teeth flashing.

I walked away from him ten minutes later both flattered and
disturbed. Flattered because someone, at least, thought I had some answers.
To life.
Disturbed because someone thought I had some
answers.
To life.

This first trip to Kenya for work
threw
this paradox into sharp relief for me. It was my job, I suddenly realized, to
understand how difficult, how dangerous and how incredibly enriching
international humanitarian work can prove. It was my job to convince
humanitarian workers that unless they consistently pay attention to caring for
themselves while they’re working to care for others, they will be lucky to last
for three years before returning home spent, disillusioned and possibly
traumatized. It was my job to know that about a quarter of humanitarians
working outside the developed world can expect to undergo a life-threatening
experience during their assignment. And it was my job to know what could help
when these most horrendous events – the
carjackings
,
kidnappings, land mines, shootings and tsunamis of life – blindside us on a
pedestrian Tuesday afternoon.

On one level, I knew, I could do this. I had already lived
in eight countries and traveled in many more. A passion for international
humanitarian work was born the year my family moved to Bangladesh and I asked,
with the innocence of a sheltered seven-year-old, whether God had run out of
money halfway around the world. I had found that I could help people discover
what self-care strategies might help sustain them in the face of the loneliness
that can come with being far from family, the weariness that attends constant
exposure to disaster, and the mental pressure of making decisions that mean
some people receive lifesaving aid while others do not.

Most of it is not rocket science. Even now I sometimes feel
ridiculous facing some of the most dedicated and passionate individuals I have
ever met and advising them that drinking too much is not an incredibly helpful
self-care strategy and that they might want to consider journaling instead. But
this is the sort of message humanitarian workers need to hear on a regular
basis. Most start out in this field young, idealistic and vulnerable. When they
find themselves working in an understaffed and undersupplied refugee camp
facing more desperate people than they can possibly hope to help, it doesn’t
take long before far too many take refuge themselves in alcohol, risk-taking,
casual sex or cynicism in an effort to cope.

On a personal level, however, I found myself during this
first trip back to Africa wanting more, much more. What I really wanted to know
was why. Why was there so much suffering in this world? Why did humans have
such a talent for violence? How did I reconcile the divine omnipotence I was
taught to trust in as a child with the pain and incomprehension of those whose
lives had been torn apart by an earthquake, a famine, a tsunami, or other
people? If God existed, if he were paying attention, why did he often seem so
slow to act and so silent? And why had I been given so much while others had so
little?

But while I wanted the answers to these questions of
meaning, they were the very answers I was most keenly aware that I did not
have. Not in the way that would ever let me start a sentence with the word
because
and feel any degree of certainty
in the answer.

I consoled myself by remembering that most people I knew who
believed that they had “those answers” were far more annoying than inspiring or
comforting.

Perhaps, I thought, it was more about understanding the
questions that are raised than knowing “the answers.”

Perhaps, I thought, one of these days I would say that and
it wouldn’t feel like a cop-out.

Los
Angeles, USA

My standard line when I arrived in L.A. was that I expected
to be there about two years. In all honesty, this mantra came about more
because I was unable to visualize anything concrete beyond a two-year horizon
than because of any well-thought-out life plan. In fact, whenever anyone asks
me where I see myself in five years, the first word that always pops into my
head is
Nigeria
.

I have no idea why. I have never been to Nigeria and had no
particular yen to move there. Perhaps it is just shorthand for “So far in life
I’ve moved internationally twelve times. Five years ago I could never have
predicted I would end up in L.A. working with humanitarian workers. I couldn’t
have controlled that process if I tried, yet it’s felt right. You
really
expect me to know where life will
have taken me five years from
now?
”

Some might say this attitude denotes a certain degree of
emotional instability, core identity issues, and a pathological need to keep my
options open.

Some might say it indicates adaptability, zest for life, a
high tolerance for ambiguity, and a realistic view of how much control we have
over the future.

Some might even say that it demonstrates a commendable
willingness to stay open to divine guidance down the path of life and a
remarkable spiritual maturity.

Whatever it
actually
indicates, I blame it (as so many other things) in large part on my parents.
They
left for what they assured
their
parents would be two years, too.
This was why, of all people to take my two-year mantra seriously, four years
into my tenure in Los Angeles I was surprised by certain signs that they were
doing exactly that.

My mother may never hesitate to remind me that my own mental
health (not to mention my bank balance) would have been better served by my
pursuing a different branch of psychology, but to their credit, my parents have
never lodged serious objections to my global meanderings. I know they probably
worry sometimes, but the worst I’ve gotten over the years from Mum is a
diffident “Well, it’d be good if you
didn’t
have to go to Haiti next week.”

But as I entered my fifth year in Los Angeles, I began to
notice a subtle shift in her tactics.

The previous May, six months after my parents had finally
moved back to Australia, my siblings and I had converged on their place for
what we hoped would be a relaxing week. The morning after we arrived, however,
the three of us trailed dutifully out to the shed to engage in the
parental-mandated activity of packing and unpacking boxes, also known as
“organizing our stuff.”

Organizing our stuff
means braving snakes, spiders, and rats in the back shed to unpack some of the
many boxes containing fragments of our mobile childhood, provide a compelling
argument as to why Mum should not be allowed to put said fragments in the
“throw away” pile, and repacking it all and labeling it so that we will be able
do this all over again even more efficiently in another two years. Organizing
our stuff does not rank highly on any McKay child’s list of “favorite things to
do on holiday”.

This time, though, it was proving more tolerable than usual.
My sister unearthed a stack of stories she’d written in her first-grade class
in Bangladesh, and I was immensely gratified to see that they all featured me
as the main character or at least the driving force in the story plot. I was
flicking through my own first-grade stories, happily basking in the warm glow
cast by decades-old sibling worship, when Mum dropped the bombshell.

“The Salvation Army truck is coming next week, and we
thought we’d just load this on with everything else.”

The “this” she was indicating so casually was the first and
only decent piece of furniture I’d ever bought on Australian soil, a pine
dresser. I was very attached to this dresser. When I bought it I was still in
graduate school and it had represented a huge step for me. It was brand new, it
cost me $300, and there was no way I could fit it in a suitcase. That dresser
represented stability and belonging and sinking my emotional roots deep into
the rich red soil of my home country. It had helped cement my Australian identity.
So what if it had now been sitting in storage ever since I had left Australia
seven years earlier for what I’d said would be two years?
   

“I want to keep it,” I said. “I’ll need it when I come home
in two years.”

“Okay,” Dad said. “We weren’t going to tell you this, but a
family of mice chewed through the back and made a nest in there and peed all
over everything.”

Great.
My Australian identity was
now saturated with mouse piss.

“Fine then,” I sulked. “Give it away.”
 

“We’ll help you buy other stuff when you come home,” Mum
wheedled. “Nice stuff.”

That was the
start of the
uncharacteristically maternal offers that have recently been linked to the
words
come
home
.