picking up the pieces

I have been in this country for four years. Well, technically this country. My first two years, in Munich, I experienced the glories of West Germany, and it seems like the past two years have served only to showcase the struggles of the East. I have no doubt that this is due for the most part to my own attitude and situation, but still, my dismal experience has been echoed by others. It's hard to live in the post-Communist world, even if you happen to be in the luckiest post-Communist part of the world, the one that had a thriving Western country to adopt it and raise it as its very own. The discrepancies between East and West are still thick and undeniable, but there's no doubt East Germany has the fighting chance that Poland or the Czech Republic or Belarus have been denied simply by whim of fate and geography.

Despite the recent history of this place, this is the "living abroad" experience that was most like my "real" life. The language is a cognate, the checkpoints are a thing of the past, pretty much everyone has running water and electricity, indoor plumbing exists, the culture is at least somewhat navigable to the naked American eye. And yet this was the only experience that brought me to my knees.

Maybe it's just pure length of time - I was in the East for 2 years, whereas my forays into Palestine, Namibia, and Tanzania lasted mere months. Two years is enough time for the prevailing despair to get under your skin and multipy in there.

There were challenges those other times. Challenges galore. I still have and occasionally read my journals that I wrote in southern Africa and in the Middle East. Life was not happy there. Jerusalem was a place so tense you could taste it - racial, ethnic, religious tension permeated every single action we made or observed. Even the tiny moments of happiness came only over/against the tension - helping a family to keep their home for another day or another week, a hymnsing in the midst of a battle, leading one blind student across no-man's-land to visit her home, an Easter sunrise service that gave us a glimpse of the landscape before people woke up and the tension recommenced. In Tanzania I was steeped in AIDS and staggering statistics and individuals trying to patchwork together these ragged pieces of lives and call it a family. In Namibia I taught hope-filled students - folks who felt called to go out there and make a tiny difference against the tidal wave of insufficiency that threatened to engulf them.

From all of those experiences, I emerged changed. But I didn't go under. It was only here that I found myself clawing desperately at the surface from the underside. Only here that I bobbed helplessly in the current, having lost my footing entirely. Only here that I had to ask someone else to think for me, to hold me up, only here that I felt like a rag doll in someone's arms.

But I'm still here, and I'm picking up the pieces and taking a deep breath and feeling that my feet have finally hit solid ground. I can look backwards at the pain instead of forwards into it.

When I arrived in Palestine, Doug gravitated toward me immediately. He'd been there half a year, was starting to lose his footing, and saw in my fresh face something he he'd lost track of months before - joy. The naive 21-year-old Jess, the one who had never looked oppression in the eyes, had never empathized with persecution, apparently she radiated it. I remember that people used to say that about me. They used words like "joy" and "unconditional love" and "sunny" and "enthusiastic." I'm not that girl anymore. I've seen too much and felt too much and heard too many stories of hope denied and lives shattered and assumptions incinerated. I've simply lived too much to be that naive, sunny creature who showed up in Jerusalem one day hoping to soak up a culture in a semester.

I don't know which girl I am now. I'm still gathering the pieces. I hope there are vestiges of who I was in college - I've never liked myself more, naivete and all. And I hope that what I did manage to soak up in my adventures and misadventures was the courage and strength and perseverance of people all over the world who persist in the face of systemic evil that looms far too large on the horizon.

I think I'm still re-emerging, and probably will be for a while. I'm excited to see what happens from here.