Here and now

This time next week I'll be in Ghana, volunteering at Buduburam Refugee Settlement, attempting reconciliation work among Liberian refugees, who despite repatriation by the UN have stayed put, not wanting to return to a country lacking infrastructure and still rather fragile.

Right now, Liberia for me is the subject of 30-page research papers. I try to understand the situation and with limited knowledge suggest solutions, like any Ivory Tower liberal, intellectualizing everything. Here I am, 21-years-old, a privileged student at an expensive and selective liberal arts college, privileged enough to spend a semester in Denmark and travel around Europe, privileged enough to spend a summer not working but "helping the less fortunate." But really, I'm going for me. It's like a pilgrimage really, only the destination is almost inconsequential, I think. I'm looking for change and inspiration, direction and passion, centering and meaning. The things people get from pilgrimages, I think. Hopefully I'll be able to make a difference to the Liberian refugees too, but the more I learn, the more overwhelmed I feel about the extent of the challenge and the more important I realize the work I'll be doing is. This is tragedy. And as an American, I feel a little guilty. Though if I went about studying it, I could probably find more things to feel guilty about than I could handle. So I've picked my poison, for now at least. For my sake, and our sake, and their sake. And we shall see what good may come, but at least I'm sticking to my philosophy:

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
~George Eliot, Middlemarch

And so I am off, to build connections, because when it comes down to it, that may be the only thing we really can do.

Now bring me that horizon.