FEB-C-8
THE LONG FLIGHTS HOME IN TWO JUMPS
ADDIS ABABA, ALEXANDRIA, LONDON TO
WASHINGTON
WATCHING ART IMMITATING LIFE:
“BEYOND BORDERS”
A RELIEF WORKER RENEGADE DOCTOR IN
ETHIOPIA
February 22. 2004
Here I am sitting at ten thousand meters above the Atlantic in a window seat of a 747 run by British Airways looking down at icebergs off Greenland, contemplating what I have just done and where I have just been. As I do so, I flip on the video screen in front of my seat, and watch a movie entitled “Beyond Borders” a story of a renegade doctor and a UNHCR worker who pursues him in the humanitarian hot spots across the globe as they try to feed the hungry and deliver medicines and vaccines, in, of all places, the Somalia refugee sites along Ethiopian borders. I only wish I were pursued by the likes of the full-lipped Angelina Jolie who is searching for the romantic angry hero who is always in trouble since he is kicking against the repeated system of injustice to the world’s poor. I know many such folk, and a few of them are martyr-seeking fools. A few are much more heroic and sacrifice their lives, not in the glorious easy and dramatic way of getting themselves shot, but in the daily grind of enervating misery they seek to relive in the world’s abundant hotspots of high pollution, low charm and vanishing charity and less value to human life where it is rather abundant and disposable. We all can do no more than to cultivate our gardens.
Some of those who are movie character dashing romantic rebels for a cause are seeking the glamour of the helicopter cowboys—Medicins Sans Frontieres come to mind—or they are the kind who go out of their way to suffer, hoping to achieve a martyrdom. Suicide bombers have the same motivation and have the security of knowing that they, at least, are in control of their destiny, and can achieve it quickly and more surely than if leaving it up to the fickle will (or aim) of others. These motivations are considerably less than honorable. I look at the far more gloriously effective Sisters of Charity, scrubbing out latrines in their crowded “Home for the Sick, Dying and Destitute.” If God has a chosen people—as has been the claim by everyone from the Afrikaner to the Zionist Jews to the Calvinist Reformers—these lesser ones are they, who make little claim on any of this world’s resources, and expect no reward except the next breath
I got up off the couch at Rick Hodes’ house and with Addisu, his first son who had had the Pott’s Disease spinal surgery correction in Dallas, we went to the airport in Addis long before dawn and I checked in. I had a doubled overweight luggage at check in, and sure enough the card from Ethiopian Air Director Mekonnen Abebe seeking help from British Air supervisor Yeshi brought her out and she graciously allowed the overage in check in weight to be waived of any excess baggage fees. Now I will have to se how I can manage to struggle along from the Dulles airport to the Audi parked at GWU before I deliver the biggest of the suitcases to my Ethiopian neighbor in Derwood. But, such struggles seem in perspective as mere annoyances in comparison to the harder task of survival faced daily by many people with the doubtful resources to make it through each day. I had said to Rick that one of the things about ht eh consistent sort of work we did, is that re-entry was always more difficult by the trivialization of the details of everyday over pampered life in the developed world. I am always impressed more with the generosity and resourcefulness of those who have marginal means, yet are able to not only survive, but look out for others around them in the event that they can help.
I have traveled “around the Horn”—not the usual meaning of those terms as I had imagined them when I had visited Cape Horn in the Straits of Magellan and Drake Passage below South America, nor the Cape of Good Hope, below South Africa’s tip of a continent in which hope is a scarce commodity. This “Horn of Africa” is a protrusion between troubled spots, the Middle East and the sub-Saharan Africa, and is sharing in each of these tinder boxes inflammations. It has been a good voyage, and one that I will no doubt have to repeat, with perhaps further extensions into that inflammatory mass to include the Sudan and other sites pleading for help in Somaliland and Ethiopia. This next trip is not for the romance of discovery, since I already have a rather good idea of what it is that I might find; nor is it with a hope of martyrdom, although that possibility is never a zero-risk likelihood, and with very little precautionary effort it would become self-fulfilling. It would, at its best, be in imitation of the motives and actions of several kinds of the peoples I have encountered in this trip—a few are expatriates working in this foreign “field”; still others are those trying to make do and improve the lives around them in places they call “home.” Each of us might try to do so, anywhere we happen to have been planted next to our own “field” that might well be a garden.