The Cost of Knowing

I am in the kitchen cooking, drinking and listening to music. I hear Eileen open the door, and before I look at her I ask cheerily, “How was your day?” She turns the corner into the kitchen and I see it on her face. I see the mental and emotional exhaustion that comes from seeing kids living on the streets because their uncles can’t afford to take them in, women working on the sex market to feed a family left by the father, people bed ridden from curable diseases because they can’t afford the treatment.

My good friend Eileen is visiting, she wanted to do a photo project in the developing world. Last minute, I throw together a gig for her, excited that I get to spend a few weeks with an old friend. I would describe Eileen as a world traveler, and definitely someone I have always wanted to travel with. When connecting her to this orphanage for street kids in one of the many large slums of Kampala, I did not even think twice about whether it would be too much. She can handle anything. And, as it turns out, she can.

But those first few nights, after her initial exposure to the slums, it was disarming to see the tears in her eyes; the confusion, disappointment and helplessness. I pour her a glass of whatever I’m drinking, and we go sit on the roof to hash it out. She tells me about the people she had met, where they came from and the lives they now live. The things she saw as she walked through the slum. Overarching everything was this sentiment of this is just one orphanage, in one slum, in one city, in one country. She wanted to do something about it, but was at a loss.

As she talks, I don’t feel much except for her sorrow, the tragedy of the transformation she was going through from seeing this other part of the world. I feel bad that she now has this madness inside her. What I didn’t feel was sorrow for the kids, or the sick, or the hungry. What she was feeling was so raw, and I had none of it left inside of me - at least not in that form.

As she goes off to bed, I remain on the roof and wonder about this. When did I go from crazy college student shouting at the top of her lungs to get one person to know about what Darfur was, let alone care about it, from the personal breakdown I experienced after returning from Malawi – my first developing world travel— to this person, who can hear some of the most devastating stories, and not even feel the tug of a heart string or a turn of the stomach. How does such a transformation occur?

Maybe it comes in realizing your own capacity. In knowing that even if I gave a kid lunch today, he will still be hungry tomorrow. Even if I paid for the woman’s medical bills, she would still return home to sleep without a mosquito net or eat vegetables washed in sewage. At some point in the past, it became too much for me. Everything is interconnected and it is impossible to take it all on at once. There is a switch I flipped a while ago that enables me to live this life without that madness. I move through Kampala in a sort of tunnel vision – I listen without hearing, I think without absorbing, I walk without seeing, I live without feeling. I need to un-flip this switch, at least occasionally.

At some point I learned that a great deal of damage has been done out of the fear, sorrow and guilt of the privileged. In the face of our impotence to change these matters we hastily throw money at it, we have this need to give tangible things. But in the long run, what does it solve? Tomorrow a tourist is going to come and see the exact same sights, and try the exact same thing, and all it really achieves is a sense of dependency on part of the poor and an ease of the conscience for the tourist.

I choose instead to focus on the positive power of people here. I am constantly coming into contact with people who are taking action into their own hands. They are not waiting on handouts from foreigners, they are done relying on the government, instead they are coming up with creative solutions to their community’s problems. Even better, I found an org that empowers people to do just that.

Gregory David Roberts after experiencing a moment of profound human darkness says this, “There is a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever and the reality from perception. Were helpless, usually, in the face of it, and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t help us to love the world; but it does prevent us from hating the world.”

I am here now. Some of my colleagues would say I have seen too much for a twenty-five year old. I have seen things that would make a person give up on the world, give up on humanity, but knowing what you know, understanding this truth I find it impossible to give up. I have met people that will turn a heart cold, and experienced things that have eaten away at my love for humanity, but there is a reward to living this life; meeting those people who will save it, if only in their small corner of the world.