The Point

Saturday, March 01, 2008

100%

Two Acholi children in Gulu, northern Uganda (Samantha Casolari)

We watched a movie about international coffee trade in my human geography class yesterday. It was filmed in about 1989, and besides the distracting continual visual references to stock traders in the World Trade Center, the only thing really notable about the movie was its feeling of gloom. Like so many documentaries of this stripe, I think it left most of us shuffling out of the lecture hall with a sense that humans are a flawed, hopelessly cruel species.

A friend came up to me afterwards as I sat by a windowsill to open up my laptop and said she wanted to talk about what she was going through thinking about her volunteer work in a refugee camp in Ghana last summer and her plans to return to western Africa this summer again. She was having a really difficult time figuring out what to do with a sense of guilt about the potential of her trips to contribute to dependencies in those communities on Westerners coming in (almost on a whim) to volunteer for a while to get funding from the NGOs they arrive with for schools and HIV/Aids clinics.

I think a lot of people in our generation are struggling with this. We receive messages from mostly well-intentioned people fighting for social justice and environmental sustainability that we need to reduce our carbon footprints, feel a sense of shame at the pesticides children are exposed to to get us our beautiful perfect bananas. Which is not to say we shouldn't have these things in mind. But the weight of all this guilt feels counterproductive to me. For myself, I know I often have to fight a feeling of paralysis about things I feel outraged about, ashamed of -- if I go to buy groceries with the mindset that I'm basically choosing between varying degrees of suffering that allowed them to be brought to me cheaply and fresh, how can I act? How can I move?

It's had me thinking a lot about the ceasefire announced last week in Uganda between Museveni's government and the Lord's Resistance Army. After twenty years of war in northern Uganda, the two sides are now through the final stages of negotiating a peace deal! The Monitor reports that the final documents were just signed in Juba on Friday, with a proposed date of March 6th to begin the permanent ceasefire. I think that's pretty incredible. Hearing about what people from Uganda think about the reconciliation process to come after this has turned some of my thinking about healing upside down.

I was walking beside a woman from Kampala during the Guluwalk in Edmonton last year, and we were discussing this idea that although there are still warrants out for Joseph Kony - the LRA leader - and a number of other LRA figures for crimes against humanity, a lot of people in the country seem like they would prefer to see the conflict end than get caught up waiting for the International Criminal Court to drop the warrants, which for a long time looked like the only way the LRA were going to agree to a ceasefire (and might still be the last big sticking point - again, the Monitor article has more).

She said she could see some sense to this. In Rwanda, the UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal's trials after the genocide have been extremely slow - the main way people are trying to achieve justice is through small, community-based courts called gacacas. I used to be very certain that some international body needed to try leaders accused of crimes like these. It humbled me to wonder why I felt I had a say in how people in either of those countries determine what justice means.

But I think about it this week and also wonder why we're always looking for silver bullets, for the one simple solution to a problem that will make everything better.
If everyone just...
All we need to do is...

My friend Hayley posed an interesting question to me the other day - if we recognise that the past isn't just one thing, that history is a contested field, why do so many of us think we are bravely pushing towards just one common future? If there are so many stories behind us, how could there be only one ahead?

I don't know if any of this seems to relate to you. But as a perfectionist myself, I think I can see parallels.

Thanks to Samantha Casolari for the amazing photograph you see above from Gulu. You can read more about the kids in the picture and find her flickr account here.

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posted by Christopher at 12:41 a.m.

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