Home

The day I left Gulu the second time, the adorable tiny Italian Comboni sisters were hosting the St. Louis Sisters of St. Joseph, who arrived in Uganda around the same time I did and are planning on staying for some three years in one of the camps not too far away. At lunch - an incredible, delicious Italian spread, a far cry from the rice-beans-cabbage I'd grown somehow fond of and am presently missing - one of the American sisters, upon hearing that I was leaving for the States the following night, commented, "It's incredible how easy it is to adjust back to the American way of life."

I made some ambiguous comment of affirmation, but in my mind, of coursse, my self-righteous little mind, I'm screaming, "Of course it isn't! Things are never the same. We are never the same! We can't be! Home won't feel like home and I'll walk in my front door and look around and feel displaced, and I'll look with scorn and disgust at the silly, stupid, godless, materialistic, sprawling, overdeveloped, overweight, empty, whitewashed American life and react in outrage! And then I'll give away all of my earthly possesions and be the change I wish to see in the world and blah blah blah blah blah...

But here I am. I'm back. And Sister St. Louis was right. It is easy. It's incredible how easy it is. It's disgusting how wasy it is. These two worlds, these two imaginary first and third worlds, the classifications we invent, because if we can classify it, explain it, then it's how it is, and it's okay. I'm here and I borrow the car, or I walk to the store, I shop, I buy things with my debit card, with dollar-off coupons. I eat frozen yogurt and Kashi granola and sea salt and vinegar chips and soy milk and other things that happen to by lying around (for the record, my stomach and digestive system have been making it very cleaar to me throughout thepast week how much they prefer rice and beans and tea and toast). I see clothes I want to buy, and other things I don't need. I watch the Olympics; I cry at every replay of the Opening Ceremonies, and even at the Coca-Cola commercials interspersed(you know the one, with Yao Ming and LeBron James). In short, I have re-taken my place in the circle of American life, without missing a beat. I'm home. Once again, I'm a consumer in a consumer culture. And even as I'm too lazy or dazed or freshly home to fight it, I'm sick of it already. It really is what we do. we consume. Even when we think we're conserving, we consume. Even when we think we're doing something completely unrelated, we still paarticipate, we're constantly buying something or buying into something; we are ever being sold; we are ever selling. I'm tired of buying and selling. I just want to live. It's not the same as working for a living; we're created to love and labor; "ora et labora," after all. It's when our very existence, the very act of living becomes itself a consumer act - when time becomes money and every decision becomes the sum of its economic implications and family becomes the fuel efficiency of the minivan we drive them around in and God is the one we remember to thank for this quarter's higher-than-expected earnings and our four-deb-three-bath beige and tan cookie cutter house and the kids with their bright futures...

If I leave the U.S., I'll always question my movites; if I don't, I'll always question my soul. It's not just the "America!" thing - being in Africa has made me genuinely grateful for a lot of what America is and has. A very damn good constitution, for one. Education, for another. A reasonable expectation of post-graduate employment. Opportunities to see more than the town - or country - in which I was born. Free and fair elections. Relative governmental transparency. Human rights. Women's rights. Children's rights. Health standards. Mint chocolate chip ice cream. But there is a genuine, concrete difference in the way - not just the way - a fundamental difference in what it means to be an individual. like the market, like the everything here, personhood is intimately bound up in capitalism. To be an individial in America is to be a consumer or a potential consumer. To be an individial outside of America, to America, is also to be a present or potential consumer. But the thing is, I don't want to be a consumer. Everyone eats and buys and makes a living. But don't want my very personhood - my very essence - defined by my nature as a consumer. Or maybe I do; maybe this is what it means to conform what I consume to the person I desire to become. But even then, it's all externals - like wearing a "Save the Whales" tshirt so that everyone says, "Look at her - she's an environmentalist for sure." Of all that I consume, I hope the only thing that defines my is the Body and Blood - as if anything else I eat or drink or buy or support or read or study or discuss has any comparable bearing on who I am. So yes. I am tired of being a consumer, simply a consumer. I would rather be any other sort of statistic. Things here are so in order, so methodic, so by-the-book, by-the-rules, by-the-laws, so clean, so black and white, that sometimes I feel like a little plastic number on a pocket calculator. And no wonder.

I have no idea where I'll be on August 11, 2009, one year from today. But I hope to God I'll be some place where living means living.

Also, I'm working on keeping everything I say or write or think from desintegrating into an angry angsty rant... so pray stay tuned.