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| South Sudanese refugee children take in the view |
My goodness, it’s been one heck of a year. Does
anyone else feel like they’re hanging on by a thread waiting for January to
come!? #anyone #anyoneatall? I write to you from a very small plane currently
mid-air on my way home to Kampala. This is my rhythm. I do a trip and then I
write. I find it very cathartic. Helps me get those feelings out.
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| South Sudanese refugees are transported to their plot of land #iphone |
But I will say - this year has taken its toll and I’ve
been feeling it these last few weeks. I want to be real about that because
Instagram doesn’t tell that part of my story very well. In my job I regularly
get to see the aftermath of the very worst humanity has to offer. This year
I’ve interviewed sex slaves from the Congo, former Isis wives in Iraq,
unaccompanied children coming into refugee camps, child labourers and victims of
war to name but a few. Every month there’s been a new story. Their stories, so
precious to me. Each face, each family.
When I get home from a trip like this, the truth
is that I usually can’t physically bring myself to look at these photos for at
least a week. Sometimes more. I can’t even open the Microsoft Word interviews
on my computer. It’s just all a bit too much.
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| South Sudanese refugees are transported to their plot of land #iphone |
I find it so ironic that I do this kind of work. I
was the girl in school who couldn’t bear to listen to stories of the Holocaust or
anything like that. Could.Not.Handle.It. Barely handled the freaking news. Tim
once tried to have me watch a documentary on child soldiers and I flat out said
no. I prefer shopping at the mall and reading Your home and garden magazine.
And then one day I found myself sitting at a bus stop in downtown Kampala and I
met a former child soldier. He was a mass murderer and here we were sharing an
apple together. We became fast friends and one day when he was at our house for
dinner he told me how he was abducted as a child and forced to become a child
soldier. All of a sudden this ‘issue’ came to life before my eyes. I remember literally shifting my physical
position on the couch and leaning in to every word that softly came out of his
mouth. I remember hearing how he would purposely shoot in the air and close his
eyes as they ambushed a village just so that he would miss shooting people. History
had all of a sudden become personal. And history now had a name and flesh and
was eating my spaghetti Bolognese!
That was the catalyst point for me. I then started
reading books on child soldiers and learning all I could. Today, it feels like
I cover a new humanitarian issue every single month and each issue then becomes
personal.
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| A sweet South Sudanese baby whose spent his life living in a refugee camp #iphone6 |
But for the first time this year I went on a trip
and I didn’t ‘feel’ it. Usually I have a moment each trip where the emotion
bubbles over and I cry. Sounds silly, but for me, that’s a good thing.
Sometimes it’s during a three hour interview where the excruciating details are
all just too much, and sometimes it’s in the privacy of my room later that
night. But for whatever reason this one particular trip I wasn’t feeling it. It
was a hard hitting subject matter I was dealing with but ‘I’d seen worse’. And
I lamented this to Tim. I never want that to happen again. I want to feel it deep. Every. Single. Time.
I want to feel it like Jesus feels it. I want to see these people the way he
does. Photograph them the way he would. I want to listen to them, ask the right
questions and stand in awe at the organisations pushing back the darkness.
So this week with World Vision I was praying
specifically that God would ‘break’ me again. And he did. #typical. I was
taking some photos when out of the corner of my eye, my colleague, Laura,
alerted me to an elderly woman creating quite the scene. Apparently she’d be in
the Reception Centre in the Refugee Camp for four weeks and was supposed to
have been resettled to her plot of land after a couple of days. Instead she
watched as day after day, truck after truck took more and more people away
leaving her behind. She had fled to the refuge camp with no family and she had
no idea where they were. She’d come to Uganda carrying her handbag and that was
it. Her worldly possessions were piled up beside her in a neatly tied heap. All
of them were things that had been given to her in the past few weeks. And here
she was saying that she was going to board this truck by force. She wanted to
be resettled. Hated staying in those long tents where over 200 people sleep
each night. Sadly, her plot and shelter were not ready yet and so in absolute
defeat she struggled to lift her items onto her head and make the embarrassing
walk back to her tent.
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| *Not the woman I'm referring to* iPhone photo from earlier this year |
My camera now slung behind my back I took one look at her and my eyes welled up with tears. She looked just like my Grandmother. But she was a single woman, all alone in a massive refugee camp with no-one that knew her or could help her. So I made my way over to her and, with the help of two grown adults, lifted her bundle onto my head. Tears streaming, and I mean, streaming, down my face at the injustice and the lack of dignity for her and thinking with every step how I’d hope someone would do this for my grandmother. About halfway along, Laura could see I was struggling and so took the bundle onto her head and walked her 'home'. Even now, tears well in my eyes as I think of the beauty of that moment. She then sat down next to her and just rubbed her back. There was nothing to say, no translator around. Just a deep sense of our shared humanity.
Reflecting later I was reminded that “because
Jesus loves us, he allows us to feel
pain that draws us to him. And in the
midst of pain He weeps with us for a world that is not as he intended, for
sorrow that he did not design.” Katie Davis.
So with that beautifully tender moment to end the
year on, I’m off to take a break for a few weeks. A good, proper break with my
family that are flying in for Christmas. I hear self-care is all the rage these
days. After all, I’ve got some Your Home and Garden magazines to catch up on.
Love,
Helen
Helen
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