This is very far from being finished

Having a few days in Juba fuels my excitement to soon be back with family and friends. This town is just too much too take���at least now that the mania has worn off and my body and energy seem to be collapsing. I am tired and sometimes irritable like my colleagues just before they head out for R&R. Last night I even felt a little depressed.

After an ironic full circle, I unintentionally had dinner last night at the overpriced and excessive restaurant I visited my first night in Sudan. The prices are offensive, especially after traveling the poverty safari route that gets you there. After eating, I sat and watched an entirely decent five-piece band and let my mind wander rapidly. They played blues covers of crooner classics and Louis Armstrong with their backs to bored drivers that waited patiently for hours in the parking lot while NGO workers and bloated government officials indulged in remarkably overpriced food, drinks, and cigarettes. The contrast of this excess with it���s backdrop of white government and NGO Land Crusers against the aggressive and rancid poverty surrounding us was just depressing.

I think part of the reason why development workers cling so anxiously and incessantly to their laptops, spreadsheets, and the narrow focus of their projects��� mandates is because if you step away from it���if you allow yourself to look critically at what you do and don���t do, if you can quiet your mind enough, if you can open your heart wide enough to take it all in���this is all devastating and paralyzing.

Take Juba for example. This city is only aesthetically cohesive from an airplane although we didn���t see the view during this trip���s landing. We came in on a loud, windowless cargo plane���an outdated 26 passenger MRI machine. On a sunny day though, from the sky, Juba looks like a clean pile of metal slivers left under a workman���s bench. But while traveling through the city, the contrasts and odors and chaos that live under and in between the shiny tin roofs tug at your mind and chest in uncomfortable ways. Traffic collides on brand new roads years before there will be any traffic laws and enforcement. A road only a couple years old isn���t any better than its dirt predecessor. Stacks of trash grow faster than they burn and encroach on neighboring vegetable markets and bicycle repair shops. Impatient and entrepreneurial newcomers seem to be efficiently laying sturdy foundation for slums tucked into spare dirt plots and around dry refuse rivers while local politicians soak in their indecision and incompetence. Large white fortress walls of cement, barbed wire, and flood lights make the difference between government buildings, luxury homes, jails, and NGO compounds indistinguishable. Cholera outbreaks follow rainstorms as unguided downpour runoff soaks up human feces and seeps into food sources.

It occurred to me a couple weeks back when I was talking to another NGO about their work trying to develop an educational system that I am a short-term witness to the birth of a country. But this is not a pure and romantic beginning of a child born into innocence. The Sudanese in the south are scraping through filth and famine to try and create something sustaining.

If you look too broadly with the intention to help, it���s overwhelming. There are very few schools. Buildings or not, very few teachers get paid. Hospitals are clinics run by NGO���s. Tarmac roads in the southern half of the Africa���s largest country can be counted on one hand. Regardless of fertile land and consistent rains, agricultural production is nowhere near subsistence let alone excess or export. Politicians spend for themselves like recently arrived immigrants in the U.S. with little financial planning and relatively hefty wages for the first times in their lives. Electricity is for the lucky few with access to generators and diesel fuels. Progress in sanitation is encouraging people to use a deep hole. Rusted steel vehicles gave up waiting for mechanics. Children with bloated stomachs and infected lesions wait for scientific progress to combat deadly starvation, malaria, diarrhea and other diseases that no longer concern developed nations.

Where do you start? How do you start?

This opportunity to peep into the dirty on-the-ground work of NGO���s has been insightful, fascinating and disillusioning. I had wondered for so long what all of this really looked like. By nature I���m often a bit too much of a black and white thinker. This time here is yet another affirmation that many clear answers don���t exist. I hoped to learn how you can concretely evaluate projects, build upon them, and improve them. I really wanted to know how you can measure the good you do, or even know if it���s good. But a lot of this work is just trying or replicating things. Or worse, it can be contaminated by donor and program manager complacency that follows habits from previous years because it���s easier that way, or it���s all there���s time for. At times, young leadership seems awkward and insensitive. I���m disappointed at how much people focus on reporting and emails and how little they focus on their interactions and relationships with local staff and their neighbors.

But this work is important and wonderful. The commitment of many here is inspirational. Even with all of this disappointment and heartbreak from observing the big picture, this is still the work I want to do. More people are educated, well-fed, healthy, and happy because of this work. There is progress here and there needs to be a lot more. People should not live like this in Sudan, in El Salvador, in Brazil, in New Orleans, in Midwest manufacturing towns, in New York. Those of us with privilege and resources have to try to make something a little bit better.

Just start somewhere.

Lastly, I am the luckiest person alive���possibly only second to my older sister because she has a perfect son, or my younger sister because she is six years younger than me but oftentimes years ahead. If you know my family, you know how blessed I am. If you know my friends your life must be as rich as mine. I was raised with the nourishment of support, hope, love, and commitment. I eat good food everyday. My hands are embarrassingly soft.

My internship experience was more than I hoped for and now I get to return for another year to study in the program I had hoped to attend since I first noticed a nudging interest in graduate school. I get to maintain this exciting momentum of learning. But before that, I will have some time that I can no longer wait for to collapse into the most comfortable place in the world: my mother���s couch.

Thank you for sharing this with me.