The big home-coming is in a couple weeks - I am really looking forward to it. But am also dreading the inevitable 'uncomfortableness' that will rear its ugly head at some point during the home visit. It can't be seamless to travel from the slums of inner city Kampala to the wide and open high street of Brentwood. Maybe it will be the shock of being surrounded by white faces again. Or the enthronement of technology which can steal life and purpose and potential.
I wonder when the shock of 2 different realities will occur. It's not as if every memory of life in the UK has left. Nope, I can remember everything, for it has been my life for 28 years. BUT another experience has also been gained with consequences so obvious and embracing that it will make the 'home' reality feel ... odd.
Scenario 1: Imagine staring into faces of skinny and smiling children as they yell 'sallo'. Imagine challenging yourself to look them fully in the face with all their beauty and potential and slowly shaking your head to indicate you have nothing to give them. Which is a big fat lie, but it is inconvenient for now, and it is easier to carry on and over the next 2 minutes forget all about them.
Imagine then returning to the UK where children are honoured, cared for, encouraged to experience 'childhood' and looked after with varying degrees of love.
Granted, there are some REAL downsides to life in Kampala... BUT I would hate for you to think that there are only down sides. Oh no, there are tremendous benefits. There is faith in God, a deep heart-felt delight at waking each morning unscathed by sickness or bereavement, a contented 'norm' that dictates lifestyle, neighbourly and community responsibility for looking after one another. We miss all this in the UK. I agree with Mother Teresa that poverty is rife in the West, only it is a different kind of poverty. We do not see street children so much, but we see addiction, depression, loneliness, desperation and suicide daily.
And so I fear that my poor old mind and heart will struggle to grasp this new poverty, and may even desire the relative simplicity of financial poverty which requires good brains and breakable hearts to pour intelligence into politics and multi-level transformation. Perhaps that is also what we need in the UK?
Almost home.
Am lost in the process.
