Challenge: I never wrote all I could and this is my last Challenge-inspired entry. Include five sentences I dreamed up which I had anticipated publishing (because I thought they sounded powerful and exciting) but which I never turned into blog entries.
I can buy a camera lens with as wide an angle as physically possible, but it will still be too narrow to capture reality.
I could argue that a wider camera lens would actually project less information. A mountain framed by a banana tree; a misplaced Habs jersey; a lopsided dala-dala; a motorcycle hanging from a tree: pictures merely project ideas, not reality. More information would obscure the ideas.
Similarly, my blog can only project narrow ideas: it cannot reflect reality. These Challenges I have been using on my blog have been helpful in reminding me of that.
What is reality? I will never know.
What is my reality?
My reality is a veritable rat's nest of hare-brained ideas. I prod at random thoughts until I arrive at conclusions. Then I hack away at my conclusions until I get new, even more random thoughts. It strikes me that if there is such a thing as sanity, I want nothing to do with it.
In Tanzania, my business (publishing magazines about HIV, gender, and sexuality) is everybody else's business. My engineering mind was not trained for this kind of interactions. Can I say I am networking
with interesting people if they will never be able to contact me? Should I call a child with HIV a client
? Everybody is connected more strongly than anybody knows. Maybe we are all part of the same company: I am in the learning department while many other people are in the suffering department. And if the world is the biggest company ever, what does that tell me about upper management?
What is your reality?
Your reality is probably quite similar to mine: you eternally struggle to find your place in a world which seems to be treating you like one six-billionth of itself.
What is their reality?
I wager it is almost the same.
But if you have never left the comfort of the West, you are missing an important mindset. Poverty and disease are rampant in sub-Saharan Africa. Get-rich-quick schemes are often glorified get-other-people-poor schemes. Even the most timid mzungu learns that pushing and shoving is the only way to board a dala-dala here in Dar es Salaam.
Personally, I do not blame Tanzanians for behaviour I can never understand. I see a potential for learning more about myself and my reality.
So far, I have never heard somebody's life story and thought, I would certainly never act that way if I were that person.
Every time I hear somebody claim otherwise because of insignificant misunderstandings, I wince.
What is common to everybody's reality?
Different though different people's realities are, everybody's reality is composed of the same three universal truths: love, fear, and Bob Marley.
I see potential. Let's get together and be all right.