Notes from Cape Town: First Day Home

I have not been able to stop thinking about the child this past week. When I least expect, her image appears in my head and I am overwhelmed with confusion. There are so many children to fall in love with, and yet this one struck me. I would hate to call her a symbol of suffering because she has a peace of my soul latched onto her fingers. We are forever connected. And yet I think of her as little Gavroche, the child of Paris in Les Miserables, who is alone and symbolic (as all characters are in Hugo's world).

How do we survive in a world so full?

I stopped in the middle of a conversation once in South Africa and declared that I was over-capacity, that my ability to process was overwhelmed, that I knew too much at once - and yet I couldn't stop. I kept taking it all in and letting the pain and confusion settle where it would. When telling Michelle's roommate, Kenneth, a guy from Zimbabwe, about the global sex trade, where young women are sold into sexual slavery in one of the most covered-up black-market industries in the modern world, he said: "But what can we do? How do we stop it?"

I looked at him. "I mean, the answer to that question is that we don't." I saw my friends squirm from the corner of my eyes. I continued on quickly. "I know how you are thinking. I've been there. I've seen people think that way. If you want an answer to that kind of question there isn't one. We have to start talking about it. We have to let it affect our day to day lives. Whatever you do, don't take this information and forget about it. Don't live a normal life."

And in telling him this I realized that was the only answer I could give myself. You can never do enough. I cannot adopt a child and remove her from her community as a Western savior. I cannot give money and expect it goes to her. I can do some things. I can buy her a new set of clothes and give her a toy, but I how do I help from so far away? When there are children in Connecticut who need things too? When it doesn't end?

"Live simply so that others may simply live," suddenly has new meaning for me.

This is a call for myself, and for all of us, to simplify our lives - as the first initiative towards global transformation. I came away from South Africa most appalled by the lack of recycling facilities and the huge amount of trash. "Don't go to India then," a friend said. Everything we do in our day to day lives affects everyone else. We are all interconnected. It is conceivable to begin local, with ourselves. This is the first step.