Remembering Our Roots

I left the U.S. in mid-June to see the world on my own for the first time. When I boarded my plane in New York, national discontent over an uncertain bailout and a too-long-for-Dick, too-short-for-Richard health care plan was only just approaching a boiling point. I came back at the end of July to find our country in the early throes of Communism, according to some, or Fascism, according to others, or even the Apocalypse. Many worried aloud that the beleaguered American experiment might be rocking on its heels.

It might behoove us to keep some perspective as we debate wealth distribution, hierarchies of need, and what it means to be free. I saw some things abroad that helped calibrate my own.

In Ethiopia, locals explained to me that in 2005, their government had held an election. The opposition had won with almost 100% of the vote in every part of the country that had hosted elections monitors. In the remaining, much less populous areas of the country, the government counted the votes and, unsurprisingly, claimed victory. When the opposition protested, the government had them arrested and jailed. All but the state-run newspapers were closed. Ethiopia’s only telecommunications company, also conveniently state-run, blocked text messaging (that insidious tool of the revolutionary) for two solid years. The government remains in power today. Few expect anything but a show in the 2010 election.
In its countryside, I met Ethiopians who walked seventy kilometers once a week for water, grain and firewood. 9 in 10 Ethiopians face a two-day walk just to reach an all-weather road. Still others will die in childbirth because there are only 2,000 doctors in Ethiopia – a country of 85 million people. Not that the imbalance matters much, since there hasn’t been a public hospital built since the 1950s, there’s no public health care system, the average yearly income is about $100 USD, and the doctors almost all live in the inaccessible major cities.

In Egypt, I booked a trip to see Abu Simbel, Pharaoh Rameses III’s 2,000-year-old monument to himself. The hotel awakened me at 2 AM so that I could join the convoy for the 230 kilometer drive to the site. We had to start so early because foreigners are not allowed to travel unescorted in that part of Egypt: the police surrounded all twenty of our buses, keeping us safe from terrorist strikes. For my train trip back to Cairo, I was required to purchase a first-class cabin ticket – the open second-class seats are considered too dangerous for Westerners.

On the streets of Addis Ababa, a man told me that his father had been murdered by Somali insurgents some twenty years before. I gasped and stopped still as he explained that, in order to provide for his mother and two sisters, he had had to abandon college and thereby all hope of joining the middle class. Somehow I choked out that I was “so sorry to hear that”. I was sure that he would cry.
But he kept walking. “Ah,” he said. “It happens.”

I suppose it does.

To be fair, my trip took me through beauty as well. I watched the sun set over the Pyramids, I bargained in Africa’s largest open-air bazaar, I heard prayers sung in the hand-hewn rock churches of Lalibela; I saw HIV-positive mothers giving birth to HIV-negative children under careful medical care, I toured hospitals built on the ruins of prisons, and I was touched time and again by the kindness of strangers. I saw the sights and heard the sounds of civilizations that were old when Christianity first set foot on American shores.

But by far my fondest memory is of the customs station in John F. Kennedy International Airport at the end of my return flight. “Welcome home,” said the agent, and I nearly cried.

It takes a great shock to make clear the incandescent promise of the things, large and small, that we take for granted. Our air conditioners work. Our water runs. Our votes are counted, our trials are open, our supermarkets overflow with food, and our children, who will be taught to read and do arithmetic, will be limited more by their ability than by their grandparents’ birthplaces. What’s more, we are safe from the violent predations of insurgents – so safe, in fact, with such deaths so unprecedented, that when 3,000 Americans were murdered all at once, we invaded two sovereign nations to prevent a recurrence.

Of course we have things to work on, and of course we differ over the best ways to improve. That’s the essence of democracy. But we’ve got an awful lot to be proud of, and a thriving system that, while slow to adapt, is near unshakeable in its strength and possibility. So if you worry that disagreement over the next steps for an already excellent health care system, or the most effective methods for using tax dollars, constitutes the end of a nation, here’s my advice to you:

Go take a trip.