JAN 17, 2009
I have successfully worked myself out of my job. My staff – these 10 people – is the most dedicated and motivated team in Chiradzulu. They have taken over nearly all of my responsibilities and they have an interest and pride in their work that makes me proud. But it has left me with little to do. I have spent the last few weeks typing up my end of mission report and handover notes. The truth is, I have lost my motivation because of the lack of support I have received from management.  I suppose it’s a good thing that my team can carry me through these final weeks. They probably don’t even realize the burden they are bearing. It’s a shame that I’ve lost enthusiasm but I do feel a freedom to speak my mind now. Is freedom really just another word for nothing left to lose?

Road to the hospital in Chiradzulu, photo by Cecile Brucker

If you have robbed someone of everything they care for, doesn’t that free them to respond in any manner they see fit? What is happening in Gaza now is beyond my understanding. I only get snippets of it from BBC radio. Last weekend I was in a pizzeria which had a television and I couldn’t stop staring at it. Though muted, the images of people, children surviving the bombing – surviving but maimed and perhaps mentally scarred for life – and the ticker tape below counting the death and casualties had me mesmerized. What has been the international response to this? Is the US really standing behind the brutality and trying to justify it by saying “but they started it”?
If you lost everything, would you care anymore? A friend showed me a news clip of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at George Bush. My eyes nearly popped out with incredulity, but then I was more surprised that my instant reaction was an eruption of laughter. How does a journalist in a country in which the US has invaded have the audacity to throw his shoes at a sitting president of the only superpower on the planet? Janis Joplin knows.
Why are we continuing to rob people of what they have if it’s just going to make them mad and then liberated to do desperate acts? Wouldn’t the more prudent response be to listen to them, understand them? Einstein said that peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. Why don’t we listen to our great thinkers more? Some people believe we are a doomed planet, a string of failed civilizations, continents of misguided societies. Yet we turn to our artists, musicians and writers as if they have the answers. And when they tell us, we praise them, but then don’t listen.

Martin Luther King said that history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of a period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Are you listening?

Sandy, A - chiradzulu, Malawi