MSF Blog: Chiradzulu part 22 (final blog)
February 2009

On the roadside in Chiradzulu... UNICEF sign against child trafficking in Malawi (photo by Pat Carrick)

I’m leaving in a few days, but as someone different than the person who arrived. I never thought I could be sick of papaya. I can cook for a dozen people with minimal planning and no recipes. I have survived for one year with the same 2 skirts, 3 pants, and 5 shirts (all of which I’m ready to burn). I can find humor in the most serious circumstances. I think living in Africa has helped me simplify my life, and that has made all the difference. Henry David Thoreau said that when you simplify your life, the universe makes more sense. Perhaps in our developed, industrialized, first-world we have so many distractions that we have forgotten how to simply be, and we are on this inevitable, insatiable quest to find ourselves.
I’m just a data manager, someone who crunches numbers. I loved mathematics as a kid because I could figure it out. It was like looking for patterns. I didn’t have to memorize grammatical rules or dates or biochemical pathways. But now I find history fascinating. I’m convinced that a good historian can predict the future. If you look back far enough you will find that we continue to repeat the same mistakes we made before. You will find patterns. But then people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Einstein, and now perhaps Barack Obama change the rules and shift the ground beneath us. During his inaugural address President Obama reminded us that a nation cannot prosper along if it favors only the prosperous.
And my next step? I imagine crawling out of the number world and writing something longer than a blog. Sometimes I even fantasize about being a guest on Stephen Colbert’s show as a best-selling author promoting her latest book. I’ve thought about this in practical terms – if I had my own 15 minutes of fame, if I had the attention of millions of people, what would I say? Perhaps just this: Do something, something that will help someone else. And somewhere along the way you will find yourself.