Good Grief

The idiom “good grief” has always seemed a bit oxymoronic to me. How can it be that grief is good in anyways? Perhaps this is why “good grief” is often used as an exclamation expressing something bad that has come along- like rain on a birthday cake outside with candles lit. Good grief, it’s raining! Mon Dieu! A, la vache! There were many points throughout this past year when those phrases passed through my head or out of my mouth. I lost a loved one back home, ran out of water for days, waited hours for things ranging from prayers to cattle crossings, had skin mysteriously melt leaving scars as the only reminder, wilted in humidity and heat that one could seemingly swim through, was propositioned just the same by boys at knee height and those old enough to have shrunk back down, had my brain packed with information and thoughts till it was obvious words and letters would start pouring out of my ears, and so many more things. But pardon me! It seems that I never really got the point through. I, in fact, am a fan of rain, birthday cakes, candles, and good grief. While every moment I went through was not a moment of good grief, many of those that I just listed (and more) can be counted as such.

Good grief to me consists of those experiences which may not be that pleasurable in themselves, but at the end of the day you get to look back and see that something good did come out of them.

Today I have been back in America for exactly 101 days. Early in the morning on April 30th I set foot on US concrete at JFK International, but I feel like I never actually hit the ground. The past three months have been blissfully happy as I worked on my capstone, reintegrated into my home culture, and enjoyed the company of people that I had missed dearly. All the while I have been working out how I merge my experiences from this past year with those of the rest of my life. I escaped a bit from myself though- not really responding to e-mails, forgetting blogs, delaying personal reflection in my diary, and not even talking to the people I had grown so close to. When I was lying in my bed last night chasing the ever evasive dreams, I woke up from one I have been living-grief. I cut myself off from Senegal unconsciously so that leaving and moving on wouldn’t be so horrible. This was never a bad grief. If anything it was a peaceful ignorance of how deeply I cared for every single moment of this past year. Feeling my sorrow hurts a bit more, but in the good way. By simply existing it means that I had the chance to go through everything I did. Now that, my friends, is good grief.

Tags: takeaways

A call from Sebi

Its 3 pm on Sunday and I’m in my usual spot behind the terracotta table in my mom’s gallery/showroom in the South End of Boston, dabbing at little tufts of oil paint on paper plates, breathing in those thick fumes of turpentine and liquin and humming along to the fast tune Nitti Nit by Yoro Ndiaye. Keeping one eye on the occasional customer browsing amongst the Italian ceramics, another on my canvas, and my third eye on the photo of Ami Diop displayed my computer screen, its a new kind of multi-tasking.

That photo is one of my favorites. Her expression, so calm and confident with a touch of mirthful understanding at the corners of her eyes and lips as she stands in the “perombre” entrance way to her house, wearing a sky blue tshirt and a colorful headscarf knotted loosely to one side, is beautiful. It captures Ami Diop, my Senegalese best friend, at her simple fullest. I was kind of worried that working on this portrait series every day would be a little emotionally intense, like staring into the eyes of my past for five hours, but the truth is that 95 percent of the time my eyes blur the images into a maps of shapes and forms, patches of light and dark and layers of color, which I must translate onto my canvas.

“Hello, how are you,” I say, all in one sentence, as another group of Sunday shoppers wanders in from the outdoor vintage market in the parking lot. Fine, thankyou, how are you? They usually answer. Pause. Is this your work? — Honey, don’t touch that, it’s fragile!

No, actually, the ceramics are all done by professional artisans in Italy, it’s all imported from Tuscany. I’m just working on some of my own stuff here in the back.

Oh, well it’s all beautiful!

Hmm isn’t it? Smile. Read more…

My Year not in College

September 2009, 32,000 ft in the air I was 6,137 miles from home headed for the western tip of Africa. I could have stuck with my peers, as many advised sitting in a college classroom on U.S. soil. But now, eight months later, no one questions what they then might have thought of as my crazy decision at the time. While I never listened to a lecture, let alone sat at a desk, during what was supposed to be my freshman year of college with the country of Senegal as my class room and its inhabitants for my teachers, I learned more than I ever imagined.

I decided to participate in a new “bridge year” program. This meant traveling to Senegal with five other students like me and a “program manager” who acted as, coordinator, professor, mentor and more. The first month we took French and Wolof language lessons in the capital of Dakar. We then moved to more rural locations to live with host families and work in near by apprenticeships. The basic goal was to learn about and adapt to the country and its culture. Read more…

Tags: bridge year, relationships, takeaways

My post for the ONE Campaign

“Global Citizen Year fellow learns that poor farmers need support” – originally posted on the ONE Campaigns blog here: LINK

Every year, Global Citizen Year chooses a group of young Americans to spend nine months working as apprentices in rural communities all over the world. Mat Davis, a 2009-2010 fellow, talks about his experience working on a farm in Senegal.

Agriculture is a love of mine. I have been gardening on plots of land in inner city Indianapolis for five years.

It’s this love that led to me become a founding fellow for Global Citizen Year . The program helps young Americans gain a global perspective and develop skills to help address the global issues we’ll face in the future. Each fellow has an apprenticeship. Mine was agriculture.

I worked on a small scale farm for Pate Diop in Gorom, Senegal. I saw just how hard it is to grow enough food for one’s family and for the global market. And I saw just how hard these farmers have to work, overcoming technological disadvantages to do their work.

With Pate and his four sons, I watered 500 tomato plants, 300 pepper plants and whatever other plants he needed to make ends meet. The watering cans we used were made from a plastic gas container that was cut in half. A branch was nailed to either side. They weren’t pretty gardening cans from Sears, but they worked. We worked from 7 AM to 10 AM and then took a donkey-drawn cart back to Pate’s house to escape the hot sun. When we pulled up into the front yard, the women in Pate’s family would be waiting to carry the produce off the markets in huge baskets on the top of their heads. One small box would be kept for the family.

But I often felt frustrated at the markets. There were tables lined up and down the street with women selling vegetables and fish, but all the tables and all the food looked exactly the same. Working hard every day to see the people in my community left with only a small box of food and a market where they couldn’t compete was difficult for me. These were things I had heard and read about, but to gain the different perspectives and to actually live the story was powerful.

My experience on Pate’s farm helped me realize that even with a lot of hard work, farmers often fall short—they’re not able to grow enough food or it’s not at the right price to compete. So in the end, food security is really about giving farmers like Pate the capacity to cultivate more from his land and more for the community.

- Mat Davis, Global Citizen Year fellow

Full Circle!

The first blog post that I wrote for Global Citizen Year was one that I thought about for a long time  before writing. It was maybe the hardest post that I ever had to write because I wasn’t yet even out of the gate, and it was difficult for me to figure out how to relate Global Citizen Year to my life when I was still waiting on it to overtake and transform me.

Then it did.

And now here I am, back at my grandmother’s house in the Poconos, back where the tangible counterpart of the metaphorical basis for that first blog post actually stands: a stacked stone wall situated in front of her geraniums and hibiscuses.

Today, instead of trying to imagine what my home in Guatemala will look like, I am trying to adjust to the idea of a newly heightened presence of the color teal in my wardrobe, and how it will be to live in a world of thousands of other people my own age who are all doing the same thing that I’m doing (such as wearing teal on tuesdays, go Seahawks.)

The approach of my immediate future today versus  the approach of my immediate future last July feels like the difference between floating in a lazy river versus barreling down Niagara Falls. (But please note  that I’m not feeling lazy, just serene, and I wasn’t feeling terrified but something more akin to  moving briskly towards the precipice of the unknown.) (Alright… I was a little terrified too.)

But in terms of further comparison: 

Today: About to change my preferred mascot from the Phoenix to the Seahawk.

Last July: About to change the language of my everyday communication from English to Spanish. 

…

Today: About to move 100 miles away from home.

Last July: About to move roughly 1,600 miles as the crow flies (which I do not).  

…

Today: The prospect of my birthday+ Thanksgiving+Christmas+New Year+Easter (and more) with my family of 18 years.

Last July: The prospect of my birthday+Thanksgiving+Christmas+New Year+Easter (y mas) with my family of  18 weeks.

…

The comparison is pretty extreme. In fact, the idea of college now seems ridiculously simple! I know exactly where I’m going to live, I know my class schedule, I have a campus map, the buses run at scheduled times on scheduled routes (Unbelievable! There are maximum capacity regulations! They are observed!) and what’s more, MILLIONS of other people have done this before me! My parents, my sister, my friends have all been there and gosh, with their advice, support, and general knowledge, this feels like such a breeze.

What’s great is that it could one day be this breezy to take a gap year.

Each year and with every group of fellows it will become a more widely considered and better understood option. I believe my GCY gap year gave me things that 20 years of college couldn’t give me. A Guatemalan family. Full-time volunteer experience. Appreciation and understanding of a foreign culture. (To name a few.)

So even though I cringed at the cheesiness of my first blog post about 2 milliseconds post pressing “submit”– there is truth in it. I feel like I’ve done something to build this movement, and I’ll keep helping because it was everything I needed and more and everything I want the rest of my world to have and experience.

What will you do?

Tags: reflection