Shock

"To grow may require that we are shaken right to our core." -Radhanath Swami

Eighteen years old, riding for hours in the back of a jeep, with a damp paper towel covering my nose and mouth to block out the dust.  Surrounded by swirls of dust, dirt, and insects no one could see that I was steadily crying.  I felt so completely disoriented, dislocated.

I was in Zambia with my parents, visiting my sister who was then a Fulbright scholar in Mongu.  I can't remember exactly what set me off, but I'm pretty sure it was an incident when we stopped for gas.  We'd been driving for hours.  There's no infrastructure in Zambia to speak of.  In parts of the country, at least at this time-- 13 years ago-- corn rotted on the stalks while in other regions people starved.  We saw a barricaded and closed University in Lusaka.  Former students milled around the gates.  There were no hospitals.  If something drastic happened we would have had to have been medevaced to Johannesburg-- possible only because my father could thankfully afford that.  While in Zambia I was bitten by a scorpion and came down with a bout of malaria, but both were treated by local doctors.

Given the lack of infrastructure we needed to always travel with supplies.  We had a ton of food and drinks in the jeep.  My sister had been in the country for awhile and knew where we could refuel until we met our destination: a convent where Irish sisters would house us for a night before we traveled onward.

I was tired and overwhelmed.  I'd traveled since I was 6 months old but Zambia was the furthest departure from anything I'd known.  While my sister refueled people began milling around the jeep.  There were no jobs, no food, and the land was not arable but dusty and dry.  One man became aggressive and began shouting at my Mom & I, still seated in the jeep.  He began demanding money, or food.  I'm not proud of myself, but I studiously attempted to ignore him.  He knew how to get my attention.  He called directly to me, "You are drinking a coke and I have not eaten nshima for four days."

Nshima is the staple food in Zambia-- a type of maize meal porridge.  You gather the play-doh like consistency in your hands and form it like a spoon to then gather meat or vegetables, depending on what's available.  I was directly challenged.  Rather than acknowledging our shared humanity, our connection, the fact that I, a foreigner, was in his home and could afford to share with him but wasn't, I became defensive.  I didn't know how to relate to his experience, how to respect him, and also de-escalate the situation.  Instead, I began assembling a rationale to ignore him and neglect his plight.

Even though I tried to intellectually disassociate from reality, on other levels of my being I couldn't be intact given this dislocation.  I cried inconsolably.  When we reached the convent I was shaky.  The nuns understood immediately, having experienced culture shock themselves.  I couldn't process the encounter with that man until years later.  While in college I shared the story with a friend thinking she would echo my indignation at this man's demands.

She questioned me, "He was hungry and you did nothing?"  That's when I started to understand what I had done.  I had completely dehumanized him and the others around him.  If I had related to him as a human, if I had considered being in his circumstances, I could have done nothing else but share with him what I had.  I could have forced my parents and sister to do the same.  I don't remember the details around our safety, but I do remember feeling insecure.  His safety was obviously in peril, which was why he was so desperate and angry.

My month in Zambia left me with a profound sense of the web of interconnectedness.  After our flight had landed in Lusaka we waited in the airport for hours.  My sister's jeep had broken down for the umpteenth time.  This was emblematic of all of our experiences.  Fictions that machines would function, that schedules could be kept, were all exposed.  The myth that the natural world could be dominated quickly evaporated.

That first night my sister took us to the home of her friend, a US diplomat who was elsewhere in the country.  We turned on CNN while she began making home-made hummus.  I saw CNN Africa, & reoriented myself on the map.  It felt so different to belong to a different spot on that picture.  I looked out the window at the pool, surrounded by an 8 foot stucco wall bordered with shattered glass.  I'd never seen a city like Lusaka before.  Everything was low walls, sidewalks, and roads.  The life of the city felt hidden.  Over the pool dragonflies were mating.  These dragonflies seemed to each be a foot long in my memory.  I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but it's true that they were so large.  Everything was bigger.

Early in the trip we drove out to an animal refuge where we would take our first safari.  Driving through the vast savanna the jeep again broke down.  We got out to figure out what was wrong.  My father is a lawyer who has no concept of anything mechanical.  My sister became the mechanic out of necessity.  Neither my Mom nor myself were any more help than my Dad.  My sister realized the battery had become dislodged.  She began gathering empty soda cans and coat hangers.  We crushed coke cans on the desolate road as the sun set, frantically using them and the bent hanger to wedge the battery back into place.  I remember looking wide-eyed at the horizon.  I could hear the sounds of animals who consider me prey.  The idea that I, or any human, controlled the world seemed so laughable.  The idea that I, or anyone, was more important than an ant, or a lion, or anyone else, was so obviously a lie.  I felt so connected, and integrated, into the fabric of the universe.  On one hand I was comforted by a sense of being part of a whole.  On the other hand, this was such a shifting of perception.  Raised as an upper-class white woman in the United States, I'd been taught an inflated sense of self-worth (conversely with little self-esteem).  I was beginning to see that I was indeed as vulnerable to the forces of nature as any other living being.

I read the opening quote, "To grow may require we are shaken right to our core," in Radhanath Swami's memoir, The Journey Home.  I'm still in the process of reading, but had to pause when I came to his characterization of culture shock.  As a young man, he travelled overland to India from western Europe.  While in Herat, Afghanistan, he was overcome by culture shock.  Reading about his profound panic, I immediately remembered that long, bumpy, dusty, tear-filled ride through Zambia.  He wrote, "I felt dizzy and nauseated, deeply disoriented and afraid.  All at once, I found it impossible to identify with anything my five senses perceived... On my knees, sweating with emotion, I struggled to connect something to the world that I knew... I felt totally disconnected."

Most members of my family have experienced culture shock because all of us have lived abroad.  One of my brothers has lived in Italy, Indonesia, China, Brazil, and now Australia while travelling most of the globe in between.  My sister lived in Zambia and Nigeria.  My other brother lived in Germany and Russia.  I felt culture shock most acutely in Zambia, though was revisited with that sense of disorientation a few years later in Cuba.  Travel entices me because of the broad experiences of life on the planet.  Simultaneously, being among a relationship to the earth and people that is so vastly different from the one any one of us have known is exhausting and overwhelming.

I began to understand the experience a little better as Radhanath continued to ask, "Why was I so affected?... The conceptions perceived by my body and mind had become my identity.  Now those familiar conceptions had evaporated, casting me into a void... Who am I?"

While abroad, trying to stay aware both to be respectful of my surroundings and safe, I didn't have the presence of mind to reflect as Radhanath did.  In later years, revisiting these memories, I came to realize that shaking me to my very core, challenging this taught belief that my life was somehow of greater value than other living beings, and that my lifestyle, consumption, and choices existed in a vacuum, profoundly reshaped me.  I'm sure I still have problems in truly recognizing all living beings, but I hope to have come a bit nearer that goal.  I began to realize that there was absolutely no logic to me having all my needs for survival met, while the man challenging me at the gas station in Zambia hadn't been able to have food.  There was no reason I should have food and he shouldn't.  Of course, intellectually I've always thought that all living beings should have food to eat.  But when confronted with the reality of inequality I shirked.

I had thought that I could live my life how I wanted without repercussions elsewhere in the world.  Zambia, at that time, looked looted.  And it has been.  By imperialism, by theft of resources, by environmental degradation and neglect.  The world is interconnected.  My actions in the United States have a real impact in Zambia and everywhere in the world.  This sense of responsibility isn't meant to be a stagnating guilt trip.  I try to stay cognizant of this tantric web of interconnectedness to guide my decisions towards what is healthiest for me, and the wider world.

I'm so sorry that I didn't share food with that man.  I'm sorry that I still don't always act generously.  I try to maintain perspective of myself as a small, but vital piece of this larger web.  I try to remember that everyone I encounter is just as vital.