One maxim I try to live by is “Share the wealth.” Sara Rendell wrote this on January 14, 2010, the first week of Social Justice class. Amigas and amigos, may these words set off inspiration, illumination, incantation …
Different from any other week coming back from break. I am not trying to stuff myself within the confines of my search for ultimate perfection. I have felt something more important boiling inside me; something else driving me. I see so much going on around me that I have ignored as a matter of convenience. I am just starting to experience my emotions for life. As I follow the situation in Haiti, I realize that my passion for going there has only intensified.
There is a purpose beyond making a 4.0 and getting into medical school.
I am not a machine that churns academic information into good grades. I am a feeling human being living in a world of human beings. Some of them are cringing with pain, some of them are starving, some of them are shaking cold, some of them are boiling over with rage.
I want to feel for and along with other human beings I share air, water, and land with. It is impossible to say that the suffering of the people in Haiti doesn’t concern me because it does–if only for the reason that I am a human being, gifted with the capacity to feel with their suffering, to use my space and energy to help relieve it.
Closing eyes to reality, to the mosaic that is humanity isolates. Isolation leads to some of the greatest forms of psychological pain.
I think of Joanna and “Screeching into the Silence” and I realize how privileged I am to have the capacity to feel.
“Donkey Boys”; Haiti’ 1992; Mev Puleo
