Addiction to prescription opiates is almost always a symptom of deeper suffering

Biruk, Sofia, Yenalem, Seble…..

You did it.

I feel like there should be 84 million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and sixty more people in this room.  In fact, I feel like the whole world should be here, not just to celebrate your graduation as an occasion that marks a safer future for the most vulnerable, or that the means by which you were trained is replicable and available, but to see how people from three different countries can come together in a spirit of peace and make something beautiful.

I came to Addis, for my first time, not from a place of peace, but from one at war. Sudan.  It suffers still. I was working for MSF in a small hospital, overwhelmed by the sick and dying and fighting, the heat and the sand, and when a chance came for me to leave that place, to come to Ethiopia and learn how to care for patients with Tuberculosis, I took it, not just to help them get their breath back, but to find mine again, even if just for a week.

The air that I stepped into, at Bole’s international airport, smelled so sweet.  It still does.

A professor from Addis Ababa University taught me everything I know about TB, with his x-rays and experience, saved dozens of peoples lives, through me.  Because of him, because of Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa in 2007, I touched hope when it seemed far away, and it carried me through my mission, and it has carried me back here, to stand in front of you, the country’s first emergency doctors, and it stretches from this room towards forever. I’m fond of repeating a quote of Vaclav Havel, told to me by my friend James, that hope is not a belief that things will work out regardless of circumstance, but the belief that regardless of circumstance, something makes sense.  That you are experts in the type of medicine where minutes matter in a country with such a surplus of emergencies, makes sense.

I wrote a book about my time in Sudan. I’m writing another now.  Some of it is about Ethiopia. You are all in it.  Don’t worry; I’m generous.

I was talking with a friend of mine about how to focus it. I knew it was going to be on emergency medicine, but was deciding on a larger direction. James, he said, remember in your first book, you wrote about that woman who walked for six days with a baby’s arm reaching from her, unable to be born any further? Yes, I said.  It was blue.

Write about what she was walking towards.

She was walking towards you.

I know you think emergency medicine is about what you know, the skills we’ve helped you learn on resuscitation, ultrasound, reading electrocardiograms.  Maybe you think it is about decision making in times of crisis, or how to manage many things at once with grace and compassion.  Or you might even think it is about research that allows you to do better medicine, or advocate for societal change.

It’s not.  It’s about a room that never closes.  It might be the only room in the city that is open twenty four hours per day, seven days per week, Eid, Timket, Easter too, and anyone can enter it, rich or poor,  no one is turned away, and in that room, they will be asked “how can we help you” by someone who means it, with nothing to sell, someone with no other interest except listening to the answer and working to satisfy it, no matter the difficulty.

I’m not sure there are any other places like that.  Churches?  Are they open 24 hours per day here?  Some.  Ok.

This is my challenge to you: make your ER a church.  Make it the place where you pray towards something that makes sense.  People misunderstand the word prayer. They think it is a conversation with god where one can ask for things; relief, salvation, even material goods.  That is not prayer.  That is wishing.  Praying is an activity, a movement towards a world you want to see.  Prayers like that get answered, wishes, never.  If you pray towards a world that makes sense, with your gestures, even the small ones, it will move into view.  This is the magic of the world, your true power.

There will be struggles, not just to find the right medicines in time, or dialysis for that little girl before she drowns from her own backed up kidneys, but in your spirit.  You might not be able to transform peoples sickness as often as you would like, but in those instances, you can transform their fear of being unheard.  And if you use those encounters as a way to pray towards an easier day for the people who will follow, by working with your nephrologists to get emergency dialysis even though it seems like it will take years and you want it tomorrow, one day it will come, you’ll see, and that day or the day after, a little girl will walk into that room gasping, and a week later, she’ll leave it skipping, and the relief will be so complete, you can almost feel it from here.  In the meantime, if you suffer a lack of means, until they make themselves available, you are able to offer the most important thing: your presence and compassion.  Let it shine.  Teach the juniors well, because they will own that space with you, and the more of us that do, the stronger it is.

As you make that place for the sick and suffering, keep its lights on and door open, you must keep your heart open with it.  That becomes your daily practice.  Practice makes practice, never perfect, only better, but you’ll see as you try to keep it open, the longer it stays that way, and soon  you’ll see that it will be filled as brimming full as your stretchers.  You will not just have a satisfying career, and  a place in the history of your country, but food on your table, the company of fine people, and dare I say it: the true love that is only possible with knowing our one shared heart.

If a goal of life is to create one of possibility, you’ve done it.  Doctor. Teacher. Researcher.  Leader. What will you do with that rooms sacred space?  That place where you make no distinction between man, woman, tribe, country, but see the sickest first, then everyone else in the order they come.  Take it throughout the country, let it put the young men and women who are knocked down firmly back on their feet so they can help pull your entire nation towards easier days?   Maybe take it to Sudan, Somalia, let the peace it promises do its work, and watch that space grow.

Whatever you want is possible.  Nothing can hold you back. Today, you join the company of thousands of men and women around the world who share your same space, your same struggles, who are as committed as you are to being excellent. Lean on them. You will find solid ground.

And you will find me.  I’ve come to know you well over these past years, and I can sincerely say you are up for the task.  It is my pleasure to retire myself from being your teacher, and instead, offer myself as a colleague, and friend.

May the long road ahead rise to meet your steps.

first class taste, economy budget.

first class taste, economy budget.

on the plane to ethiopia were women wrapped in bright scarves, glass beads glistening.  Africa again.  I’ve made a life for myself here.  during the 17 hours on the plane, before drugging myself into a coma, i transferred my contacts to a new phone.  from ermias: taxi driver, just: “ermias”. my friend.

stepped from the airport into Addis’ high, blue air, and it was like coming home.  on the sloped cement path to my waiting car, a mother and a daughter laughed as their carts wagging wheel lead them astray.  i climbed into a waiting truck with my team of teaching doctors, our eyes heavy with sleep, and we drove down bole road, smooth, full with addis’ blue taxis.

the hospital was a first stop. men and women in white coats circled the sick,  the locus of their murmuration not a shifting delight, but the pain of a person they didn’t know.  we don’t flutter in such numbers around a suffering of the spirit.  I wonder if it’s because we bear it too quietly.  an ankle, though, that is redhot and infected, is plain, and if we fix it, you can hobble on that same trip we’re all making.

between the circles of doctors and nurses, a young man, blood at his mouth and nose, shivering, nails paper-white.  it takes time to learn how to spot the sickest in the crush of so many, but I have a particular eye for them, with it, i saw that man from tigray, blood pouring from his face, stooped slightly forward, trembling, alone, between stretchers of women gesturing to me for help, and knew in a glance that those women had days, maybe even years, but this man, arms drawn in from the sleeves of a blood spattered shirt, holding himself, had only hours.  the tough part is that once you tune into, you see age and suffering everywhere you look, in the faces of your friends, even your own eyes.

i picked that man from the pile, and he  was swept into the eddy of attention that runs behind the emergency department threshold.

it’s been four years since i started coming to Addis Ababa, to make that threshold.  with friends from toronto, doctors, nurses, colleagues, Wisconsin university, and ethiopians who understand that if you don’t make a place like that somewhere, for the poorest people, it doesn’t exist in its true incarnation anywhere.  i’m here to deliver exams for the first class of emergency doctors the country who can make it last.

i remember the minute it all started for me.  i was back from sudan, visions of what i couldn’t do to make that place safe flashing in front of my eyes, peppering my dreams with guns that sit there still. i was on the end of jeff’s dock, my toes just over its rough edge. my phone rang in the pants bunched beside me.  it was toronto’s director for emergency.  he told me that ethiopia wanted emergency medicine.  would i help?

no, my first thought.  nononono.  say no.  say no.  but then:  sudan.  sudansudansudan.

no.

“yes.”

that man who got pulled into the river of attention, who got the platelets that plugged up his hemorrhaging holes, who got back the blood he had lost, gifted from someone else, wasn’t swept into it by me, but from one of the doctors we’ve trained since that phone call on the dock.  i’m here to do give the first four their final exams.  should they pass, we will move with them into a new, safer space where even the sick and poor can continue communion with our same shared heart.

(found this in the notes for my second book, Life on the Ground Floor)

Don’t worry about finding your place in the world.  The world will place you. It will grind you into sand just like the ocean does rocks, back and forth, ever smaller, ever more perfect, until you’re so smooth you disappear, and if that thought makes you look at mountains and think “ill never outlast them”, you’re wrong, you’re fucking MADE of mountains, and together you last towards forever, then rocks, then sand.

the spot warmed by grace has gone cold.

but just for now.

in my piassa apartment.  sun beams warm through a window, then a cloud.  partly cloudy is the best kind of weather because what’s not to like?

tree outside my window bursts from the ground.  if you were a mountain, you would be, like, whoa, so fast?  this place is out of control! the moon, watching the mountains crash like waves, then smooth, then crash again, would say, slow down, let me get my breath.  the sun…well, she would have better things to do than watch us.

busy at the hospital.  busier and busier all the time.  you build it…

a man had his leg taken off.  it was blue to the knee.   i saw him this morning, the day after, wincing in pain.  he looked better, somehow.  more himself.  he has a fever now.  i’m worried.  his remaining foot is not looking so good.  dusky.

today, as every day, on my way to the hospital, i walked past the coffin sellers that line churchill. i try not to take it personally.   beautiful swoops of gold weave on the red felt that covers people’s final box.  outside of one the shops, a father scooped last night’s injera onto his son’s plate.  father to son, cradle to grave, even these people, one day, in their beautiful boxes.

a shroud, my mom said to me, when i asked her how she wanted to be buried before i left, just a shroud. let the worm’s dig into me, straight away.  good idea, i said, changed my will from “a pine box, buried somewhere beautiful” to “shroud”.  she’s still teaching me, after all these years.

when i went away to cambodia for the first time, to do this kind of wore more than a decade ago, i made a CD on which i wrote “play in case of emergency: funeral mix”.    i like plans, what can i say. it’s a youtube playlist now. don’t get sad: the afterparty is more of a dance thing.  maybe you’ll get a chance to hear it if they can’t fill the part of my will that says “if technology allows, transplant my living head and brain, even temporarily, onto a giraffe’s body”.  i just think the galloping would be INSANE.

this afternoon i walked a group of visitors, ferenjis, foreigners through the emergency.  in the background,  a woman screamed, someone pushed a patient by, shroud over his face.

one of the women who was touring paused, turned to me “what is YOUR self-care plan?”.

work with what comes up, i guess.

the world might not be bad or good, but it does ask you certain questions. like: can you see through the lattice of self reflection straight into the outside where bird song takes up empty space in large gulps?  do you get that the only guarantee is that you are born to die, that it’s a matter of time before the other leg starts to look a little purplish too, and the living that happens between then and now, is in your hands, all of it, so how are you going to do it?  in the absence of answers, you can only live questions and the best one i’ve found, the most sincere and direct path towards disappearing completely, is to ask myself if i can give love, and only it, at all times, in every gesture, to myself, to everyone i encounter on this kaleidoscope merrygoround that i get ride for the time being, and perhaps even for a few glorious days galloping clumsily across the savannah, choking down bitter leaves.

i can’t.  i mean, with the love thing,  but i’m getting better, and there’s no perfect anyway, and even if there was, it would last, just change like everything.

at one point, when my practice was stronger than it is now, when i had done a few retreats  months apart, and sat every day for an hour so, first thing in the morning, after i woke, after I stood up from my cushion and winced at the slow electric  feeling in my leg, i would forget who i was.  it was weird.  i would look for glimpses, but there would just be pieces fluttering, disappearing as i tried to to pull them together. i could not even find where to start looking, so i would just hobble down the stairs.  by mid afternoon, the story of myself that i tell myself would form into a sense of “here” and “there”, but until then, there was no difference between the two.  my sense of suffering, during these months, was as close to zero as it had ever been, because there was no one to do it.

there is now.  i’ve a hangover. they have them here too, i was sad to learn.

the smell of a jubilee, once faint, grows stronger.

first here, then here, then here, then, on june29, toronto, here.   you should come.

as i look back on the last months, it’s tough to say i’m proud of anyone, as I have had nothing to do with making them.  still, daily, i feel something akin to that, when i watch the doctors we’ve trained navigate a floor full of sick and worried people with skill and compassion.  maybe it’s awe.  maybe that’s what pride was supposed to be in the first place: an awe one feels to participate in something beautiful.

here is their facebook page.  i like it.  actually, it’s more of a love thing.

one of them, anyway.

i’m finding it difficult to write. service seem to compete.  why would i spend my time talking about doing something, when there is so much doing to be done?

this morning, i walked down churchill road’s steep hill, the fine, metal smell of poorly scrubbed gasoline driving itself deeply into my smallest spaces.  beside me, cars honked, buses chugged, people fitted between and moved across the road.  at the bottom, there is a corner where people gather selling tea or fried bread to long lines of ethiopians queued outside the ministry of immigration.  three women pushed past me, smiling, carafes of tea steaming in their hands, and ran towards a busy bus that had stopped up the road. i promised myself, like I often do, that one day i’ll buy all the tea and all the bread, and they can go home early.

i entered the hospital gate, past teams of students in white coats, walking hand in hand, leaning on each other, laughing.  i waved at the ones that i knew, or stopped to do the shoulder bump that ethiopians have been doing since forever.  i drew close to the emergency, and heard the high wail of a woman.  i turned the corner, saw her facedown, in the gravel outside our one window.  she rose to her knees, then threw herself to the ground.  again.  her mother.  her father.  her sister.  her daughter.  who knows.  i was five minutes early, five minutes late.  abat, i said, and tapped the blue jacketed security guard on the shoulder.  he kept his eyes on the woman, and unlatched the emergency’s half door to let me pass. inside, the thick smell of sickness in still air.

we put an ultrasound on a young woman’s chest, and saw her heart swinging wildly in a bag of water. with great care, we guided a needle into it, through her diaphragm.  its metal glinted white on the screen.  when it was next to the collapsing muscle, the one through which all the love passes, we pulled bloody fluid into a syringe. her breathing eased. ours too.

a man died breathless.  his pupils widened into a final, unflinching stare, because there was no more use for the light.   there were no wails.  he was alone, found by the side of the road, bruised, maybe beaten, or hit by a car.  we worked on him for long minutes, hoping to get his heart to beat wildly too.  we could not. we didn’t say , after, that if we had better tools, things might be different, because we already know that. we scattered in separate directions, separate thoughts on the same thing.

better people, though, i can’t imagine.  i am humbled by them.  that is why i end up in places like this.   people think it’s because i am generous, but it’s more selfish than that. i come to be, in equal measures, as two sides of the same paper, humbled and inspired, because i would give my life for the idea, that if we make the world easier, even briefly, for someone, the illusion of our separation from them disappears.  i am giving it.  i have no questions.

well, maybe some.  tomorrow i want to ask these young doctors and nurses: how do you deal with all the dying?  there’s a fine line, you see, a balance that can tip.  when you see a lot of it, and then catch yourself in the mirror, your eye to your eye, you can say to yourself, when you’ve seen a lot of it, have just watched a young man’s electricity shake itself free, blink out just like that, you can think that you too are mostly dying, and forget about all the living.

a week ago, I was in the omo valley, running on a straight, rocky path, jumping over small puddles, edging along larger ones, scratched by brambles, my hands bleeding from the thorns.  on hot flat stretches, swatches of brand new butterflies, perched on some treasure in the soil, opened and and closed their new wings.   I ran through them,  and the rose, pattered against me, swirled and trailed in the wind, weightless,  thousands and thousands and thousands blinking points of light.  so much living.

i left the emergency, late for my lunch, ravenous for my lunch, and a young man stepped in front of me and said “my muzzer….my muzzer…”, and pointed at the building i’d stepped out of.  what about her, i said, and his eyes became wet, and the tears started to fall.  he had no more english.  take me to her, i said.

beside her bed, her breathing fast and shallow, i gently welcomed this man to the end of her days, mourned with him and his sister, then left them behind.

how do you deal with it, and still get on with all the living you have yet to do?  i’ll ask them tomorrow morning.

late for lunch l walked down the street.  people smiled, and held hands.  trees stretched an inch closer to the sun, in as many directions as they could.  a bird flew underneath the eaves of a building and was gone.   the world was clear and wide open.   behind me, somewhere in the building i left, on its upper floors, two people came out, wet and new, crying: how cold, how bright.

ajan chah used to hold up a glass and say, “this glass will one day be broken.  for me, though, it already is”.

write hard and clear about what hurts.  that’s what hemingway said, anyway.  i guess in that way, you could write about the whole, wide world.  sunsets, murmurations, those friends walking hand in hand, between these buildings, five floors below.

the other day, i sat to get my shoes shined, gray as they were from bole’s dust.  three young boys jostled to be the first at my feet. i  chose the one who had first raised his hopeful brow, mimed with his brush.  i pointed at one of the other boys and said in amharic “tomorrow”, to the other, “wednesday”.    today grinned, tapped the wooden box with his brush.  i set my foot on it, and watched the world go by.

the boys laughed with each other and tried to speak with me, until we were all  lost in the street scene .  taptap. one shoe done.  zap.  the laces flew out of my other.   a security guard appeared behind me, and tossed a sandal on the ground.  it’s strap was broken.  one of the boys, the one with the tuft of hair at his front (the style in addis, these days, particularly if the tuft is dyed blond), opened his wooden box and took an awl out, and a length of thick black thread.  he punched two holes in the sandals broken sole, pulled a loop of thread through with a small hook, another hole in the broken strap, tied it all together, and handed the shoe back.  the woman dropped a single birr on the ground, 6 cents, then turned.  the boy with the tuft of hair turned it over with the awl, disappointed, then put it in his pocket.

where i was from, i would have explained if I had the words, my friends would have, i mean, i would have, just thrown both shoes in the trash, and bought another pair.  the old ones would have been carried to the curb, then lifted into a large truck whose engine ran all the time, that drove to another, bigger truck, then from there to a place where even more powerful engines pushed mountains of broken shoes over each other, because noone knows how to fix them anymore or anyone who does, and for a rare blink of time, we can pretend that this doesn’t matter, we can as be ignorant of value as we are blind to the chugging boats carrying containers of plastic shoes from chugging factories to chugging trains are, like we are the growing piles of plastic shoes waiting their thousand year turn to dissolve into parts ready for another turn.

taptap on the wooden box.  two shoes done.  i paid twice the price.  as I walked down the long hill towards churchill road, blue mini-buses strained in the other direction, packed full.

i sat with the doctors and nurses who had helped during the difficult death of the young boy i spoke of last time. i tried to gather them just after, but the day was too full, too many patients on the ground or leaning on the backs of chairs, huffing.  tomorrow, then.  we need to talk about it.   not because anyone did anything wrong; the opposite.  we did the best we could, but we are pushed by that bright impulse to do it better, only ever better, never perfect, only practiced.  as importanlty, we need to be clear about what hurts, lest it turn into something else.    it’s ok to feel sadness when a young mother weeps over her son’s still frame.  it’s what we’re supposed to feel, and if we don’t, it’s because we’ve hidden it from ourselves.  but we’re in it together, with each other, with him, with her. it’s ok to mourn. let it come up, and through, bear it, let it do its work, and it goes.  ignore it, and fixes in your heart like gum, then hardens into anger, or unease, and fingers swing wildly at at each other, from the fulcrum of our own heavy heart.

in that small room, six of us mourned quietly for that young man, and his family, said some silent prayers, voiced some new ideas, and left it renewed.that you can transform suffering into compassion by being clear about it is one of the most wonderful gifts love has given us.

today is the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.  a year ago, i stood in front of a group of friends and family in lac la biche, alberta, snow piled high in the parking lot of the small church, the nearby lake, frozen hard, and talked hard and clear about what hurt.  i’ve been back there since to see my grandfather, and as i slowed to a stop in front of the kitchen window where she invariably stood, washing dishes, or cleaning carrots, an excuse to peer into the dark, watching for the jitter of my headlights on the gravel, it was empty, full only with the bare wall behind it.  like me, like you, like that boy, she was already broken. i walked in, and my grandfather was sitting quietly at the table.

“she always gave more away than she kept for herself.  not just her garden, but her love,” i  a said to my dad today, her son, as he stood framed by that same kitchen window,  talking in turns,  the millisecond delay familiar from all my times away.

“yeah…that’s it……”  he said, then paused into a long, thoughtful silence.  finally, wish you could be here.  me too, i said.  love you.  love you.  bye.  bye.

last week, thursday, lunch with someone from the ministry of health.   “we are ‘visioning”, he said, “for the next five years for the health system of Ethiopia.”  while I’m sure you have your own, given your deep knowledge of history and place, the context and resources, i’ll share mine, i said.  it’s this.  a young boy, from a wealthy family, is walking late at night home from a football match. he has no money in his pocket, no phone.  he left both on the kitchen table before he went out to play.  a car careens around the corner, and he moves to leap out of the way, but twists his leg on a stone, falls, and is hit.  the driver stops, horrified.  a crowd gathers.  “don’t move him!”, someone shouts, as the driver bends over to lift his crumpled frame.  an ambulance is called, and medics tape his broken neck to a spinal board, and take him to black lion emergency department, because it’s where people go when they are suddenly sick and don’t have any money, and at the door, they are met by doctors and nurses, who from the first minute  know exactly what to do.

we might be broken from the beginning, our hearts, perhaps even our bodies, but life has seen fit to create a system where it puts itself back together, at least temporarily, because it knows there is great work to be done by every single soul as it looks for the sweet release from what holds it back from connecting fully with what moves it.

speaking of sharing. i’ve finally found a connection that allowed me to get some new music.  like water, to a thirsty man.  got this record.  recommended. love.

Pulled the muslin gauze over the face of a fifteen year old boy, and walked away from the wails,  down the hospital’s dark halls to find some air.  In a doorway a woman with bright sequins on her hijab smiled at me, a beautiful baby on her hip.  Framed by a window, two lovers held hands, looking at the city that stretched below.   I put my hands on the sill beside them, and leaned out.  The air was sweet.

Welcome to the broken, beating heart of the world. Not Ethiopia, I mean, but the one inside this present moment.  Thing is, you can’t hold it back even if you try, so you let it in and it does its thing, breaks you down, brick by brick, until there is nothing left between you and it, and just then, at your most vulnerable, it surrenders itself to you in a sweet embrace, holds you in the perpetual centre, moves you, whispers “it will be ok, even death, even that. ” Maybe, if you’re lucky, even that whisper fades.  On that day: freedom.

I almost drowned once, or so I tell myself. Everyone has a story like this.   A current had given me access to part of the ocean I didn’t deserve, carried me out past the break into huge, rolling swells. I sat there on my board, watching them crash, rocked up and down like on an elevator.  I decided that they were too big, that I would wait for a reprieve, and paddle in on their wash. I turned around to watch the thin line of the horizon, and saw the crumble of a wave breaking behind me. In that white foam, doom. I turned my board broadside, the worst move, and was caught and dashed straight down. Every time I started to see brightness, my leash would rip me blacker. I couldn’t reach it to set my leg free. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Like that. For long seconds, I didn’t know up. Finally, tumbling, I let myself go loose, and waited. Brightness. Gasping. Like everything, in that, a lesson. You can’t fight the ocean because as soon as you’re in it, you’re part of it, so roll.

That same ocean hammers on the tin above me. Between its thunder, I can hear faint music. Strings, a woman’s, then taptaptaptap.  A lull, and the song floats in, mixing perfectly with the weather until it picks up. Harmony.

I’ve arrived to Addis a day or two ago. On my first morning, I woke myself from a deep, dreamless sleep, blinking the heavy lids of jetlag. My body, familiar with the feeling from all the shifts and travel, made no complaint, and pushed itself up, and out the door.

I am staying on Addis’ most famous street, Bole road. It runs from the airport, to Meskel Square, a broad plaza where the best runners in the world start their mornings, zagging over the rows of bleachers that if run from end to end are exactly ten kilometres. I’ve passed them at the 5 in the morning (in a car), and they are not jogging, but running towards it at top speed, some barefoot, on black asphalt.

Not on Bole, though. It is torn to pieces. It is being rebuilt in preparation for the African Union’s 50^th anniversary in May. Like so much of this city, it is in construction. Cranes dangle on the city skyline. Train stations are being pushed together, rows of old houses pushed apart, replaced with ones with plumbing, electricity. This century is going to be Africa’s, and in no small part, Ethiopia’s. The anniversary is a nod to the past, but in this place, in this country, all eyes are on the future.

Mine too. It’s why I came. I’m here to work myself out of a job. Teach medicine well enough so it can be taught, then I just come home and relaaax.  Whatever that is.

I walked out into the morning sun and picked my way along the busted rock.  Ahead of me, a woman stepped deftly, wearing heels, boulder by boulder, bag balanced on her shoulder.   Her eyes stayed forward.  She didn’t teeter, not once.

That’s the city.  Not really my thing, or so i tell myself, but it’s where I often am.  I would rather be in the bush, i say. In Sudan, or the papaya orchard I called home in Cambodia. This is where the people are, though, and they are streaming here, fast, running towards the future.  With them, the young doctors who will pick them up when they fall and put them back together, the ones who will greet the centennial with grins, shakes of their gray head, “remember when…”.

Though some battles are being fought in the bush, I think it’s here where it will be won.

 

I’ll see the young doctors who will do it tomorrow at morning report. It gives them hope that I keep coming back, that I’m true to my word.  Of course, it’s them who inspire me. Though I don’t know if the future will grace them with the cover of Time magazine, to me, they are the most famous people in the world. Who else? Really? That guy? Riight.

Don’t think I’ll be here for centennial. Another 50 years? Maybe just. If I dial down the smoking (note, insurance companies: i have never smoked, and never will smoke…i use the smoking of cigarettes for their literary effect, you know, waving them, their bright light as an incandescent punctuation mark, like that). I’ll try.

The rain has slowed. It’s dusk. The mountains that ring Addis are black silhouettes against a purple sky. I can see Bole from my window. The part that has been tarred glistens, mirrors a man walking by with a newspaper over his head.

This song has come on. Thao. Girl be playing Toronto this month.  If you can, see that show for me. Cities are good like that.

I’ll do my best to blog. It’s not as easy as the bush, distracted as one can be from the broken, beating heart of the world by all of the flashing lights and moving pictures of the past. It’s here, though, same as there. Has to be. No other way. It’s the just the one ocean and all, same one that moves through the rivers and the clouds, you and me, back again, like love, and you’re just part of it until its done with you.

 

 

we throw these beautiful parties in toronto (and you should come), but because of my addis travels, i am away until the summer. in lieu of rocking the party with my soul brothers, i send this prayer to the celebration deities.  love.

I shot my brother in the eye with a gun.

He was seven, I was ten. I told the story to a psychiatrist I worked with, professionally, one busy day in our inner-city emergency department, the caterwaul of a confused, psychotic person behind us.

“I’m going to be nauseous for the rest of the day”, she said, and stood up.

I lived in the country, and had a little gun. An air rifle. With it, I was allowed to shoot only two things: targets and varmints. There were three forms of varmints in the fields where I lived: gophers, whose holes could break a horse’s leg, magpies who strewed garbage from our burning barrels all across the lawn, and moles, who blindly ate the roots in my mother’s garden. The latter, I didn’t shoot, but trapped in their dirt tunnels. They were the only ones I got paid for: a dollar each. It’s possible I never got permission to shoot the magpies, but I lumped them into the varmint category on my own after listening to their laughter, high in the trees, as I scooped up their slimy trash.

It didn’t take long for me to discover that what allowed me to discharge my responsibility as varmint sheriff was a puff of compressed air that pushed a lead pellet down the barrel. I emptied the gun, and saw the ripples it made in a puddle, then worked up the courage to hold my hand over it, wincing as I pulled the trigger. A discovery is best shared. A little brother, best experimented on.

I spent an hour convincing him to look down the barrel of the gun. I can’t recall my young logic. A test of trust. Bravery? Perhaps I even did it first. I don’t remember.

He bent over the rifle whose stock I had pumped three or four times, and put his face over the barrel.

I shot mostly soft, lead pellets. They were the most deadly, because on impact they spread so the hole they made was bigger. They had to be loaded one at a time though, so for targets I poured hard BB’s through a hole in the action.

I was sure the gun was empty. I’d tested it. I didn’t want to shoot my brother in the eye. Mom would take the gun away.

A bright, copper BB was stuck in the magnetic chamber, and when I set the gun on the ground, stock down, it clattered into the chamber. I didn’t hear it.

Sang Seuhn, a Korean zen master, says that the problem with the world is that there are too many people, and that we eat too much meat. The problem isn’t the diet, it’s the killing of so many animals without looking into their eyes. How can you know what you do, when you sit so far away from the weight of your actions? There is no exchange between the hunter and the hunted, where each recognizes that one day they will be on the other side of the equation.

I was having lunch in a small town in Cambodia, near where I worked with a starving group of Khmer Rouge. Next to me, a man sat with an AK-47 leaning against his table. A friend bumped his table, and the gun slid, clattered to the ground, the barrel facing me. Its owner smiled sheepishly and picked it back up. A week later, someone threw a grenade into that place. I went to the nearby hospital to help, and bodies were lined up, stiff, out the door.

“Penance,” a medical student said, when I told him the story about my brother, knowing where I worked. Yes, I answered. The other side of the equation.

Sudan bristled with guns when I was there. More are on the way. Libya had one of the largest stocks of light arms in the world, and after its recent civil war those weapons are now moving across its long borders into the hands of its neighbours.

One afternoon on an airstrip, I watched two young boys get beaten with a stick as they crawled on the hot ground using their elbows, dragging gun sized pieces of wood.

In Cambodia, a friend asked a Khmer Rouge commander how many men, women, and children lived in his valley. Ten thousand, he answered. And how many soldiers? Ten thousand.

America has created a viscous army for itself. Convince your people that it is not only their right to bear arms, but a duty, and then convince them there is something to fear. How many soldiers? One-hundred-and-fifty million. In Connecticut, people are counting their tiny graves.

A colleague of mine was once held hostage in our emergency department. A sniper’s rifle killed his captor. We rushed the hostage-taker to the trauma room and tried to save him, but failed. Snipers make few mistakes.

My grandfather makes bullets. He loads the powder in, grain by grain. He says they are more reliable than the ones from the store.

I nestled my rifle onto a coat that lay on the hood of my grandfather’s truck, and angled it towards a target in the woods. The crosshairs danced. Bang. The gun recoiled and the scope hit me in the forehead. I wiped away the trickle of blood before my grandfather could see. Bullseye. Later that day, I shot a deer through the eye. It fell like a stone. It’s blood steamed in the snow.

Guns. Since I was a young boy, they’ve occupied my daily thoughts. They are my default dream. The finality of their bang and a world transformed. The power. The powder. Each grain a plus sign in a deadly equation, giving us a velocity we don’t have the wisdom for, letting us live on the same borrowed time as the carbon we pull from the ground and use to light on fire. The power of gods, in the hands of children.

I pulled the trigger. Brother’s head bounced back and he fell. His hands flew to his face. My heart. My god.

Letmeseeletmesee. A pearl of blood on his lower lid. Danny? I’m dizzy. My heart’s in my ears. Open your eye. Open it.

A red dot on his white sclera. He blinked. He must have blinked at the exact right time, and the pellet bounced off his lid. Can you believe it?

He never told. He wanted to keep the gun too.

These days, we don’t need guns to feed our family, only to kill people from far away. As such, between humans, they bring only misery, never salvation. Not in my dreams, not in the world. Until then, we live diminished by the distance they afford.