A Loss of Innocence

 I'm back in Nyala now and back to work. There is always lots to do and to keep me busy these days. We are very shot staffed in Nyala for various reasons which seems to add a lot more pressure to the job. But after work when I find some down time I like to do some light reading. Right now I'm reading a book called 'A Bed for the Night-Humanitaianism in Crisis' by David Rieff. Ok maybe it's not light readin but it's on the recommended reading list for a course that I am taking in June. There are a lot of really good thoughts in this book and none of them yet have been encouraging but they have been eye opening.

I have really struggled with having compassion for the general population here in Sudan. It really hasn't made sense to me why I feel this way. People are suffering so much here and it seems like for such a futile cause. In Ethiopia I saw poverty like I never thought was possible. I saw people at the mercy of the weather and the elements that surround them. If one thing in this careful balance they called survival was thrown off their world collapsed and they fell into a crisis. In Mozambique I saw people suffer from HIV/AIDS. It seems to infect every community. Everyone's survival was comprimised by one preventable disease that infected 30% of the population. Seeing this suffering brought me to my knees and filled me with a compassion beyond my own and made me really want to see change and to help how I could. Here in Darfur I see village after village abandoned and burned and people forced into dire circumstances because they seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hear of women being raped and children being killed and yes it does effect me but I am having a hard time seeing that same compassion in me. I have hear that relief workers have a tendancy to be the most cynical hardened people around. Yet that doesn't make sense. It takes a soft heart and some hope to do this kind of work - why do we end up cynical and hardened?

I think I am understanding a bit more as to why that can happen. Here in Darfur I have realized why I feel less compassion for the innocent victims of this crisis than I did in Ethiopia or Mozambique. It's because it is really hard here to find an innocent victim. Even as families run from their burning village with only their lives they are not necessarily the innocent ones in this crisis. Next week or next month they may be assisting in burning the next village over. They may not be the ones pointing the gun at the moment but they probably were the one holding a gun six months ago. Really the only innocent victims are the children. But only the ones that are not old enough to hold a gun. There is a war within a war within a war happening here and I'm really not too sure who the real enemy is and who the victims are. So realizing this and seeing the self inflicted wounds that come from years of fighting tends to take the compassion out of the situation. Who do you have compassion on? Don't get me wrong, I still want to see the suffering end and I will continue to do what little I can to see this happen or at least relieve it a bit, but I feel the cynicism setting in. So my prayer today is for my heart to stay soft. To continue to see people as people loved by God and that He made bigger sacrifices to see their suffering end than I ever could.