Life in Akany is an endless barrage of contradictions in my
brain. I have been here a week and it is an experience I am finding very
difficult to put into words. Akany is at once so familiar to me and yet so
alien, so comforting and yet so disconcerting, so inspiring and yet so
intimidating, so full of life and yet so lonely.
I know this place, in my mind and in my heart the routine of
orphanage life is something which will always take me back to a place of
contentment and peace, and the familiar trill of the English language passing
back an forth among my fellow volunteers is something I cling to in the most
foreign of situations. And yet still this expanse of land, this ease of
establishment and the relaxed engagement of the staff and volunteers is so far
from the situation I find myself in that I feel my strangeness seeping from my
pores to become a visible cloud which I fear people can see.
I am constantly grateful for the presence of the other
volunteers with whom I live, those who share their daily routines with me and
add a degree of normalcy to the challenges I face. I find the facility itself
rises up in my mind as a protective mother who opens her arms at the front gate
as I enter from the mayhem of the outside world, swallowing me up into a bubble
that seems like home. So why then do I simultaneously feel as though the
presence of my colleagues and the security of my surroundings, at once so
comforting and burden-lifting, also provoke in me a feeling of unease and
occasionally a blind panic. It is because I feel it is dangerous to give in so
easily to this feeling of ease when Akany is not my final destination and the
road ahead is yet so long and treacherous as to use my naïve stupor against me.
This place is truly an inspiration, an image of all the
things our centre could one day be. It tempts me with its promises of all the
things to come, of the importance of succeeding and the potential being fanned
out before me. However this monolith of experience and establishment is at odds
with the weak and trembling child that I tend at this time. I find myself
looking up, neck craning at the giant we hope to create and I become
overwhelmed and scared by the sheer magnitude of the task ahead.
Among the bustle of children, the calls of the staff, the
chatter of volunteers and the cacophony of sound emerging from the various
animals on site one would be amazed to think you had any space left in your
head to from thoughts. Yet somehow, as you move with the crowd, the vast sea of unfamiliar
faces, accents, curious smiles make me feel like I am shrinking, yet no one
moves into the space I have created by retreating into myself and in doing so I
suddenly find I am creating a wide empty ring around my diminishing figure from
where I watch the crowd around me within which I feel more alone than if I had
always been by myself. Then, just as my eyes well up and my heart feels as
though it might burst I am abruptly recalled to my senses by some banality of
life, the shout of a child, the bark of a dog, the gentle touch of a concerned
peer and then suddenly I am grown fat on the noise and am riding the wave of
vitality, being carried along, laughing and singing, by the crowd that only
moments ago was as terrifying as a beast of my own imaginings.
This life lived in an endless sea of juxtapositions has
always been a feature of my existence, one I am aware of even as I long for
home while revelling in the unfamiliar. It is a quirk of my personality that
only those closes to me can have claimed to catch a glimpse of in my daily
life. My hankering for solitude and constant search for company, my ability to
take delight in the smallest things while feeling myself dragged down by the
sadness of the world, my ceaseless ambition and crippling self-doubt, my
shameless honesty and my embarrassed insecurities - all these things and more
are part of the duality that is me. And here in this place, which seems born of
and fed by such disparities I find my sense of self ceaselessly affirmed and
then called into question.
I wonder if it is a blessing or a curse, this active drive
to be so self-aware. I wonder if all persons analyse their moods and feelings
for catalysts and explanations and scrape away at their own cognition until
they find a satisfactory rationalization or until a part of the mind is
reached, so black and deep that it is impossible to look at and so you are
forced to look away. I wonder if other people happily keep secrets from
themselves and accept their emotions or musings as an abstract phenomenon, a
simple curiosity of the human condition.
I wonder too how much of myself I have found and lost
through even this attempt to explain and understand the complexity of
experience here in this place. I see myself standing of the edge of the cliff
of self-discovery and I find myself tempted by the prospect of the fall. I read
in a book once that vertigo is not a fear of being high but the constant
struggle to resist the urge to fall (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being” Milan
Kundera). So now, in the spirit of an affection for the vibrancy of life as it
happens I must drag myself away from the introspective rhetoric of the morning
and throw myself into the frenzied activity of the afternoon.
I wrote this post because I thought I should not leave my poor
blog unattended for more than a week, but looking back on the result I see that
engaging in reflection on impressions and not activities leads to the kind of
musings not really fit for public consumption. But because I have written it
and I have nothing else to post, post I shall and hope that no one judges me
too harshly.
I promise the next blog will be about the practicalities of
life at Akany and the preparation of the centre for Christmas in the Southern
Hemisphere. In the meantime I miss you all lots and think of you often so if
you have news please pass it along.
xxx
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