Work

I returned from Dar Es Salaam on Saturday afternoon. There were long flights and long periods of waiting in between. From Tanzania we flew to Addis Ababa and waited for five hours until 0100 before boarding a plane to Rome. In the Rome airport, there was fresh coffee again, lots of nuns, and then a flight to Naples. I wasn't back 12 hours before I began working again.

I can't seem to stop working. Is it the job? The analysis that drives me? Or is it the mission - the sense that I must make the difference I came here to make? Is it anger at the injustice I see, and the inept attempts by "V" and "R" to control me and my work? Or is it simply less painful to focus all energy and hope into a project I feel I might be able do something about? I look around me, at the people on the streets of Dar, or Douala. I wonder if anything I do will ever change their lives even a little bit. I can't seem to have any impact on my own life - what arrogance is it to think that I can impact theirs?

On the way to Cameroon, when "R" tried to force me to share my analysis with him so he could steal it - steal anything I was working on, I couldn't even begin to work up the energy to care. I told him: "I have nothing left to lose. There is nothing bright and shiny in my life."

And this work keeps me awake at night. I stay up until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open - and then it drives me awake again.