April 9, 2009 - Uganda to Jordan, via Khartoum and Cairo

The plane from Uganda stopped in Khartoum, Sudan to offload some passengers and let others on board, before we moved on to Cairo and Jordan. Maybe that’s the source of it; I can’t seem to shake the weirdness of that. . .

Khartoum, Sudan: the home of the Government of Sudan, designers of a current genocide which we’re doing next-to-nothing about. I read something once about the Holocaust that pondered about the ethics of proximity—about how somehow it’s easy for us to dismiss horrible things if they’re not happening in our back yard, in front of our eyes, much less to our kids—but rather in some distant place.

But I was, for an hour, in the same city as the creators and perpetuators of a genocide. In reality, I live only a 2 hour flight away from them, and a 4 hour flight away from the genocide itself. So even if ethics were related to proximity, my lack of action makes me somehow guilty. I sat on the plane and chatted with the Palestinian man beside me about what I should see in beautiful Jordan. People got off the plane and walked out into Khartoum.

And then more people got on—a woman in a gorgeous turquoise headscarf, silver jewelry and henna on her fingers, an elderly man with a white traditional robe and a turban and a cane, a wealthy woman dripping with diamonds, a small child. I have had Sudanese co workers and friends, I have read books, I have heard the stories of friends and colleagues who have worked in Darfur for years, prior to the time most aid workers were expelled—but somehow I’d never felt it like this. This is happening NOW, on our planet. And our lives go on as if it were nothing. I remember that from Victor Frankl’s book about the Holocaust—or at least I think it was him. He sat in the concentration camp and realized, stunned: “life goes on outside.”

But we can do something, surely. Am trying to figure out what and how like the rest of us.

http://www.savedarfur.org/

http://notonourwatchproject.org/