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Part Five: Twasula, Twasoma, Twalamusa
Week Eighty-Three/ December 2017
Being Back
Winter
Being back for the holidays was both wonderful and challenging. It was wonderful to be able to see family, but challenging in terms the adjustment. Almost everything is the same, family and friends are slightly older, there are new babies, but mostly, things are the same: my favorite coffee shops still stand, pristine and with more types of milk than I can recite, and when I order…
“I’d like a small cappuccino in a for here mug.”
“What type of milk?”
“…Regular?”
“We have whole, skim, 2%, almond, and soy.”
“What’s regular?”
“Whole.”
“I’ll have that.” After a few minutes my coffee would be served to me in a paper disposable mug, even after stating that I wanted it in a mug. Eventually, I resorted to hovering over the barista, “is that a for here mug? Don’t forget to put it in a for here mug.” Things are the same, but my husband and I are different.
In AFS (the American Field Service) they talk about wearing purple lenses; before you leave you have blue lenses, during your time living somewhere else you learn to wear red lenses, and when you come back, wah-lah, you wear purple lenses, or at least that’s the idea.
Before the Peace Corps I was annoyed when a barista would serve me in a to-go cup when I asked for a mug, after Peace Corps, I get angry. The biggest aspect of U.S. life that I was aware before the Peace Corps, but now grips me with startling rage, is the waste: I get mad. Not, ‘shake my head and walk away mad,’ but, ‘let me explain to you why you are being wasteful and I don’t care if it takes all day’ mad.
People forget their reusable grocery bags, they forget their reusable mugs, they ask for a to-go cup even when they’ll be drinking at the café, they consume copious amounts of meat, they use six paper towels to dry their hands. They lack, as we talk about in health belief models and behavioral change models, any perceived severity regarding the consequences of their actions. The fact that many middle and upper-class Americans, for the most part, seldom have to even have an awareness that there are consequences to their actions demonstrates huge privilege and calls into question who we think of as part of our shared humanity. When you get a disposable cup every time you go through the Starbucks drive-through, where does that cup go? Where do our old electronics go? When we spray our lawns with pesticides and use huge amounts of water to keep them green, where does the run-off go? It doesn’t just disappear, it negatively affects both communities and the environment.
While there are massive structural shifts that need to take place to address the structural violence being done to populations, that does not rid us of responsibility and accountability for our actions. It costs little to bring that reusable mug, eat poultry over beef, use one paper towel instead of six, or use reusable grocery bags, so why do so many struggle with such small changes?
“’[T]he world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them’…[W]e must understand that what happens to poor people is never divorced from the actions of the powerful.”
Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power, 2003, loc 2335
Twasula Wano mu Uganda 