Heavy world

As I am preparing for Africa, I thumb through a book, “Hope in the Dark.” It is a photo-journal about two people who travel to Kenya. Not Uganda, but their story seems relevant enough to mine. I read the entries. I look at the pictures. I feel my heart crack a little more with each story and each picture. Lately, I feel this way a lot.

I need to take you back for a little bit.

On Tuesday, my mother went to a funeral. She told me about it when she got back. The picture she painted was all too familiar to me. It was for a sixteen year old girl, Mackenzie. They were friends of the family. I did not know Mackenzie well, but I knew her mother and father. I had been to her older sister’s funeral years before. Shannon was sixteen when she died too. Car accident. Ten years later her parents were sitting in the same seat for their other daughter…also gone at sixteen. This really bothered me. How much should one mother suffer? It really made me question justice in this world.

I am arranging for a speaker from Uganda to come to the school that I teach at. His name is Norman. He is a teacher. He has raised his children in Africa. He has seen his daughter die, consumed by AIDS. He has seen the suffering of his orphaned grandchildren. As I showed my students his video to prepare them…I felt that same question creep up within me. Why did these people deserve this? Where was justice?

As I turn the pages, two entries catch my attention.

The first page is a picture of graffiti, “Piny Pek.” The entry read, “We walked along the dirt road to Muungano village where these words rested quietly on the brick wall next to a pharmacy shop. ‘What does piny pek mean?’ I asked. ‘Heavy world,’ they said.

That nailed it. It IS a heavy world. I have been feeling the weight of it all along. Where is justice?


A couple of pages later:

“I stood within the filthy, shack-filled slum of Kibera while also looking up at the stunning clouds that danced across the vast stretch of the African sky. There is such tragedy and yet such beauty at the same time.”

Then I remembered a discussion I had about my dreams of seeing natural beauty-specifically the Grand Canyon. In this discussion I expressed my reverence for nature and its beauty…but I also stated that the one thing that I found more beautiful was people helping people. Compassion being acted on. It was right after I got back from New Orleans. The water was dirty, and everything was trashed…but I still maintain that it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. People sleeping on the floor and showering in FEMA trailers to help others out. Breathtaking.

“Overwhelmed by the insanity of this broken world, I find it difficult to understand how the pieces of it all fit together.”

Heavy world. Where is justice?

“The same earth can hold the fragrance of a field of flowers while also occupying the stench of urine on hot concrete.”

Where is justice? I think it’s in beauty. Where is beauty? I think it’s in compassion.

It’s a heavy world…I know this…I am terrified and weighed down by this information…Yet, as I prepare to encounter the beautiful…I feel a bit lighter.