The most important thing I’ve done this year was follow world news from a place that is not the US.
When I moved to Burundi last July, I told myself I’d make an effort to follow the news of the continent, but it didn’t take long for me to become overwhelmed by the inundation of countries, leaders, traditions, and conflicts that I knew almost nothing about and had to catch up on first in order to understand anything I was hearing or reading.
I’m not claiming that by reading up on the history of dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea I can understand something that might be happening in Algeria or Morocco, or that such instances would necessarily be more similar than those occurring across continents or across countries within other continents. I’m just trying to say that as I hear unfamiliar names and numbers on the radio here, I’ve started to think about how few of the stories of this continent I was exposed to before I was actually living here. And how the stories that get told on the street in my village or over beers in Bujumbura, the ones happening beyond the scope of attention of the government or the press, may never reach outside ears—even though, at times, they may be critically important.
After reading Philip Gourevitch’s account of the Rwandan genocide and the role that the UN and Western countries played in enabling and exacerbating its horrors in “we wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” this year, I wanted to call people who I knew were in the US in 1994 reading the New York Times (whose archives I scrolled for mentions of the events) and ask them: “Did this matter to you? Did you even care?”
And then I remembered the details that I missed myself about Sudan or about Somalia, even when I was living on a university campus in the American capital, arguably with the most resources and information I’ve ever had in my life. And the myriad of stories that I’m still oblivious to now.
In some ways, as my friend and fellow team Burundi member Hayley so wisely pointed out recently, its been a weird year to be away from home in terms of news: I watched the footage of Hurricane Sandy, which was crashing down around my family and friends in New York and New Jersey, from an internet café in Bujumbura; followed President Obama’s reelection at strange hours over the garbled radio speaker of my cell phone from my rural placement site; and felt distant and disconnected when I couldn’t get an international call to go through while my father and brother were locked down in a Boston hotel room in the days after the marathon bombings.
Yet I heard Burundians both in the city and in the mountains listening to local broadcasts about these same events. Call me naïve, but the gross imbalance between the world’s awareness about the US and the US’s awareness about the world hit me viscerally and violently.
As I wrap up my last few weeks in Burundi and move on to the next chapter of my life as a graduate student in New York, I hope I won’t be shy about sharing the stories I’ve heard and the perspective I’ve been privileged enough to gain firsthand. The more I think about it, the more I believe that the most meaningful way I can make something of my experience this year upon returning to my home community is to bear witness: not to a single story that may or may not contain anecdotes of poverty and corruption and dysfunction and war, but to the notion that there are ideas outside the walls of Manhattan or New York or the United States which often contrast or challenge our own. And that we commit a crime when we don’t afford them their due place.
Given that our training a year ago opened up with this video about the danger of a single story, I think that the emotion I’m feeling now is the perfect bookend.