What Working for Peace in Africa Taught Me About Myself
And the wilderness.
Who did I think I was? God?
I thought I had everything I needed to be a peacemaker. And I was headed to the newest country in the world, excited to be part of their early history. The nation was building peace, and I was ready to share all I had learned with my new friends.
Just weeks before I left the United States, in the summer of 2012, I met with a mentor — the director of my graduate school program, and one of my professors. We had spoken, in the classroom, about the what-ifs involved in times of war and genocide. I had given a deflated answer to the question: What would you do if genocide broke out in the country you were serving in? which, I think, I had asked. I didn’t believe military intervention was the answer, did I? Even after merely studying war in theory, my conviction was faltering.
At that time, in the classroom, I didn’t know I’d be moving to South Sudan. I knew I’d be returning to Africa somewhere, but I didn’t know exactly where yet. By the time I met with my mentor that summer, I did know. And at that point, I desperately wanted to know his answer to the genocide question.
He never got around to answering in the classroom. He was the most brilliant teacher. He made us think for ourselves. He made us keep going deeper and deeper into our analytical wells. He rarely gave an answer when asked.
When I visited him, we sat in his air-conditioned office and talked about my fears and hopes and excitement about my upcoming mission. And then I asked him. So, Professor, what would you do? What would you do if genocide broke out in the country you were serving?
I should have known peaceful protest would be his answer. And he meant it. He would rally 10,000 people to stage a peaceful protest, at the onset of genocide. He would be prepared for martyrdom.
I may never fully understand the weight of that moment. He, with all his years of experience, even living in post-conflict environments overseas, must have known the odds of South Sudan going to war, were good. He also must’ve known, based on my obvious penchant for nonviolence, that I was in agreement with his ideal.
In the end, he simply did what he always did — he prayed for me. And I asked him to be my death notifier, if the need should arise. Then, he asked for a hug, and I gave one gladly.
“Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” ~Wendell Berry
I wasn’t God. I wasn’t even there.
In the end, as it turned out, I never even had the chance to decide if I would stay or go. When the war started, I was sleeping safely in a quiet guesthouse in Nairobi, Kenya. After all those talks about what I would do if war or genocide started, I never even had the autonomy to decide.
I cried in bed as I thought about the friends I had made, and all I had invested in the country at that point. Little more than a year after my assignment had started, Juba was on fire. And I sat there, powerless. There was absolutely nothing I could do to help, except listen, and pray.
I felt slighted. So much for my grand ideas to be like my professor and stage a peaceful protest. Asking loved ones to pray for peace was all I could think of. And it made me angry that they were concerned for me. How could they think about my wellbeing when there was a war raging? Them, I begged, think about them.
Still, much as it bothered me to acknowledge, I had to figure out what to do with myself and how to take care of myself. After reading a Wendell Berry poem, I decided to go to Maasai Mara for Christmas. All I wanted to do was be with the animals. I felt like such an asshole for going on safari while people were being murdered just west of me. But I went anyway. Maybe I would find what I needed in the wild.
We saw almost all of the animals on that two-day journey. Lions, elephants, giraffes, hippos, zebra, buffalo, wildebeest, gazelles, topi, steenbok, jackals, hyenas, mongooses, warthogs, dik-diks, dung beetles, and several types of birds, including a wake of vultures feasting on zebra carcass. We even got to share several intimate moments with a cheetah. We watched her roll around in the grass in the shade of a large bush, then bathe, stretch, and walk toward the horizon.
The only animal we didn’t see, though we followed the rumors and chased him down with all our might and hope, was the elusive leopard.
Tired and windburned, I had done what Wendell told me to do. By the time the safari was over, my face hurt from smiling. I was joyful though I had considered all the facts. But my insides hurt from confusion.
How could I be so happy at a time like this? Why couldn’t things be this peaceful in South Sudan? Why was all of this happening? Was God the leopard?
As I was preparing to leave South Sudan, in the summer of 2015, all I wanted to do was go for a long walk in the wilderness.
Everything that was going to happen had happened, and I found myself right back where I was when the war started. I wanted to go back out into the wild. I couldn’t understand why, but I had the strongest desire to be surrounded by woods.
In those final months and weeks and days, I sought to make sense of everything. Though there had clearly been an upheaval in my being — I had been so overwhelmed by stress and trauma, I had started visualizing myself as being split in two: my thinking self had been carrying my feeling self on her back for some time, sheltering her from the view — even still, I wanted to at least understand why everything had happened the way it did.
I wanted to understand why this country was the way it was. Why should people ever have to live that way? Why did I see such drastic paradox on the streets of Juba? Black Mercedes SUVs speeding along Ministries Road with dilapidated mud huts in the background. Were the leaders really so desperate for money and power they would steal, kill, and destroy their own people? Was this really about tribalism? Those were some of the words on the street.
Nevermind the war that had taken place inside me. I would get to that later. I had filed it away in the folder of my brain labeled, “Trauma To Be Dealt With, Eventually”. My focus was razor sharp during those end days. Why has this happened to the Sudans?
I made friends with someone who knew some things. Someone born on the inside. He told stories of a child soldier learning how to swim across the River Nile with one hand holding a rifle above his head. Him. This was decades ago, during the war of 19-something. There were so many wars to keep track of. Then I heard stories of a barge being blown to bits while traveling north on the Nile, unsuspecting soldiers burned to death. This was part of the new war. Of course, I had no idea if either story was true, but it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to believe they were.
I wanted to understand the situation so badly, in the end, that I was able to read a book called The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars by Douglas H. Johnson. I not only read it, I understood it. The book had been given to me by a fellow classmate, and one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I sometimes wonder if he knew what I would need to go through to be able to read it. When I had first arrived in country, I tried to start reading it, but I couldn’t. It was too heady, and too heavy for me at that point. By the end, I was eating the words like tacos I had starved from for what seemed like an eternity.
I had become obsessed. If nothing else, my mind had expanded. Whatever else was happening to me, I knew for sure that I was after knowledge. I had come to regard myself as a bonafide badass by then. A badass American babe who had survived 1,000 days in the newest, frailest nation in the world. I had managed to figure out the truest way to live in solidarity with my new brothers and sisters — cope with the harsh realities of life, in whatever ways you can, no matter what it takes. And if I could survive in South Sudan, I could do anything.
“You have to go out into the wilderness. You go out into that place where there’s nobody to perform (for), and the ego has nothing to do, and it crumbles, and only then are you capable of being loved.” ~David Brooks
In Juba, as I dreamed about going for a long walk in the wilderness, I imagined walking through actual woods. Fortunately, I was granted the opportunity to visit a counseling retreat center in the Michigan woods, a few months after I returned to the United States.
It was perfect. I could walk in the woods every day. Maybe the answers were there. I hadn’t been able to figure anything out in the desert. God knows I had tried. And perhaps the therapy sessions could help get me started on that trauma I had filed away for later.
I walked in the woods almost every day, looking for answers. It was beautiful, and I most certainly experienced the healing touch of nature. But something odd happened. It took some time, but I eventually realized the real wilderness wasn’t in the woods.
The real wilderness was in me.
One day, as I talked with my therapist about some of the mistakes I had made, he reminded me about prayer healing. I went back to my room, lay on the floor, and closed my eyes. I’d done this before. My therapist in Nairobi had reminded me how.
Step 1: Close your eyes.
Step 2: Imagine the scene of the traumatic event.
Step 3: Notice how you’re feeling.
Step 4: Invite God into the scene.
Step 5: Notice if there is a shift in how you’re feeling after God shows up on the scene.
I wept.
How could God do this?
I lay on the floor and became intimate with what had happened. I wasn’t thinking about the particulars of war anymore — not at the macro level. I was thinking about the war that was raging inside me.
Less than one year before I lay there, I had chosen to have an abortion. In the sticky Juba heat, months after the war had started, I had gotten knocked up by someone I didn’t love, couldn’t love. I was so weighed down by trauma at that point, I could no longer really recognize feeling. Even still, I thought about keeping the baby.
But in the end, I decided not to. I flew back to the United States to have the procedure done. It was the single most difficult decision I have ever had to make. And the procedure was the single most painful experience I have ever had.
The next morning, I woke up crying. I reached for the only thing I could think of that might bring me some comfort: a Sarah Young devotional book. I opened the book to January 14th, and I read these words:
“Do not be ashamed of your emptiness.”
I threw the book across the room, angrily, and continued crying.
“The movement of grace is working in my life when I get my sense of humor back.” ~Anne Lamott
I had gone to South Sudan to make peace. I had considered, soberly, what I might do in the case of war or genocide. I had been educated, prayed for, encouraged by amazing people.
What I ended up doing in South Sudan, was commit heartbreaking violence. Under the weight of it all, I threw everything I believed in out the proverbial window. As it turns out, I wasn’t immune to the effects of war.
My loneliness and exhaustion and stress and trauma had brought me to a place of sheer survival. I did learn how to be in solidarity with war survivors, and it wasn’t pretty. I was not, in fact, a bonafide badass American babe. I was all but destroyed; body, mind, and spirit.
The real wilderness didn’t look like the woods. It looked like being face down to the ground, learning how to make peace with myself.
On the floor, in Michigan, I closed my eyes.
I imagined the scene of the traumatic event. I wept on the operating table as some faceless woman hovered over me in a dark, cold room, reminding me to breathe as the surgeon tore at my womb.
I had never felt so alone or shameful in all my life.
Then, I imagined God entering the scene. To the best of my ability, I pictured Jesus sitting next to me, holding my hand. He wept with me, even harder than I did. He never took his eyes off of me. When the procedure was over, he picked me up in his arms and carried me out of the room. He carried me into the lobby, collected my sisters, and walked us to the car. He gently set me down and told my sister I would need a lot of love, and some chocolate.
I still wept as I imagined this drastically different scene. I had never felt so undeservingly loved in all my life. God was not the leopard. God was who God had always been: compassionate, gracious, abounding in love. God was present in a way that is unfathomable to the human mind.
I kept repeating it to myself. “Do not be ashamed of your emptiness. Do not be ashamed of your emptiness. Do not be ashamed of your emptiness.” Grace is easier to accept from God than it is to accept from oneself.
This was the journey I had to take in the real wilderness, which lasted much longer than a walk in the woods. This was the journey to self-forgiveness and self-acceptance. The journey to grace.
At the end of the wilderness, I wondered if I was allowed to laugh, as I had wondered many times before. Finding humor in such a serious situation, did not come easy. But if there was anything I had learned from my South Sudanese friends, it was that humor is key to survival, and life.
Thinking I could make peace for an entire nation when I still hadn’t learned how to make peace with myself, was funny. Right? Showing up in the middle of the Sub-Saharan Desert wearing tight, American blue jeans was funny. Don’t you think?
Ok, how about when someone asked me what I wanted to write about, when I first arrived in South Sudan, and I said, “Grace.” ?
Now that’s funny. Isn’t it?
Funny or not, I know what I’m going to say the next time someone asks me that question. Humor is brilliant, especially when we can find it in the darkness. I’m glad I have learned to do this.
But I’m ready for my laughter to come easier.
What do I want to write about?
Joy.
Let joy be the new word.
Lindsay Linegar is a writer living in her home state, California. Her educational background is in International Development (MA) and Psychology (BA). She loves making meaningful connections with humans, wondering at nature, doodling, listening to good music, and more than anything, dancing. You can reach her through email at lindsaylinegar@gmail.com
