Witness

There was this astonishing lecture tonight about ruination and afterwards there was a party and Katie was there. I taught her Khmer last semester as she prepared to return to Cambodia for the second time in her life, to volunteer at an orphanage and do some research for her undergraduate thesis in anthropology. She came across the room, we hugged, I asked, how was it? She said amazing, it was amazing. And she told me of living alone in a Khmer neighbourhood called Break Bra and how her neighbors insisted that she be in by dark and feed her noodles every morning, watching to be sure that she ate every last spoonful.

And then she said, and it was terrible, and she started to tell me stories. They tumbled out, one after the other, with hardly a pause for breath, thin stories, more just a listing of losses—five orphans dying of dengue, her own grave illness, watching a family riding a motorbike killed in front of her, giving mouth to mouth to a dying stranger covered in blood, being surrounded by machine-gun waving bodyguards when her friend overtook a powerful man’s vehicle on a road. There was so much anger, she said. I didn’t know, before, when I was a tourist, that there was so much anger. Before I could speak Khmer. And then she said, I’m bitter. I feel bitter that my family and friends can’t understand. I’m going to become a human rights worker so I can help. I don’t know if I can take it, this kind of work. I’m going to go to dinner with my friends now. And then she left, and I watched her go.

And I remembered. That this is what it is like to lose your innocence, your naivete that if you mean well you can make things better, in any world you choose. And I thought of what my friend and mentor Sue said to me the day I went to her weeping, guilty, afraid that my lack of action had cost a child’s life. Sometimes, Sue said, we are just here to witness suffering. It was not what I wished to hear. It was not why I was there, not why I had gone to rural Cambodia, not why I was enduring the incomprehension of my Khmer neighbors, the stifling heat and the long lonely evenings alone with the geckoes and a half-crazy cat. I had not gone to witness anything. I had gone to change the world, as respectfully as I could, but to change it nonetheless. To do good. To be of use. And yet. I had not realized that suffering filled the land, that it fills every land. I had not realized how dark or how vast suffering could be, that I could not stem its flow, that I would fail time and again, that I was fallible and frail and sometimes hateful.

Sometimes, Sue said, we are just here to witness suffering. I told Katie. I don’t know if she was ready to hear that, if she will be able to bear working in a world where one is confronted daily by scenes that shatter the heart. I just wanted her to know that it is normal to be bruised by your inability to save the world, and that when we open our hearts, when we open our eyes, that it is then that we are overwhelmed and battered by the cruelty of the world. This does not have to be the end of us. I still hope for a better world.

I have learned, Thomas Merton once wrote, that one cannot truly know hope unless she has found out how like despair hope is.