Saving Darfur & The Glam Life (DIARY)

Current mood:

calm

i gotta tell you—if you have abandonment issues, nothing makes you feel more welcome and loved than walking off a plane and seeing an anonymous driver sent by some faceless corporation holding up a sign with your name. it makes your insecurities melt for a good 90 seconds—like gee, i matter!

anyway, my driver was a kindly older african man, his nationality clear by his accent. i asked which country he was from. being that i’ve been to

nigeria

once and have a yoruba name, i often feel that this makes me an expert on such matters. he told me that he was sudanese. fascinated, i started to grill him about the situation in darfur. frankly, i asked him to explain as an insider “in the simplest terms” what has happened, what is happening, and what really can be done to help.

for those who may have missed is, while you were having the best week ever, there is a mass genocide taking place in the region and people are dying of murder, starvation and despair.

it turned out that my driver was an activist who had been outed from the country some time ago, and he painted a picture for me on how the instability and issues actually began in the 80s. he also painted a picture for me of a childhood spent in schools sitting on the hard ground with no books and very rough disciplinarians. he said that this was the first step for the lighter arabs in his country to try to subjugate the darker africans by denying them proper education. he and a couple of his mates managed to sneak into neighboring regions—just to learn and he became quite outspoken.

he got lucky as he was only asked to leave the country—most other activists were murdered or tortured. his mother still lives in the region, and he just came back from a 2 month visit. she can’t get a visa to leave because of his family’s political views, and anything he mails her will be stolen, so he has to go to hand deliver whatever he can, whenever he can to his mother and family members who still remain. the light and darker people at war had the same color difference of a couple of shades as I did with this gentleman. man’s inhumanity to man.

at this point my head was spinning and i was fast falling into a depression. i have to tell y’all a secret. just between me and you, i don’t even watch the local television news anymore because i don’t feel that it tells me anything that i need to know. i don’t want certain images in my head breaking my veil of safety and sanity. local news tells me nothing that relates to my daily life. if there’s another rapist in the bushes in central park he’s gonna be there whether i stress myself out or not.

so my repeated question to the driver was, what can we do? see, i am a person of action. sure there’s always value in talking. hell, i make my living running off at the mouth and storytelling, but then i feel that people must be willing and able to take some sort of action. watching images of starving bodies is futile if we’re not going to do anything to help.

the gentleman told me that he was surprised as an african american that i would ask, that i would care. i reminded him that many americans were doing things to help—i’ve seen them, marching, collecting food, money etc. he said yes, americans were helping, just not african americans. it was at this point that the 10 minute depression i’d been in since our convo started spun into a shame spiral.

he went on to explain how africans hold african americans in very high regard, regardless of how your hair braiding lady, church fried chicken guy, or whomever might look at you. they see our civil rights struggle here as a beacon of hope and possibilities. he said that half of the people in his activist organization were african and the other half were american. zero however were african american.

i again asked what he wanted us to do, because i’ve seen the pix and t-shirts, bumper stickers, and stuff like that to me often seems like b.s. and band-aids.

he told me that telling his story and spreading the word is a start. he explained that since there has been light shed on the situation there has been a sharp decrease in murders and starvation, and that there is the slightest glimmer of hope. he said that there was value in bumper stickers and t-shirts.

he explained that his people held african americans in such high esteem that in his opinion, if jesse jackson would only show up, leaders would meet and work things out. i didn’t have the heart to tell him that jesse can’t even help us get our sh*t together, with all due respect, mr. jackson. he’s trying to manage his baby mama drama like everybody else.

maybe black americans are absent from the save darfur movement because they’ve got so many problems of their own—very low self esteem, education, crime, healthcare—all the ways that poor people everywhere catch hell. school and jails stats, marriage stats, mortgage crisis impending, boys and girls dying on foreign soil for issues more complicated than they realize—it’s not all champagne and caviar.

the driver explained that yes– they do see us on tv and in posters swigging champagne and life looks like a party. wow—they are totally buying our hype. i explained that just cause you see 50 cent popping off bottles of cristal doesn’t mean we’re all ballin. my friends range from people in bk trying to scrape up the next $1000 for their rent to folks living in bel air mansions trying to scrape up another $25,000 for their mortgage. and that’s real.

it’s like when i was 11 or 12 and went to stay in virginia for the summer. my brother and i pimped off the sneaker money my parents gave us so that we could get ourselves adidas, and we convinced my sister that blue smurf sneakers from woolworth were a good look—for her. then we pretended to the virginia kids—cause they didn’t know any better—that we were totally down with ll cool j just because we were from nyc, had a kangol to share between us, and saw him in green acres mall once. it was a good front.

the driver said he knew this now, but people at home do not. he told me about the film darfur now, and i told him about our new betj series africana, and how they could possibly submit darfur now for broadcast on BET. he said he doubted we would care and would try some “more mainstream whiter outfits first.” he said that he often drove many of my bosses at BET and BET J but he’s forbidden to interact. it was at that point that i think he became hip to the fact that i was trying to audiotape him on my samsung blackjack which is a piece of crap, but an awesome spy phone because it takes pics, videos and makes audio recordings.

he also told me some things in confidence that he asked that i don’t repeat because it seems that some of these nonprofits can be as gully as the mafia, so i will just say this: writing a check is not the best thing as we always don’t know where money is going, but you can sign petitions, sending clothing food supplies and the like.

so now that you know, you can’t pretend you don’t.

what should we do? because in all honesty other than writing a check, wearing a cool sloganed t-shirt, or yelling at a march, i still have no idea. and for those of you who are more knowledgeable on such matters, forgive my ignorance.

here’s what i decided. we’ve gotta clean up our own backyards.

i am thrilled with oprah’s south african school because we are all global citizens and i plan to follow in her footsteps one day, by building schools in my backyard—in harlem, detroit, watts etc. that may not buy me as much press or glitz or nobel prize speculation, but hungry is hungry uneducated is uneducated. imprisoned is imprisoned–

wherever you are.

if you can use whatever you do to be a light in some way to somebody, that helps. helping somewhere is cosmically helping everywhere. i guess that frankly, my earlier assertion that black folks have their hands full is a bit of a cop out because on an individual level, if we can’t help when it’s difficult to, we won’t help when it’s easy to.

i had a class once with yoko ono where we thought that she was batty because someone asked her how to stop the war and she said mend the teacups in your cupboard. i get it now.

whatever you can do—wear a t-shirt, tell this man’s story, send people to this blog post, make a film, write a poem, or maybe even add them to your prayers. drops in the bucket yeah, but the ghanians say that small drops yield a mighty ocean.

we pulled up in front of my building and our camaraderie seemed to cease. like, in that moment, with the action of him opening my door as i searched for my keys we were reminded of the roles were playing in the moment: holocaust survivor and pseudo privileged first world daughter once removed. i gave him a hug and my personal information and told him to keep in touch.

he asked if i was coming to his screening. i said that i would try. my friend’s party was the same night.

more info on helping somebody:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict